“Are we gonna be able to test it anytime soon?”

Aidan leaned against a bookshelf, arms propped up behind his head as he watched Micah Kingsley crouch down, obscured in part by a dusty gray lab coat as he tinkered with the machination on the table that looked vaguely like a small, boxy radio.

“I do not intend to test until it is precisely and pointedly perfect,” Micah replied, rotating his tiny screwdriver an extra ninety degrees.

“Isn’t that, like, what testing is for?”

“Only if you’re not a genius like myself,” Micah replied.

“Okay, but I just hope you’re gonna be able to finish it in about fifteen minutes. A genius like you wouldn’t want his permanent record tampered with, would he?”

Micah paused, glancing up at his bespectacled bro. “Whaddya mean?”

“What, you forgot? The parent-teacher-student conference?”

“That’s today?! Okay, change of plans,” Micah said as he flipped a couple of switches, causing the box to whine and his friend to jump. “We’re testing it once.”

-----

The gymnasium after school was home primarily to athletes that wanted to get some last-minute practice time in, slackers who wanted a place to chill and gossip before getting picked up, or -- interestingly -- cheerleaders who enjoyed doing both. The gym teacher himself tended to be asleep in his office at around this time, making it truly easy for any students still stuck there as the afternoon dragged on to do as they pleased without fear of retribution in the educational sense. As far as hangout spots went, the gym after school was a wholesome, judgment-free place; all were welcome within its halls, and all could be privy to its unique cultural quirks. 

It was here that the light din of cliques chatting amongst themselves, rubber soles and rubber balls squeaking on the floor, and enthusiastic exclamations of cheer all intersected, only to be curiously interrupted as one of the four large sets of double doors creaked open. Ms. Cynthia Wraith, the fair, young literature teacher stepped inside with a slight bit of respect for the setting she had just entered, as if walking into a church. She certainly didn’t mean to deliberately interrupt this student bonding session after school hours.

Regardless, as a new teacher, she still had a responsibility to convey an air of professionality and relative power over the students, upon which she needed to have a sort of authority. Ms. Wraith stepped in, heels clacking over the gym floor, and announced to a room which had, for the most part, quieted down. “Is anyone here in Micah’s science class?”

Maybe a fourth of the room -- around six people -- drolly raised their hands.

“I wish I wasn’t; you know how hard it is to catch the teacher’s attention with him in the class?” One of the girls sitting against the wall sighed, exasperated. “I could have a genuine question about the laws of relativity, meanwhile they’re fawning over Micah because he’s breaking them.”

There were general murmurs of agreement as the students more or less complained about Micah’s overachieving tendencies before Ms. Wraith cut in, “Well, does anyone know where he is? Apparently, science was his last course today and he hasn’t shown up for the PTA conference, which should start in five minutes once his mother gets here.”

“Mom? So he didn’t just spawn into existence from mitosis?” someone said.

“I heard he was in the library trying to put the finishing touches on his time dilation device,” another pointed out.

“Hey, you’re kinda cute,” a third person said.

Most people fixated on the time dilation line. Not everybody knew exactly what it was that Micah did all the time, but they did know that when he did something, it was sure to be interesting.

“Well then I suppose I’ll look for him there,” Ms. Wraith said, closing the door behind her as she headed back down the hall. Without looking back, Ms. Wraith could hear the doors open back up again as a small contingent of students started following her. She could only sigh and pick up her pace. It’s not as though they were breaking any rules, but Ms. Wraith did not enjoy being the target of scrutiny, and even more so when she was just the vehicle to achieve a perceptibly more interesting purpose.

 ---

The box was now shaking, blue electricity emitting itself from every crevice and frying the outlying walls that Aiden and Micah pushed themselves up against. Its whir got ever so louder as Aiden tried to yell over it, “This is crazy! Micah, this is frickin’ insane! You’re--”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’ve heard it all before.” Rather than fear, Micah’s face was neutral, tinted aqua in the writhing light, yet beneath the glow of his glasses, his eyes glowed in a different manner. A glee of some sort. A smile tugged at the corner of his mouth when the door burst open, and in poured a cadre of students with Ms. Wraith at the helm.

