No matter which ball she was attending, Mrs. Ada Strickland always felt like its belle. That was the pleasure of frequent hosting—every guest had, at some point, an obligation to give her their greetings and goodbyes, and she considered herself somewhat of an artist in her ability to extend each instance into a full-fledged conversation lasting up to an hour in length. Even better was the opportunity for a speech in the middle of the evening: she’d wait for the first guest to attempt a departure, then insist they had only to wait a few more minutes until they were free to leave before tapping another guest’s silverware against her own half-filled champagne glass. When the din of the conversation had settled and she had the spotlight, she’d laud her praises on one or two of the guests, usually contemporary artists of whom she was an important patron and whose work the party was ostensibly arranged to honor then, during whatever series of toasts she’d set into action, she’d receive praises about her speech in turn, as well as one or two compliments apropos her jewelry and dress.

That was the best part, though she’d never admit it—she was far too vain to admit her own vanity outright, even if she was proud of its status as an open secret. She knew for a fact that it was rumored she never wore the same thing twice, and her only disappointment lay in it remaining a mere rumor. It was a testament both to her sway as a figure of the elite art world as well as her knowledge of and confidence in her role that she was the contemporary bellwether of aging with grace, abhorring anyone who blew money on fraudulences like botox and liposuction. 

When her husband had passed over a decade ago, she had kept the honorific of “Mrs.”, feeling that a change to anything else would have garnered her diminished respect among people on the fringes of her various social circles. After marrying into copious wealth in her mid-twenties, Ada had spent thirty years honing a fabricated socialite persona and then her personality to fit it. A lie, she felt, was only something she didn’t believe was true, and if she could forget her young adulthood of playing hooky and breaking laws—the ones that were, even now, faux pas to break, anyways—she could make it have never happened at all. She was now an Us, and, to her as well as to most of her confrères, that could only be true if she’d never been a Them.

It was because of this powerful and long-sustained former ruse that she felt no pang of guilt or shred of doubt at her new trendsetting fashion decision. She had been itching for some weeks for the type of splendorous evening at which she could show it off, and tonight was going to be far from an exception in meeting her standards. The maids and caterers were just then busying themselves with preparing the final details: they’d cleared the oak dining room table into one of the walk-in closets in order to accommodate the guests on the first story of the central London loft flat, replaced all the light bulbs in the dining room’s aquamarine chandelier to ensure they shone at their maximum capacity, and were preparing courses upon courses of food—both abundant and variant enough to satiate the world’s most avaricious gourmands—the aromas of which were already wafting out of the kitchen from their places on china platters. Hand-cut glass flutes begged for champagne in serried ranks on marble counters, and everything, from the picture frames to the hardwood floors, gleamed. All Ada Strickland had to do now was put on the centerpiece of the night and wait.

After the initial crescendo of the evening had begun to simmer in anticipation, in the time after the fashionably late had finished filing in but before the unfashionably early had departed, Ada tapped her glass with her friend Hans Robertson’s hor d’oeuvres fork, cleared her throat, and said, “I’d like to propose at least one toast, so please, everyone, make sure your glass is half full at minimum.”

“Is it alright if it’s half empty?” called a man from a far corner of the room, whose full beard she remembered, if not his name. The room tittered its approval of his joke.

“Not tonight,” Ada said, smiling at him and then the rest in attendance. She raised her glass higher. “Tonight, we have only time for optimism, thanks to the unparalleled human rights work of our esteemed guest and my dear friend, Ralph Wallace. To him.” At this, the group of people turned to face a lanky silver-haired man in a tuxedo and clapped into their glasses. He smiled and raised his glass to them in return. “As well as to the equally harrowing work of his wife in making sure he doesn’t miss too many meals or lose too much sleep.” The bronze woman on his arm took her turn for a smile. “His new shelter in Whitechapel that serves the homeless minpeople of London, opening on the first, is the first of its kind in the world. With over one thousand beds available, it will be able to serve not only the current estimated population of abandoned or otherwise homeless mins and womins in London, but will hopefully be able to serve the population even as it grows in the coming years.” More applause. “Though, of course, we hope it doesn’t.”

“Now, I’m not one to point out the symbolism behind my attire too often; usually, I prefer to let it speak for itself. Tonight, however, I’d like to take a moment address the min, or, more specifically, the womins in the room.” She pointed at her earrings and necklace. They were cylinders made of filigreed sterling silver, three inches in height, with small pink diamonds crusting their edges. Inside of each of them sat a small naked woman between four and five inches tall when standing. The womins in Ada’s earrings were both cream white blondes bordering on an unhealthily thin weight proportional to their size; the one in her necklace shared their complexion but was bordering on an unhealthy proportional weight in the opposite direction. This womin seemed, to anyone who would have looked closely, to be less comfortable in her position than her compatriots; the chain of the necklace was slack and the pendant rested directly on Mrs. Strickland’s ample cleavage, which was directly exposed in her sequined oyster dress. More than with the fact of her location, she appeared uncomfortable with the attention she was receiving as the centerpiece of Mrs. Strickland’s outfit, and it was a testament to her inability to physically shrink further that she didn’t disappear completely. She couldn’t see the womins in the earrings from her vantage; Mrs. Strickland’s neck and chin blocked them from view, and, feeling as naked as she was, she huddled into a ball and averted her gaze away from the crowd’s prying eyes and towards her knees. A few guests had noticed her distress, but any concern they showed manifested in the form of a whispered grin to their spouse followed by a louder chuckle.