“What in the blazes?!” she exclaimed, hands on her hips as the students behind her swarmed into the small backroom. “What on Earth is this?!”

Micah’s glee ceased, and he suddenly dashed forward in front of his contraption, arms spread out to protect it from the incoming rabble. “Hey, hey, hey! Careful! You can’t mess with it!” he yelled, his backside burning a bit from the blue sparks.

“Never mind the contraption, we need to get you kids out of here before there’s some sort of nuclear meltdown!” Ms. Wraith reached for Micah’s wrist and was summarily slapped away in return. Indignant, she barked, “Did you just assault me, Mr?!”

Micah began to sweat, and it wasn’t from the electrifying heat. He cared about his permanent record, and assaulting a teacher was at least worth a suspension. And yet, if anybody tampered with the device, it could have disastrous repercussions that even he couldn’t foresee. He looked into Ms. Wraith’s nostrils as he reached for a possible rebuttal, “Uhhh, it-it’s just--”

“Uh, Micah!” 

Aiden’s voice and pointing finger led Micah’s gaze to another student traipsing nonchalantly into the glowing maelstrom, straight up to the box, on Micah’s left side. “Cool…” he said, almost hypnotized as he raised a finger to touch it.

“No!” Micah yelped, lunging for the student and his hand. He impacted with a bang, bringing the pair tumbling down in a fall that not only sent them to the floor, but briefly created a chaotic field of flailing limbs that affected everything near it. Including Micah’s device.

The impact was minor, but it was enough. Blue sparks turned red, then yellow, then pink. The cycle continued for less than a second before all lights ceased completely. Yet static remained in the air.

The crackle raised the hairs of everybody up high as scared whimpers surfaced from most.

“What did you do?!” Ms. Wraith gasped, as the box began to once again emit light. A solid glow, bright enough to fill a football field, leaked out of the mechanical seams of the box, blinding everybody with blue until finally a BURST of a blue shockwave, upending the bookshelves, blowing open the books, and circulating through the entire school.

-----

Sharon Kingsley sighed as she stepped out of the car, exasperated after a long day of being worked to the bone, exploited, advanced upon, and generally victimized in that concrete safari known as corporate America. To make matters worse, tonight looked like she was going to be taking work home with her, or else that’d be a cut to her pay.

The toned woman’s flats landed in tepid, grime-infused water, only serving to increase her frustration. A tempered groan escaped her as she shut the car door.

And still… her son Micah. The young man was more than a genius; he was caring, consistent, and diligent. He did everything he could to make his mother happy, and even further, he knew exactly what he wanted from life, which was even better. Micah was the ideal son. A chance to celebrate his achievements was, perhaps, not a bad thing after all.

Sharon walked up to the school, stepping inside after pulling open the double doors.

Before her, the school had all the signs of a school that was specially open in the early evening. Lights on, banners up, a sign-in desk and table before her. Usually such a thing was manned by a staff member or two, yet nobody was there.

Looking around, Sharon spotted a small bench and decided, “I suppose I should just sit down. And… wait.” She stepped to the bench, turning and relaxing, letting all of her weight slowly compress as her tensed up energy released itself. The creaks of the old wood scraped out their screams as she totally loosened her taut muscles. It was a benign experience but was also enough for a euphoric smile to escape her lips. Sometimes, it was the little things in life.

“Micah!”

He sat up with a start, having always been a bit of a light sleeper. Aiden was above him, grasping his shoulders.

As Micah’s vision adjusted, he took note of his surroundings, the abnormally high ceiling, the expansive, plains-like ground.

“Where are we--””

“We’re shrunk. The machine malfunctioned and we shrunk. We’ve established this, let’s get on with it.”

Aiden stood up and started to trot away, and for a few seconds in its wake, Micah could only process what exactly he had heard, and its ramifications.

Like a needle of adrenaline had been stuck in his heart, he bolted up, not at all tired from the burst or what happened in between. “Wait, what?! SHRUNK?!” he yelled, catching up with his friend.

Aiden sighed and said, “Look, we’ve already gone through the surprise and everything, we’re here, let’s get over it. Now we just need to worry about fixing this mess.”

“We?”

Micah now realized where Aiden was walking. Far ahead of the pair, a mighty wooden pillar rose into the heavens, connecting to a canopy that cast a dark shadow on the gray floor. It was the table. At the table leg’s base, a group of about half a dozen students and Ms. Wraith stood and sat huddled, tense, and twitchy. They saw Micah and Aiden arriving and collectively breathed a sigh of relief. “We’re saved!” one of them shouted.

Micah felt a bead of sweat form.

Mrs. Wraith, whose face was evidently stressed and streaked with some sort of biological liquid, rose and approached Micah before anyone else. “Glad to see you’re alright. Now, how are we going to get out of here?”

No chastisement? No getting yelled at for creating a device on school grounds that needed a peanut-sized pebble of pure plutonium? Not even a disapproving glare?

It seemed off. 

Regardless, Micah had to think for a moment. The device malfunctioned from the fall, releasing a reverse polarity charge that not only caused expansion between atoms to occur in reverse, but also did so at an accelerated rate. Hence, their new size. All they needed to do for the device to work was reverse the reversed polarity and ideally trigger a complete undoing of everything that had just occurred.

Plan in mind, Micah explained it to Ms. Wraith, who now forced a smile. “Good… idea, Micah. Now, how do we go about doing that?”

“Well, we’d first need to find the box.”

“Found it!” 

One of the other students -- a girl named Iasmin, if Micah could remember correctly -- pointed out the box on the ground. It was about a minute’s walk from their current location, though it was a bit hard to make out from their location the orientation of the box.

“Alright then,” Micah said anyway, ready to lead his troupe into battle. “Follow me!”

-----

“What the fuck?!”

Jodie had only stopped to relax on the bench for a moment before making her way to cheer practice when her boyfriend Benson sat down next to her to chat. It wasn’t, strictly speaking, something they did often. Not on this precise bench, anyway. However, it was by all rights a mundane thing for any couple to do.

Of course, this changed when the world around the couple began to rapidly expand in size over the course of a few moments, landing the two on opposite ends of the wooden bench and the equivalent of hundreds of feet away from one another at their rice-grain-like sizes.

“BENNY!” Jodie called, distraught and horrified as she heard the doors open and slam shut, followed by an ominous clacking of heels that felt ominously slow.

Benny, from across the bench, was standing up and waving, inaudible.

Jodie, however, could see the gargantuan figure strolling up into the school, appearing rather confused at its emptiness. Shrugging, the colossal woman strutted to the bench.

“BEN! LOOK OUT!”

The shadow of an asteroid-sized, eclipsing backside enveloped in a gray skirt fell over them.

“BEN! LOO--”

Jodie could not finish her sentence before she was smothered completely by the woman as she sat down.

Struggling against the fabric backed by flesh, Jodie could only seem to crawl through a thick mesh on one side and hard wood on the other, maybe hoping to slide out from the edge of her butt. Maybe.

Then the butt began to bounce and bumble.

She was beginning to squirm her ass as it relaxed into the bench. The once calm grotto Jodie had made for herself had been replaced with an ever-increasing pressure as the woman stretched from her legs to her head, the focal point of the maneuver being her rear end. Haphazardly, Jodie was ground into the seat of the bench, her bones breaking individually, her skin ripping apart as the friction against the celestial bodies she was at the whims of became too much for her. Jodie’s screams were of agony as her skull split under the weight of the enormous ass as it clenched. Even her clothes were less strong than toilet paper, easily coming apart into miniscule pieces of cloth and cotton.

Benson on the other side of the bench watched, but he did not know of the horrid fate to befall Jodie. At least, not until another stretch of the giant woman brought her posterior upwards, revealing a gooey red pile underneath.

“What the?!” he spit out, needing to stop before gagging. Deciding that it would be prudent to escape, Benson sprinted to the only place he could: the very edge of his side of the bench, where it rose into a massive wall that would be considered a normal armrest at normal size.