“These womins all agreed to be part of tonight’s events, hoping to be part of the effort to fundraise for the shelter.” The crowd applauded their honor, bravery, or whatever admirable trait in the womins they felt they were expected to recognize. “Although it’s already fully constructed and ongoing costs for supplies border on negligible, the cost of maintaining the facility itself, as well as keeping a full staff payrolled, does not. My goal in hosting this fundraiser tonight is to ensure that The Ralph Wallace Shelter for Minpeople can remain financially afloat for a decade, at least.” These last two words she emphasized. “This problem doesn’t seem to be going away any time soon,” she said, “and although anecdotal cases of the occasional celebrity who catches the bug have entered the public eye, the average person remains unaware of the extent this pandemic. Someday, we’ll hopefully have a cure or vaccine, but until then, I believe we all have reasonable fears that it will only spread. The first step is to make people aware.”

“We all know that this disease is associated with groups of people often considered invisible at best and unsavory at worst. But aren’t all who find themselves in this vulnerable state deserving of our help, regardless of whatever other stigmas surround them? Besides,” and here Ada tossed up her hands in affected exasperation, knocking her left earring in the process, leaving its terrified captive to cling with equal effort to her stomach and the cage, “they’re not the only ones affected. Are we going to sit by and let what happened in America with minutiosis happen here? Let it fester out from the inner cities into the suburbs, and only then give it our attention? When it’s ravaged our entire country?” She paused for effect. “I hope not. Your children are not immune to this disease.” Then she grinned. “Then again, maybe you’d prefer they catch it so you can keep them at home indefinitely.” She laughed along with the crowd.

If the womins in Ada’s earrings could have glanced at each other during this section of the speech, they would have. As it was, their view was eye level with Mrs. Strickland’s mouth, its movements magnified twelvefold. The womin in the left earring kept her composure, but the one in the right couldn’t help but shudder at the glib remark.

“In the meantime, however, the people who have already been affected need immediate and direct support. That’s where all of you come in.” Again, Ada paused, but smiled this time. “Anyone who donates over two thousand pounds tonight will earn a rented minanimous necklace, as we’re calling them, for an evening; two more and you’ll get a pair of earrings. Five thousand for an evening with a full set like I’ve got. Hopefully you’ll use that opportunity to raise awareness of more than just yourself while out on the town.” Ada winked at a spot between two women in the crowd, both of whom blushed. “I might add, as well, that womins and mins of all races and weights have agreed to engage in this opportunity for publicity, so don’t worry you won’t find anything to match your dress.” The womin in the necklace glanced up at the crowd for a moment, before thinking better of it and closing her eyes. “And for those of you so gravely concerned—yes, we are compensating them individually for their efforts as well.”

“What about the men?” a heckler called. “What do we get for five thousand?”

“If you don’t have a woman controlling your checkbook,” Ada said, “God help you.” Again, she laughed with the crowd. The womin on her chest trembled with the jostling. “Fortunately, we have ties with metallic inlays, a new design from our lovely French friends Théo and Inès Laurent. They unfortunately couldn’t make it tonight in order to receive our first-hand compliments on their designs, but their talents are no less than divine intervention.”

“Now,” she said, “I’d like to raise my glass, once more, finally—I know I’ve bored most of you to tears with my dithering, but it comes from a good place, I promise—to Ralph and Marie Wallace, for their tireless work in helping our city’s marginalized populations.” She raised her glass as well as her chins, and the womins in her earrings each had to take a moment to adjust to the swinging of their cages. “To you,” she said, “and to them.” She sipped her glass. The rest in attendance followed suit, most of them draining theirs. Then, having had her fill of the evening’s spotlight, Ada pointed it over to the Wallaces. “Now let’s get another glass in everyone’s hand and a speech from Ralph!” she said.

No more than five minutes after Ralph Wallace had finished his equally charming sermon expounding the mission underlying the night’s festivities, the married couple whose leaving Ada had delayed by insisting they stay for the toast approached her to say their farewells. They were both dressed to the nines, one point less than the majority in attendance.

“Oh, Alice! There you are!” Ada said.

“We’re actually just on our way out now,” Alice Anderson said. She was a stout brunette in her mid-forties. Unlike most of the women at the gala who still had private preoccupations with maintaining their trimness, her weight rivaled both Ada’s and her husband’s and, unlike Ada, she’d never had a claim to being thin to start.

“You’re sure you don’t want to stay for the main course?” Ada said.

“Well, I’d love to,” Alice said, “but I’m our driver tonight and Edgar’s already had enough to drink that he’s no fun to be around while sober. We’re headed home so I can be no fun too.”

Ada smiled. “Perfectly understandable. I don’t suppose I could finesse a parting donation from you? Five thousand will cover the salary of an employee for almost three months, and I know you don’t care at all,” she winked at Alice, “but you get to partake in this season’s fashion statement. I think an Asian min in gold would really match your complexion.”

Alice beamed from the compliment, but deferred to her husband, Edgar. “What do you think?”

“I think those earrings aren’t half as beautiful as the womins inside them,” said the hirsute man. He leaned in close to the right earring, his eye less than two inches from the petrified womin inside. The champagne on his breath filled her nostrils as she stared at the small gap in his front teeth. “And what about that lucky womin on your chest?” he said, turning his eyes to her. “You’re gorgeous, my dear. How would you like an evening on my wife instead? I know I certainly find it comfortable on her!” He laughed, and the womin, like the one in the earring, turned away from him. Alice tugged on his dinner jacket sleeve as surreptitiously as she could and he regained his composure. “But none hold a candle to you, of course.” He reached for Ada’s hand and kissed it.

“You see my problem,” Alice said. “If he makes a fool of himself tonight, I’m implicated by the virtue of this dreadful thing.” She held up her hand and displayed a diamond ring.

“I see,” Ada said. A wry smile remained on her face. “I suppose you’re the one who ought to be making the financial decisions right now then.”

Alice thought it over. “Well, I don’t see what harm two thousand pounds to a good cause does,” she said, once more turning to her husband, “do you? Edgar?”