After a dash, the out of breath Benson waited.

And waited.

And waited.

Soon, the woman stood up once again.

A light feeling of victory, nevertheless marred by the grotesque death Benson had witnessed, coursed through Benson’s chest as he watched the woman… pace.

She was pacing. In front of the bench.

She clearly had nowhere to go at the moment. She was waiting for some sort of directive or sign.

Things were not going well for either of them, Benson reasoned. He smiled a little, then gulped as the woman turned toward the bench again.

Benson’s pulse quickened. She was coming for the bench again. And this time, she was coming to his end.

There was nowhere else to go. Nowhere except…

Benson charged to the front of the bench, stopping at its high-rise-sized edge. He looked down, hoped his understanding of physics meant this would not hurt, and stepped off, screaming all the way down.

“OW!”

The impact left a mark, but Benson did not hear any cracks. He was in pain, but more of a bruised sort of pain than a broken sort of pain. 

A glee at escaping death flowed through Benson as the woman sat down just where he had been standing seconds before. Her pantyhosed legs were like arches on either side of him, monuments to his will to survive.

“I lived! I--”

Sploch.

-----

Sharon adjusted her legs as she got comfortable on the bench, letting one flat rest on the ground as the other one curled itself over her thigh in a relaxed motion. Pulling out her phone, she drafted a text to Micah.

“I am here. Where am I supposed to go :))“

Sharon cringed at the emoticon, hoping she was using it right, before putting the phone back in her pocket. Then she stood up once again, no longer wishing to just fill time. Sharon started to walk to the table in front of her, slipping a bit and nearly losing her balance. Stopping to see what could’ve caused it, Sharon looked down and noticed a small streak of read coming from beneath her shoe.

“What the…”

It was a weird sight, though Sharon ultimately shrugged and walked to the table.

“Let’s see…” Sharon said, pulling out the list of students. 

“Ah, room 207!” 

And with her destination in mind, Sharon started off.

“There appears to be… a problem,” one of the students called out.

Micah noticed too. It was obvious, after all; he noticed halfway through their trek: the box was face down. The controls were stuck under a colossal cube that none of them could even budge together, let alone overturn.

“Yeah… looks like it.”

“Wh-what are we going to do?! I am not going to be small forever! I can’t take it!” one of the meeker boys, Randy, began to rant. “What if the whole world shrunk?! And we all have to ride rats and make weapons out of needles?! And we’d scour the land for more survivors but in reality, we’d only traveled, like, three blocks?!”

Micah peered at him, recognizing him as the one who’d initially tampered with the box. Quite the change in attitude from his gung-ho demeanor that got them into this mess. Nevertheless, he assuaged Randy’s fears.

“That’s not possible. Even if the whole payload discharged, the shockwave would only have a radius of maybe…” Micah thought for a moment. “About a fourth a kilometer. Chances are only people inside the school would be affected.”

“Really? Well, we can probably just wait for someone to come pick us up tomorrow if need be. Then figure out the size problem with the box,” another girl threw out.

“Assuming they see us,” Aidan posited.

It was a possibility that was uncomfortable to think about, the idea of one of their fellow human beings not taking notice of the group, and somehow leading to their demise through actions as innocuous as walking or even sitting down.”

“Isn’t today Friday?” Mrs. Wraith asked.

Somehow the negative air that fell over the group was even worse, as the inevitability of their needing to survive amongst possible pests and one another for over forty-eight hours with no food was a nightmarish proposition.

Suddenly, Micah’s pocket vibrated.

“Hey, buddy, I think you’re getting a call,” Aidan said, picking up the sound of the tone.

“What the heck?” one of the students said. “We all tried our phones, and they didn’t work.”

Micah could only ignore him as he smiled ear-to-ear, eagerly digging out his phone from the pocket. “Well, you all can’t even begin to fathom what I’ve done with this thing.”

Micah turned the phone on, and he could see it was a text from Mom.

Mom.

She was here. In the school!

She could save them!

Quickly relaying the missive to the group resulted in a cavalcade of reactions. Most of them began to crowd around Micah, nearly piling over the genius, trying to glimpse the phone screen’s bright text.