Edgar was beginning to reach his finger out to prod at the bauble, but snapped back into sensibility once more upon being addressed. “For a good cause,” he mumbled. “Why not?” From the pocket of his tuxedo, he pulled out his checkbook.

The evening progressed like any other, except that Ada granted herself one of the larger slices from the centerpiece cake and an extra glass or two of champagne. Fundraisers, compounded with hosting them and surpassing her goal by a wide margin, as she had tonight, gave more allowance for indulgence than other, more directly celebratory events. No, they hadn’t managed to fundraise enough to sustain the shelter for more than two years, but even that was a feat. You did something good; you got to be a little bad.

Once all the guests had cleared out, Ada left the dining room to the cleaners and ascended the staircase of her penthouse flat to her bedroom, leaning most of her weight on the banister in her stupor. Ralph and Marie had given her their heartfelt thanks, and had each even spent a few minutes chatting, as best they could over the banquet’s din, with the womins adorning her ears, asking them how comfortable they were and whether or not they wanted a chance to try the food while it was still hot. The womins had both decided to forgo having their supper at the same time as the rest of the guests, preferring to stay in the earrings. An eavesdropper had teased that it was a sign of how much they’d already grown to love Ada, and she’d had no thought to question that assessment. Who didn’t?

She pressed the nob for the lights in her room, then quickly turned it to dim them, shading her eyes with her hand. She wheezed with the effort of her drunken walk up the stairs, her mouth open to suck in air. She wasn’t as young or thin as she used to be. In front of a large tri-fold mirror, she appraised herself for a few minutes. The womins in her jewelry weren’t more beautiful than her, were they? That was the problem, she thought, with wearing another person as a fashion accessory—anyone who cared enough to look was bound to compare you with them. There was a fine line of making sure they looked almost as good as you, but not quite.

Ada looked at her face, sanguine even in the mood lighting of her bedroom. She tucked a strand of hair that had come loose behind her left ear, and it tickled into the earring with the womin, who moved as far away from its touch as she could before pushing it back out. Ada giggled at her effort, and continued to giggle as she looked at the reflection of her chest in the mirror and saw that the pendant around her neck had slipped three quarters of its way into her bosom. When she realized that her laughing was only shaking the poor trapped womin, she couldn’t help but begin an unkempt guffaw, resting her hands on her thighs to support herself as she doubled over. In the mirror, she could see the womins in her earrings clinging to the curling bars surrounding them as their cages swung, but the womin in her necklace had turned horizontal with the shift, still wedged in Ada’s chest.

“Oh my goodness, you poor thing!” she said after the two minutes she took to halfway regain her composure. “I’m so sorry! That must have been why people were snickering towards the end.” She pulled on the necklace’s chain, then let forth another burst of laughter when she realized it was going to need a stronger tug than the one she’d given to get the womin out. “And here I thought they were just enjoying their wine!” She tucked her left hand between her breasts and spread them. The womin in the pendant fell down another two inches, now completely submerged in Mrs. Strickland’s fat. “Don’t worry, I’ve got you,” Ada said, her chest still heaving with her giggles. She reached in with her right hand, and pulled the necklace out. “I’ve got you.”

She took her earrings off and placed the silver cylinders on the top of her dresser, between her hairbrush and a box covered with salmon fabric and pearls. “Did you all enjoy your nights?” she said as she lifted the latches on their cages. Each of them began to step out in order to stretch their legs. They both nodded, but the one still in the necklace seemed less certain of how to answer. It didn’t matter though; Ada was no longer paying to attention to them. She returned to the mirror where she continued to preen herself for a few minutes before she opened the door to her bedroom again and called down the stairs: “Layla, can you please come get my necklace and dress and then take care of the womins?”

“Yes, ma’am,” a woman’s voice called back. The oak stairs creaked as she walked up to the master bedroom. Layla, a thin woman too haggard to appear her age of thirty-three, held in her arms a rectangular wooden platter about the size of a cutting board that had thick edges raised ten centimeters high. She unhooked Mrs. Strickland’s necklace, placed it on the platter, and began to approach the womins on the dresser, but Mrs. Strickland stopped her.

“My dress first, dear.”

“Of course, ma’am,” Layla said. “You look lovely, by the way.” She held the platform in one hand and frowned with concentration as she unzipped the dress in the dim light with the other, then turned away as Mrs. Strickland began to remove her clothing. She emptied the necklace of the womin and placed it alongside the earrings on the dresser. The two womins walked onto the wooden carrier and began conversing among themselves, leaving the other one out of their conversation. Layla watched as the womin who’d been in the necklace stared past her at Mrs. Strickland’s back, which was now naked except for the white lingerie that cut into her thick flesh. “Anything else, ma’am?”

Ada appraised her figure in the mirror, lifting her sagging breasts and stomach with her hands, then letting them flop down. “Give those three a special treat, will you, dear? They did well for us tonight. Maybe a thin slice of cake to split between them?” She sighed, content with the night’s turnout, then unfastened her bra before going into her walk-in closet to put on her nighty. “Ralph’s shelter is going to turn out superb. I’m sure of it.”

The three tiny womins sat down in a corner of the board and leaned against the wall, bracing themselves against the jostling of Layla’s walk back down the stairs. Layla gazed at the plump one, who was dancing in place and waving her arms. “What do you want, then?” she asked. The womin paused, quivering and tense; placed her hands on her crotch; and relaxed as she soiled herself. Layla frowned down at her. The thin womins, who’d already been sitting in a different corner, moved further away from her. “I know Mrs. Strickland doesn’t give you breaks neither,” Layla said. “Doesn’t give you the right to piss whenever you want like that. Who do you think has to wash your things, hm? Are you going to clean up your mess?” The womin who wet herself had begun to sob. Upon Layla’s taunting, she sat down without bothering to move from the puddle underneath her. “Get up, you cow,” Layla hissed. “Now I know you’re just trying to wind me up.” She had stopped walking when they’d reached the foot of the stairs. The womin curled into a fetal ball and wrapped her arms around her legs, tears streaming down her face. “Filthy bloody animals. Come on, let’s get you lot to the sink before you two take her example and wet yourselves as well. Then we can get your clothes back on and then your supper.”

While Anne and Louise, the womins who had been in Mrs. Strickland’s left and right earrings respectively, squatted to relieve themselves in the sink, Layla stared at them. “That’s much better innit? Don’t see how you lot haven’t figured out some sort of sign language to ask for what you need yet. I heard all that tosh about how anyone can get it, but I don’t believe a word.” Then, once she’d scooped them up in her hands out of the sink and onto the kitchen counter, she said, “For your treat, if I can find it, I’ll let you take a peek at who’s made reservations to wear any of you. That sound better than cake?” She walked away from the counter to find the sheet of paper on which their fates were written.

The womins would have wanted both the gift of prescience and the cake, but they didn’t complain when Layla returned with the list, cut herself their slice, and ate it above them, spraying crumbs as she read the names of a handful of the guests and chewed at the same time. All of the reservations that had been made for any of the three of them that night had been for Margaret, the woman who’d been in the necklace. There were four separate occasions for her lined up in the next month.

Margaret didn’t hear Layla’s announcement. She was staring into space, muttering something repetitive to herself and rocking back and forth. When Layla looked away from the list to leer down, she prodded Margaret’s side with her little finger to get her to stop. “What do you think you’re doing there?” she asked. Margaret quieted the movements of her mouth and body, but didn’t appear to reenter reality, still gazing at her surroundings without seeing them. Anne whispered something to Louise, both of them glancing at her.

Layla, uninterested in investigating the incident further, turned back to the cake. “Oh, apparently the Hoovers have requested a full set of black women,” she smirked. “Those poor things have no idea what they’ve signed up for. Mrs. Hoover always leaves such a mess when she’s here, the pig.” She took another bite of the cake. Margaret, still halfway hazy, now saw the vanilla crumbs cascading from the gigantic maid’s mouth and grabbed those that fell on the platform nearest her. After wordlessly offering to split them with the other women and being declined, she began to eat them by herself, stifling her pain with their sweetness. The food at the shelter was nowhere near this good. For a moment, she was grateful.

None of them would bring Layla’s thieving up with Mrs. Strickland. They were uncertain they’d have the opportunity anyways; they’d heard that Ada Strickland never wore the same thing twice, and they imagined that included minpeople. Besides, it was only some cake.

In the end, who really cared?

After a nurse—neither the name nor appearance of whom Jamie could remember—had prodded at his naked body and assessed him as going through withdrawal, she had placed him on the counter of the nurses station and taken a full body shot of him with a digital camera from above. To Jamie, still reeling from the fever dream that was minimization, it looked like an alien spaceship, come to abduct him into an alternate reality. It was.

The nurse had placed a tiny pair of turquoise scrubs at his feet and, once he’d pulled them on, brought him to a single bed in the corner of the geriatric unit with the curtain permanently pulled around it. On the bed were a little over a dozen other freshly minimized people—freshmins, the nurses called them, more often than not in a disparaging tone—who were almost all in the same position as him: they were vacillating between feeling sure they were about to die and hoping that they would. If not for the plastic wall that rose fifty opaque, pewter centimeters into the air and surrounded the mattress on all sides, he felt certain that he and at least half of the other vomiting mins on the bed would have jumped off the edge the minute they’d arrived.

The bed itself wasn’t entirely uncomfortable. Yes, the mattress and sheets were all hospital standard, their starchy and stiff texture pulled taut underneath him and further magnified by his size, but he imagined he was living in the lap of luxury compared to the carmine stains he’d started seeing pop up in alleyways over the course of the last year. Then again, after his third straight day of vomiting, he wasn’t so sure he preferred his position. The minimization itself was a paralyzing fugue state that lasted a standard three hours, and he’d only regained control of his limbs half an hour before the withdrawal-induced nausea and sweating welled up inside of him.

There were four metallic troughs wedged where someone had cut long, thin rectangles into the mattress. Each one ran horizontal to the bed, and they ran up its edge in equidistant increments, like the lines on a measuring cup. They reached three quarters into bed’s width, leaving enough space that any of the mins could walk around them instead of risking a leap. From the bottom of the bed to the top, they were respectively filled with vomit, feces, water, and liquidized food. These top two troughs had thin metal sheets dividing them into twenty equal sections as well, to ensure whatever minimal sanitation they could. In all, it was a DIY job; medical providers were still in the preliminary research phase of figuring out how to best care for minpeople—asking for funds from the government.

Whichever nurse was in charge of their unit—their single bed was described as its own unit—would change each of the troughs three times a day, leaving a total of one glorious half hour in which no miasma emanating from their own filth stung the freshmins eyes and lungs. Otherwise, most of the nurses existed solely to ensure that they were all still breathing once per hour and to tsk their unnecessary disapproval at whatever new arrival had failed to reach the vomit trough in time. Once per day, they would load the minpeople onto a tray, bring them over to a sink, and let them bathe themselves one by one while another nurse changed the unit’s sheet. The only amendment to the schedule was the occasional family who would arrive to take away a relative on the unit after they’d detoxed. That or the gruff man whose job it was to go from hospital to hospital with a bright orange cage to bring all the neglected minpeople to The Ralph Wallace Shelter for Minpeople.

On his fifth day on The Minpeople Unit for Detoxification, or MUD, as the hospital staff called it, Jamie was less delirious and his insomnia cleared up enough that the shadow of the night nurse woke him from a three-hour nap. Her light blue nametag read Caroline Byrne in large sans-serif letters and underneath that, in smaller font, Student Nurse. He looked up at her and she looked back only for a moment, her hazel eyes pausing no more than two seconds on any of them. If someone had asked Jamie what he was looking for when he stared at her eyes, he might have told them he was trying to figure out how she felt about them, but the truth was he already knew. He was hoping to find any trace of evidence that he was wrong.