“‘I am here. Where am I supposed to go, colon, close parenthesis, close parenthesis’,” someone read out loud.

“I think it’s pronounced smiley smiley face, actually.”

“No, it’s really the double smile.”

“Huh, that’s a pretty good compromise. Okay, so she said ‘Where am I supposed to go, double smile.’”

“Eh, maybe it should be ‘double smiley face’,” someone disputed.

“He said colon? I could’ve sworn it was semicolon.”

“A semicolon would be smiley winky face.”

“But what about the double--”

“Can you all please shut UP?!” Ms. Wraith shrieked. Logically, it didn’t go farther than a dozen or so real-life inches, but to the miniscule party it felt a whole lot louder. Dispersing the crowd, Ms. Wraith pushed in to reach Micah. As the other teens dispersed, she knelt to Micah’s level, nearly hissing, “You have a signal down here?”

“Y-yeah.”

“Can you use it to call for help?”

“I mean, I could try. The phone can connect to towers 50 times the usual distance. It’s just that… we shrunk much smaller than 50 times. We’re, like, rice-sized. Don’t expect too much.”

“I expect that you’re doing everything in your power to get us out of this mess.”

Micah only looked down at his phone, thinking about the message to compose, one which he may not have the chance to send again if an unexpected lapse in technology occurs at a size so much closer to the actual sizes of the electrons the phone uses to perform its functions. It’s like playing golf with boulders.

After the deliberation, he settled on “HELP MOM. WE’RE SHRUNK. COME TO THE LIBRARY; WE’LL BE ON THE GROUND. PLEASE. THIS IS NOT A JOKE.”

Micah flashed the phone in front of Ms. Wraith, who evaluated it. “Hmm, grammatically, it’s rather accurate. Flow could use work, but beggars shan’t be choosers.”

Taking that as approval, Micah hit the “Send” button.

Sending.

Sending.

Sending.

Sending.

“What’s going on? What’s it waiting for?”

“I… don’t know. I’m picking up a signal, but it’s taking a long time to send out.”

“Well, when do you think that’ll be?”

Micah could only shrug as he took note of his phone’s battery. 17 percent. If this phone died before the message was out, they would be forced to wait out the weekend on the dusty ground to fend off the rats and the roaches. Not ideal.

“I think… that one of us should go out into the school to look for someone.”

-----

The hallway had gone from a simple corridor to a sprawling, terrestrial landscape of celestial scale. Mr. Jean, the school’s janitor, had just finished locking the garbage can in the closet when a bizarre sensation came over him, and he was now as small as a… convenient, easy-to-understand small object for size comparisons. Like, say, a grain of rice for instance. Yeah, that could work.

Mr. Jean could not ruminate on the thought, because now he could feel every step shake his bone structure and rattle his teeth. Looking out onto the beyond of the hallway, he could just barely see… a silhouette. At this size, even large things appear blurry when viewed from far away enough (or perhaps he just needed glasses). Each new footstep was another tremor through the linoleum floor, bouncing him and bouncing him again, until it came into his field of vision.

A woman.

A titan-sized woman.

Mr. Jean ran out, waving as hard as he could, screaming, “HELP! HELP! I’M DOWN HERE!”

The woman was slowing down, and for a moment, Mr. Jean was beginning to think this woman would be his salvation. Her boat-sized flats appear to have stopped just in front of him. Now all he had to do was wait for her to reach down and pick him up.

Then she bypassed him, instead heading directly to the next door down.

“Yep, looks like 207.”

KNOCK, KNOCK, KNOCK.

Each powerful blast reverberated from the wood and into the floor, jarring the man as he looked at the woman stare disapprovingly at the door, before reaching for the doorknob and opening it herself. A gust of wind from the displaced air knocked Mr. Jean off balance, but he was up and at ‘em in moments, only making it a few inches before the door slammed back shut nearly busting his eardrums.

“No, no, no, NO!” Mr. Jean lamented, running after the door and, upon finally reaching it, pounding on the strong wood with his fists before sinking to the ground, lamenting as he now punched the linoleum ground.