Student Nurse Caroline paused her pen’s movement on the clipboard and leaned her face close to a lower corner of the bed, where a withered elderly womin lay in a corner close to the trough of vomit.

“Mrs. Bishop?” The coffee and cigarettes on Caroline’s breath shrouded the unit with more potency than her shadow. To most of the minpeople, it was a smell welcome for the vicarious feeling it lent them. Mrs. Bishop didn’t move. “Heather Bishop?” Caroline exhaled deeply and all that Jamie could think of was how desperately he wanted caffeine in him. A single puff of a cigarette. “Heather?” Still the womin didn’t move. “Another overdependent freshmin,” Caroline muttered to herself. “How do you let yourself get like that, to where you’ll drop dead without a fix?” Her question was rhetorical and muttered, but it grated on all the minpeople on the unit who were lucid enough to hear it. From her breast pocket, she pulled out a white stylus with a black rubber nib. She leaned in again and said, “Mrs. Heather Bishop, speak now or forever hold your peace.” Heather Bishop held her peace. Caroline prodded the womin in the shoulder once with her pointer finger, her hand inside a robin’s-egg-blue latex glove. Then she used the stylus to pull Mrs. Bishop’s chin open, and pushed the tip into the womin’s mouth.

Jamie no longer had coffee on his mind. He stared in horror as the giant hand assailed the dead woman’s body. She had wizened, tan skin and her fingernails were covered with chipped black polish. Her scrubs, which were standard size for all minpatients, hung loose around her withered corpse. Jamie thought he recognized her as a woman he’d once fought with for a panhandling spot. When he couldn’t look anymore, he turned his gaze up to the bored face of the intern. She watched the fingers on her spare hand as she twirled them around a loose lock of her brown hair, checking her watch in intervals while she waited for the instrument to make its measurements.

Nurse Caroline had started to hum a tune to herself when the stylus beeped. Jamie flinched at the speed with which the student nurse pulled it up to her eyes to read. She sighed, looked at her watch again, and scribbled something on her immense clipboard. Then she walked away, leaving Heather Bishop lying on her back, stretched out on the bottom of the bed with her eyes open, her mouth agape, and her limbs at odd angles.

Jamie turned to look at the faces of the people around him. “Is she…” he started. Half of the other freshmins were too delirious to care, and the other half were, like he’d been, staring at the womin. He met the eyes of the man next to him. “Is she going to just leave her there like that?”

The man raised his thick eyebrows. “You’ve been that out of it, eh? You didn’t notice when Keith dropped dead two days ago then?” He spoke with a Scottish brogue.

They watched as an emaciated young woman walked over to Heather’s body. “Heather,” she said. She placed one hand and then the other on the elderly woman’s shoulders. “Heather.”

Jamie could feel his heartbeat increasing back to the tachycardic rate he’d had for the past four days. “I see,” the man mused. Jamie looked at his bare feet. “What cocktail are you coming off of then?”

The woman began to shake the Heather’s body by the shoulders. “Heather, if you’re faking, just tell me. She’s not here.”

“Just… Just heroin,” Jamie said.

The man raised his eyebrows higher. “Ah, yes. Just heroin.”

Jamie glanced back over at Heather Bishop’s body and found himself unable to look away. “A lot of it.” He wondered how many degrees of separation he’d had from her. They were both mins in the same hospital and he had vague recollections of meeting her. At most, she had to have been the friend of a friend of a friend. “What’s your drug of choice then?”

“Ah,” the man smiled and rubbed his hands together like a scheming cartoon villain. “I’m a coke man myself.”

The young woman began crying onto the corpse’s shoulders. “This isn’t funny,” she said. “Yvette’s going to take care of us, remember? She’s going to come as soon as our seven days are over. She’s going to pretend to have a place.”

Then, as if defending his honor, the man added, “But I enjoyed a speedball here and there. A little dope never hurt anyone, now did it?” He chuckled.

“Heather,” she keened.

At that moment, Nurse Caroline returned with headphones in her ears and a Ziploc bag in her hands, and the man’s smile drained from his face. “I’m just protectin’ my innocence,” the girl sang to herself as she pulled a pair of felt-tipped tongs from her pocket. “I’m just protectin’ my soul.” Then, in a curt tone, she said, “Move away from the body, ma’am.” The thin womin clung to Heather’s body, refusing to move. Caroline shoved her away with the felt section of the tongs then grabbed Heather Bishop’s body and placed her in the bag.

The womin shrieked and ran back to grab onto her friend, but she was out of reach almost instantly. “Stop!” She shrieked as she beat her fists against the plastic wall, but if Caroline noticed, she didn’t show it. “Stop, you fucking bitch!”

Student Nurse Caroline lifted the bag up to eye level, rattled the flimsy plastic container until the corpse arrived at the bottom, then pressed as much air out of it as she could. With a zip, it was sealed. “I’m never gonna let you get close to me.” She placed the bag on her clipboard and, with a thin marker, wrote something on its label. “Even though you mean the most to me.” She hummed her way back out of sight to the nurses station.

“Bastards,” the man said, his accent growing more aggressive with his tone. “Nurses.”

“Nurses.” Jamie nodded.

“Aye,” the man said. “The whole bloody NHS.”

Jamie felt sick to his stomach, but instead of running down the length of the bed, he took a seat. “Should we go comfort her?”

The man mused on it. “Ah, I don’t know. Give it a few minutes. She looks like she’s about to be sick.”

“I think I might be too.” Jamie looked away from the young homeless woman and back to the man next to him. “What’s your name?”

“Leo,” the man said as he sat down next to him. “And yours?”

“Jamie.” They shook hands. “Nice to meet you.”

“How old are you?” Leo asked. “Don’t look older than twenty-four, I’d wager.”

Jamie nodded. “Then the drugs’ve aged me four years,” he said. For a minute, they both watched as the frail young woman who’d tried to rouse Heather dry heaved onto the spot where she’d lain. Jamie realized he couldn’t stand the silence. “How long have you been here in hospital?”

Leo stroked his beard. “I’m on day six or seven now, depending on if we’ve passed midnight. You know,” he said, with a glint in his eye, “you can tell how long folks have been here by how far up the bed they are. It’s split almost in half that way. The nurses always place the new folks at the bottom, and then as people develop appetites… Well,” he shrugged, “here we are.”

Jamie nodded. “Bollocks we don’t have a clock,” he said.

“Or that they never turn the bloody lights off. Those three minutes every hour whenever a nurse sticks her head in all our faces are the best rest I get.” Leo said. “Plus, some of them aren’t so bad in certain departments.”

Jamie looked at the older man, then turned onto his side away from him, and closed his eyes. He couldn’t have cared less about Nurse Caroline’s breasts. Leo was, at this moment, however tenuously, his only sure acquaintance in the world; otherwise, he would have cursed him out for his blatant disrespect of the scene they’d witnessed only seconds before.

“Oh, don’t be like that,” Leo said. “I’m just trying find the bright side.” Jamie didn’t respond. “So where are you headed after here, then? Have any folks that’ll take you in?”

Jamie considered it. “Guess that’s up to them.” He hadn’t spoken with anyone in his family in a little over two years, but the nurses would have tracked them down and called them by now. The chronological gap in communication itself didn’t loom quite as large as the distinct possibility that even his minimization couldn’t mend the rift that had caused it. He knew of friends who’d been taken back in once they were physically incapable of shooting up, let alone getting their hands on a bundle in the first place, but he was unsure that his family was so forgiving.

“Me, my old lady’s taking me back, thanks for asking,” Leo said. “Said she’s glad she’ll finally be able to put me in my place.” Jamie turned back to him and queried him with his eyes; nothing frightened him more than being entirely at someone else’s mercy, especially someone with reason to be vengeful. “Oh, don’t give me that look. I’m sure she’ll enforce the rules, but that’s just how we joke. I’m sure she’ll miss my size,” he winked, “but she’s a good woman. Thank god we were separated when I got the bug and I never gave it to her. Better that than that shelter, anyways. No offense to you, if that’s where you end up.”

Jamie nodded. He stared into space, his gaze directed at the thick fibers in the sheet beneath them. “When’s she coming to pick you up?”

Leo shrugged. “If I haven’t lost count and this really is day seven, should only be about nine more hours. Whenever she’s awake, really.”

A pale teenage girl with royal blue hair approached them. Her scrubs had a thread sticking out of the shoulder that, to a normal person, wouldn’t have been longer than 3 centimeters, but if she hadn’t been anxiously chewing on it, she would have had to continually brush it out of her face. “They can’t… they can’t just do that, can they?” she said. “Dump her in a bag and… Poor Sylvia…” She was trembling. “She said they were in a camp together.” She chewed on her string as the two men looked on. “What’s going to happen to her body?”

Jamie felt his heart sink again. He’d been on the brink of distracting himself.

Leo scratched his chin. “I didn’t bother to ask, to be honest with you, lass. I assume if she’s got a family they’ll let them know.”

“And… and if she doesn’t.” The girl had her each of her hands on the other other arm’s elbow, and she hunched her shoulders.

Leo shook his head. “I don’t know. I’m sorry.”

“I don’t understand,” she said. “They can’t just do that.” She looked back and forth between Leo’s and Jamie’s eyes. Neither of them responded, and she took a moment to process it. “They can’t,” she echoed, quieter this time.

“You’ve never been to hospital after an OD before, have you?” Jamie said. His voice was hushed.

“I’ve never OD’d,” the girl said. “I don’t even do drugs.” Seeing their disbelief, she insisted an explanation. “I had painkillers in my system because I sprained my ankle pretty badly. I stuck to my prescription, but, since I have minutiosis, the doctor assumed I was a jun—” She blushed an apology for the close call, then continued. “An addict. But it doesn’t make sense. My prescription is in the NHS system. They didn’t even believe my mum.” She bit her nails. “No offense to anyone who does drugs.” Her eyes began to water. “I don’t even know if my mum believes me anymore. I’ve been on this stupid ‘unit’ for three days and she still hasn’t come to get me.”

Leo nodded, pondering how to gently break whatever might need to be broken to her.

“See, the nurses don’t view us as addicts,” Jamie scowled. “You were right—we’re junkies, a waste of resources and time. No matter where we are, we’re a waste of space, but when we’re in hospital, taking up beds, it’s even worse. Nobody really wants us alive so much as they don’t want our deaths on their hands. Us being shrunk is a blessing to them and to the whole fucking NHS, because now we all only waste one bed.”

The girl chewed on her string.

“Come here,” Leo said. He extended his arms. “Don’t mind him.” She hesitated—he was not only a stranger, but an old junkie min to boot. “It’s alright, love. I don’t bite.” She placed her back against the plastic wall, slid down next to him, and received his embrace.

“So nobody cares about us?” she asked. “Now that we’re minpeople?”

Leo continued to hug her, but remained quiet. Neither he nor Jamie were experienced with their size, but they already acutely understood the treatment.

“It’s alright,” Jamie said. He clutched his stomach. “You’ll get used to it.” He stood up and headed down the bed.

Leo watched as the younger man went to comfort Sylvia. “Never mind him,” he said. “What’s your name, love? How old are you?”

“I’m Cass,” she said. “I’m fifteen.”