Getting his frustrations out, Mr. Jean began to stand back up to assess the situation. “Okay, so… it might take me a long time to get there, but there’s a phone in the counselor’s office. If I can--”

The door opened.

Rather, the door was knocked aside by an inconceivable force at Mr. Jean’s current size, blowing him all the way up into the air. This jarring, terrifying predicament came to an abrupt halt when he landed in the slightly-too-small entrance into a sort of dark tunnel, opening up from a larger structure that overlooked a metal basin.

As Mr. Jean tried to get his bearings, he heard the woman say, “Jesus, I am parched.”

Then she walked toward him once again. The approaching titan began to reach unfathomable proportions as she became easier to discern, with the fabric of her office clothing like colossal systems of ropes, with her hair like its own drapery of ropes, arms like… giant ropes. What is it about ropes, he wondered.

Again, it was no time to dawdle, as she crouched down and was now closer than she had ever been to Mr. Jean. The beautiful woman’s face showed slight aging, and at this size each and every nook, cranny, mole, and imperfection on her face was like a star in a pink, morning sky.

“I’M RIGHT HERE!” Mr. Jean yelled once more as the woman parted her delicate lips from one another, approaching Mr. Jean until they were like a wormhole, or an eclipse, blotting out the world above him as it became only one black, humid maw.

In that moment, Mr. Jean realized where he was.

The telltale sound of water rushing through plumbing hit Mr. Jean’s ears. He knew that sound well, but never knew how imminently terrifying such a thing could be until the moment before he was catapulted on a geyser of cold, rushing water into an eager, awaiting mouth. He landed in a tsunami that swirled and torrented and was soon replaced by more water as the woman gulped. Mr. Jean tried to exercise the little control he had over his fate as he reached for anything in the humid, cold, warm, murky, potent-smelling, slippery darkness. Was that a tooth? A potential grip betrayed no handholds, making him hypothesize it to be a cheek (if you could call the crazed and manic screams, gasps, and flails of a doomed man hypothesis). He was slammed into teeth again and again, grateful for the first, last, and only time in his life that the act of drinking did not require one to chew.

Then, it came tumbling down. Or rather, he did. The biological grotto Mr. Jean had found himself within began to incline, the movable space began to decrease as the air was expelled and the tongue began to fill the mouth. The last trickles of water began to trickle down the newly created ramp, and they sent Mr. Jean down with it in a picture not unlike the whale scene from Finding Nemo, except far more claustrophobic, and certain not to have a happy ending.

Gulp!

A final bulge traveled down her esophagus, and Sharon wiped her mouth with her sleeve, satisfied. “Ahhh.” 

And then she walked back into the classroom to wait, with only one thought:

It was so weird that nobody else was inside.

“What the? Why me?!” Micah exclaimed, indignant as most of his cadre faced him with their arms crossed.

"Perhaps because you're the reason we're in this mess?" Ms. Wraith threw out.

"No, I'm not! If anybody should be blamed, it's him!" Micah pointed a thin finger at Randy, who shrugged in response.

"What can I say?" Randy said. "When I see something glowing, I've gots to touch it. It's in my genes."

"Well Randy didn't set up a mad science experiment in the library backrooms," Iasmin countered, to which Micah sighed. 

"It's the backrooms! Nobody goes in here! You think I'd do something this crazy at my house?"

"Firstly, yes. Secondly, it was your idea to send someone out anyway!"

"Yeah, someone expendable! But not me.”

Ms. Wraith held up a hand, “Now, now, now. Nobody’s expendable.” She then leaned in next to Micah’s ear and whispered, “But as long as the machine is upturned, you are technically expendable. Besides --” she gestured to his phone in his hand, “Maybe you would get a better signal out there rather than here. No?”

It had the venom of a threat. Micah’s eyes flared as Ms. Wraith peered at him through his glasses.

A heat welled up in Micah’s chest as his classmates around him, oblivious to the insinuation, nodded and spoke in agreement as public opinion swayed against him. Quelling his anger, Micah took a deep breath as he thought for a long moment. He spoke, finally, and said:

“Okay, I’ll go. But I’m taking Aiden with me.”