Seven more visits from Nurse Caroline and four from Nurse Erin, who worked the morning shift, and, sure enough, Leo’s wife arrived to take him home. She was a thin blonde woman in her forties, and she placed Leo in the breast pocket of the men’s overcoat she wore. “I got this just so I’d have somewhere to keep you,” she said to him, and stroked his head with the pad of her finger.

“Ta,” Leo said to her, though she couldn’t hear him. Then to the minpeople on the bed: “Guess I’m a pocket square now. Bye lads!”

“Cheers,” Jamie said.

“Good luck!” Cass waved.

“You too, love,” Leo said. Then his wife, with him in tow, walked off, complaining to him about all the paperwork that had held her up.

“I hope he knows what he’s doing,” Jamie said as he knelt down in front of his personal square of water to scoop it up to his mouth.

“Me too.” Cass sat down on the wall near him.

Jamie patted his face with his wet hands to wake himself up. He could feel his stubble growing. “So how’d you sprain your ankle?” he asked Cass. “You know, since you’re not an addict.”

Cass hesitated. “I was...” She looked away. “I was at a party and I got really drunk. And I fell down the stairs.” Then, as if trying to defend her right to be blamed for her situation, she said, “It was my fault for sneaking out and getting drinks from guys in university. That’s how I got minutiosis.” She fiddled with her string. “Now everyone knows what a slut I am. Even my mum.”

Jamie looked at her. She didn’t return his gaze. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I guess shouldn’t have asked.”

“It’s fine. You didn’t know. I guess I just never thought it was going to be me.” She sighed. “I know that’s part of what they warn you about in the speech they give you about staying safe. But I only did it like five times total.” She fiddled with the thread sticking out of her scrubs. “I always told my mum I was out studying with my best friend, so now she knows I’m a liar too. It makes sense she hasn’t got me yet.”

“Hey,” Jamie said. “She’ll be here. I’m sure it’s just the doctors and NHS bureaucracy doing their best to hold things up.”

“Maybe she’s too busy,” Cass said, ignoring his assurance. “My dad died almost a year ago and my mum had to take care of me, my twelve-year-old brother, and my baby sister all by herself. I know I should have helped her instead of going out. I was just…” She took a deep breath to prevent herself from crying. “I was so sad. I needed to get rid of it. I thought I was going to explode.” She took another withering breath. “Maybe I did.”

Jamie sat in silence for a moment, hoping to give her a second to calm down. “I understand,” he said.

Cass rolled her eyes at herself, and wiped away a tear with her finger. “Of course you do. I’m sorry for being such a whiner.”

“It’s fine,” Jamie said. She gave him a dubious look. “Really. You’ve got plenty of good reasons to complain, trust me.”

“If you don’t mind me asking, um…” She thought of how to word her question. “Well, I know this is personal…” Jamied nodded his consent. “Well, why would anyone do heroin? Especially with minutiosis on the rise. Aren’t there other, safer drugs?”

Jamie cracked his knuckles as he mulled it over. “It feels good,” he said. “And it’s cheap.” He realized he was speaking in present tense. His non-sober days were behind him. “I knew it would kill me, I just didn’t care. I mean, I thought I knew it would kill me, and I knew it would at least kill my pain in the meantime.”

“Yeah,” Cass said.

He shrugged. “The problem is I’m not dead. I mean, my life is over, but I’m still living. I don’t know.” He shook his head. “It just felt so good, you know? Now people who don’t know me hate me and I can’t blame them, because everyone who knows me and isn’t also using hates me too. I pawned my grandma’s jewelry when she died to get high, and I was out of money by the time her funeral rolled around. I’m worth hating. I don’t know.”

Cass rested her head in her right hand. “There are some good ones, though, right? There are still people who care.”

As if on cue, Nurse Erin, a morbidly obese woman with her hair pulled into a tight bun behind a headband, leaned her shadow onto the unit. “Good morning guys!” Jamie and Cass stopped talking and looked up at her. “I have another freshly minted fellow here for you. Be nice to him.” She placed the tray with him on the foot of the bed and left it there while a young Asian man trudged off of it. She leaned in to the top end of the bed, and talked to the minpeople who were less immediately ill. “So, it’s slop for lunch and dinner as usual, but I figured I’d split one of my biscuits with you as a snack to break up the monotony. You better promise that you’ll finish the whole thing or it’s my butt on the line, got it?”

Cass smiled at her. With Nurse Erin’s massive frame looming over them, it would have been easy for her to feel like an animal in a petting zoo or a child in a playpen, but she put effort into believing that Erin saw them as people. That was most likely the truth—people who didn’t see them as people never bothered to be so kind. She waved her arms at her to grab her attention.

“Yes?” Nurse Erin asked. “What is it?” Then, almost immediately, she smacked her forehead. “Oh, I almost forget to tell you! Your mum’s here today to spring you out early. She finally managed to convince the doctor that you weren’t in the right place. Go figure, it’s only all over all of your papers. She’ll be half an hour at most, I promise. She’s just in reception now. Sound good?”

Cass smiled and nodded. Jamie looked up at Nurse Erin and tried to send her a telepathic plea: What about me? Will any of my family take me? Have you even spoken with them? Do they know where I am? Nurse Erin didn’t hear him. She grabbed the empty tray she’d brought the freshmin in on and walked back to the nurses station.

“See?” Cass said. “I told you. Blue skies ahead. For both of us.”

Erin returned an hour later to bring Cass to her family.

“Sorry about the delay,” she said as she placed the transportation tray down on the bed for Cass to climb onto. “Your mum’s with your siblings, and they don’t allow kids near the unit, so I have to take you back to her. Doctor’s orders.”

Cass hugged Jamie then stepped onto the platform. “Good luck!” she said. “I hope you hear from your family.” Then, with a single turn of Erin’s body, she was out of sight.

In the night, the new freshmin, an overdependent, died. He was twenty-three years old. Nurse Caroline didn’t arrive to find his body until forty-five minutes after the other minpeople had noticed he’d collapsed. She put him in a plastic bag while singing a song, and returned to the nurses station to drink her coffee.

The next night, a man with an orange cage arrived for Jamie.

Under the amber babble of the backstreet dive the driver was talking. His pudgy lips beneath his beady eyes beneath his balding head, his voice gruff but slow, plodding along:

“They always look so bloody morose. I mean, it got to me the first day or so, them staring all blanklike at me with my carrier like I were the boogyman. Their little eyes and all. I’d feel sorry for them if I didn’t know what they were like when they were full sized, from back when I was an overnight cabby in Soho. Better they’re mins than bums and bumboys, init?” He shook his head and took a pull on his pint. “They say some of them are happy now they can’t kill themselves with all that. Makes you think maybe, just maybe, they were meant to be that way. You know, god’s plan. I mean, they don’t do such a good job of that either, obviously, if they’re still leeching off people, but at least they’re not in everyone’s way. I pick them up from all the Essex hospitals and bring them to shelter and that’s that. Two people can look after all of ‘em and Essex is a bit cleaner every day. And— Here just a sec. Excuse me?” He signaled the bartender, a bored snub-faced woman whose black shirt failed to hide her gut. She refilled his drink. He took a long swig and placed it on the bar counter. “And the best part is that, yeah, they’re still leeches and all that, but it isn’t costing the taxpayer’s a cent. Place is run private. The entire population of minpeople in this country can fit in a place smaller than the first floor of my house.” He caught himself. “I mean, not all hundred thousand. Just the ones who were such cunts they’re not only shrunk, but homeless too. Families won’t take them back in even now they can shove them in the sock drawer if the little buggers get cheeky.” He laughed and caught some of his drink in his throat and had a fit of badly stifled coughs. “Good thing too the place is private. Prime Minister would’ve had a fucking riot on her hands if she’d tried to make people like us pay for their mistakes.”

The man next to him nodded and grunted his approval. Kept staring at the replay of the previous night’s football match on the television and took a pull of his own drink.

The driver, reinvigorated in his diatribe, continued. “You’d think they would have learned from the first time this kind of thing happened to em, wouldn’t you? But no, moment they know there’s a cure for that one—and a cure, mind you, free on the NHS, which we end up paying for—they get right back to it. My mother in law, religious twat, says Jesus does it to ‘em, but that’s bollocks of course. They do it to themselves. The Irish drink, the jews cheat, and all them junkies and prozzies give each other whatever diseases they can.”

He shook his head. “I used to be a bleeding heart when I was young, if you can believe it. Not an activist of any kind, mind you. Was always too tired during the day to go walking around with a sign from spending all night driving, but I thought it was a shame first time this thing happened. Swear I did. I didn’t necessarily cry over any of them—already had a basic idea what they were about—but I thought it was a shame. But now it’s the boy who cried wolf. Fool me fucking once.”

The driver turned his head around to see if he’d caught any kind of audience. A couple at a table in the back were necking. His expert eyes scanned their hands and found only one ring.

Turned back to the Martha, the bartender. “You drive late night around some places in this city and you meet all kinds, don’t you. I’m sure you get it, Martha.” She ignored him. “No, there’s all kinds, but never did get Julia Roberts in my cab. That one bloke in the Green Party’ll have you feel sorry for them, but the truth, plain and simple, is that they’re scummy little people, and they were even before they got minimized. At best, they’re broken, and it’s not like they’re about to get fixed.” He chuckled. “Get fixed. Like fuckin’ cats.” He took a drink for the first time in a few minutes. “At worst.” He shrugged. “I don’t know. At worst, fuck ‘em.” He tilted his head back and drained his third pint.

He chuckled. “And on top of being all around scummy people, half of them are just plain numpties.” He turned to the man on the stool next to him and grinned. “You know some of them try to run away? I’ll leave the cage door open and look away for half a second and one of them’s trying to climb out. To where? If you hadn’t burned all your bridges when you were big, if there was some place else for you to go, I wouldn’t be transporting you to a shelter. Martha, dear, another, if you could.” He didn’t wait for her to fill his glass to keep rambling. “Do they think they can still survive in whatever alleyway they were sent to the hospital from? It’s illegal for them to exist out there unattended, and someone ought to tell them it’s for their own good.” Martha refilled his drink. “Thank you so much, dear.” He took a sip and put the pint down, cradling it with both thumbs looped through the handle. “How are they going to get their breakfast out of a dumpster they can’t climb into any more?” He laughed. “It’s absurd, really. You take people who spend their days begging for other people’s hard earned money who have given themselves what should be a terminal illness, and you try to reward the cunts for it with a place with three hots and a cot built just for them, free of charge. And they would rather sleep in the street, at five inches big.”

“Don’t get me wrong, there are some good folks who get caught in these people’s crossfire. Get the bug through no fault of their own than being too trusting. But them lot have somewhere to go. I never even see them. I just get paid to wrangle up the bad ones who got what they deserve and take them somewhere nicer to live that they don't even want."

“There is one good aspect of my job, though. A little perk.”

Nobody bothered to ask what the good aspect was. What modicum of interest anyone bothered to show him at the start of his rambling was gone. The man beside him watched the replay. The bartender finished wiping down a glass and started on a section of the counter. The woman at the back table withheld a pleased gasp as her partner snuck his coarse fingers across her smooth underwear. A Pulp song playing at a low volume mingled in the thick air with the sound of football commentary.

The driver stared down at his reflection in his drink, which was still wrapped in his hands. His mouth, silent, hung slightly ajar. The Good Aspect had woken back up. She was thrashing her limbs against the sensitive skin of his scrotum’s underside.