Aiden, who had been in the back eating a pack of amoeba-sized Skittles, gasped out loud before coughing up the candy. “What the, why me?!”

“There’s no way I’m going alone. Plus, we technically both broke the rules. Sorry, buddy, but we’re doing this together.”

The rest of the students once again murmured in agreement as Aiden exclaimed, “Bro, why would you throw me under the bus like that?! That’s so--”

Micah darted to Aiden, cupping Aiden’s mouth with his hands as he grabbed him and began pulling him away from the group, announcing, “Anyway, my phone’s going to die any moment now, so we’d best be on our way.”

Continuing to cover his friend’s mouth, Micah led Aiden further away from the group and toward the monolithic gateway that was the open door to the south of the room, leading into the library proper. Once they had sufficiently achieved enough distance from the group, Micah finally removed his hand from Aiden’s mouth, who immediately said “-- uncool of you, man!”

Micah looked at Aiden, cocking his head in confusion, before brushing it off. Micah said, “Look, I’m trying to save you.”

Aiden stared at Micah, eyes widening, and he said, “Save me? But what about the rest of them?”

Beginning to stutter, Micah said, “I-I’m trying to save them too! But I need your help. We need to find my mom.”

“Well, where do you think she is?”

Pulling out his phone, Micah looked at the message. It was still sending.

“I don’t know. But I know where she’s going to be. We’re going to have to get some height.”

-----

After quenching her thirst, Sharon entered the classroom. It was sparse, with the occasional motivational poster hanging on the wall. A gopher hanging from a tree branch saying “You can do it!” elicited a chuckle, though she soon turned her attention to the empty classroom. Another sigh escaped her, and she wondered out loud, “Where is everybody? It is the 18th, isn’t it?” 

A brief check on her phone calendar showed that it indeed was the 18th. Despite this, she had seen nary a soul, despite the lights being on and the smell of food wafting from the cafeteria.

Frustration mounting, Sharon strutted to an empty desk, low heel on her flats clacking on the hard floor, and plummeted into it, sinking back to get as comfortable on the hard plastic seat as she could.

Of course, unbeknownst to her, another such student awaiting her evaluation along with her mother had been sitting in the seat prior to the inciting shockwave. As her mother stood over her, berating the younger girl for failing chemistry, the both of them were suddenly reduced to the size of beetles. 

The abrupt transition caused the stressed young girl to become nauseous as she stood up on the concave, yellow, plastic shell of a chair to get her bearings. “M-mom?!” she called out. “Where’d you go?!”

For a moment, there was no response. Then, “SWEETIE?!”

Looking up, the daughter could see her mother’s face peering out over her from the desktop. “MOM!” Joy filled the young girl’s heart for the first time in a while at seeing her mother’s face, though this soon turned to revulsion as she turned away and gagged, vomiting on the plastic before turning back to her mother. “Help me!”

The mom nodded. “Stay calm,” she called out. “I’ll get down there!” 

As those words left her mouth, it occurred to the mom that she did not know how she was getting down there.

She stood up on the wooden desktop and began to walk around the outskirts of the table, peering down at each drop that seemed to be hundreds of feet tall wherever she looked. She knew that once a height’s fall exceeded the person’s height, that was the point it started to become dangerous. 

Then she realized… this wasn’t a hundred-foot drop. It was a two-foot drop!

She dashed back to the edge of the desk to her daughter. “Sweetie! You need to jump off!”

“What?! Why?!”

“You’re going to make it, just trust me!”

Then the door opened. A woman appeared to step through. The pair turned and saw her mountainous visage as she stepped directly toward the desk they were seated in.

“Look, you need to jump off, now!” 

“But mom! It’s too high!”

It was quite the fall, and it was rather cruel to subject her daughter to something like this with no proof. So, she decided to give her some proof.

Taking a running start, the mother charged to the right side of the desk, the opposite end of the door as the woman stood in the doorway, surveying what appeared to be an empty room, and wondering why that was the case.

She leaped off.

The fall was a harrowing experience, wind blowing her hair and clothes until she abruptly and painfully stopped on the linoleum floor, now far below her daughter. Despite this… she stood up and dusted herself off.

“See? You’re like an ant!” she said as she saw her daughter step to the edge of the chair, agape. “You’ll be okay!”

Then the woman in the doorway began to walk toward them.

“Listen, you need to move now!”

“But what if I get hurt?!”

“You won’t!”

The footsteps got louder and louder. 

“I-I-I just… I just can’t!”

“NO!”

Then just as the colossal figure appeared about to sit down, she paused for a moment in the air. “Damn, I’m thirsty,” she said, and she turned back to walk. As she was walking, the younger daughter collapsed onto her knees, head in hands. The door behind her opened and then shut.

“Okay, okay! Alright, it’s fine!” her mother said. “Now, go ahead and stand up!” she called up to her daughter, who was now quivering in place.

“It’ll be okay!” she coo’d up, continuing, “I’m fine!”

“B-but we’re small! How’d we get here?! What’re we going to do?”

The door opened once again. 

“Okay, look,” the mother started, desperation seeping into her voice. “I don’t know what we’re going to do, but you need to jump down, now.”

“I-I-I--”

“Just fucking do it!”

The outburst shocked the girl, who took a few steps back, out of sight of her mother from beneath the edge. Despite this, she could see clearly the giant woman approaching, turning to sit down.

“A-are you doing it?!” she yelled out as the asteroid of a derriere overshadowed the seat. “Where are you?!”

Then there she was, having taken a running start to hop off the edge of the platform, but had tripped on the rough, slanting plastic near the edge, only her hand poking out over. She exclaimed in shock as the shadow engulfed her further, then yelled out, “I tr--”

SLAM!

The derriere descended with a frustrated ferocity, ample enough to engulf the entirety of the seat’s surface space. The outstretched arm morphed into a multitude of expressions of its own, reaching out with desperation from beneath the massive mound of humanity, curling and twitching its fingers, turning into a fist and shaking around, and -- the mother thought -- waving down at her goodbye. This was all the prelude to it gradually losing this life and becoming limp, letting itself hang down over the edge of the seat, droplets of blood dripping down.

“NOOO!” the mother cried. Desperation of her own becoming the operative factor, she hopped on the silver leg of the chair, shimmying her way upwards, seldom ever losing any progress back down. Despite this determination, it still took her several minutes before reaching the front right corner of the chair. Her daughter was on the back right, and there was no area on the seat not covered by a thigh.

Gulping, the mother gripped the taut nylons, and she used them to climb to the side, desperately hoping, praying that her daughter may still be alive. The new shimmy was itself tough, as her hand and footholds were as malleable as human muscle and fat, though at her size it was undoubtedly easier to grab onto the bound hooks and cords of the socks than it would have been with equivalent material at normal size.

She got closer and closer, now approaching the interior of the skirt. There was just enough light to see her… daughter’s arm… on the inside, but it was enough. She continued her sideways climb, a burning desire to check for herself. She had to know.

Then, something unexpected happened. The giant woman’s leg shifted from the seat of the chair to beside it.

What was once a simple if arduous sideways climb just completely changed dimension in the span of a second. Now the former mom was hanging from the side of thighs with the girth of skyscrapers, dangling from side to side as the woman swayed. The jarring transition was just too much, and her fingers gave out, sending her plummeting downward into…

A soft space. A dark soft space. A… frankly, slightly ripe-smelling soft space. A slanted soft space. Looking above, the mother could see a colossal mass in the light of day that continued above her into the terminus of this room, ending a few dozen or so feet in the direction of the darkness.

She was in her shoe. The woman was adjusting her shoe. And that could only mean one thing.

The mom quickly crawled up the small incline that was the shoe’s heel, but the heel of the foot was far quicker. It barricaded the mother in at first, but then it kept. On. Coming. It was the closest feeling to being buried alive she could ever imagine, unable to even push against the terrible, encased foot. Even before losing all mobility, she tried pounding on the limb with all her might, screaming and shouting against it, horrified and terrified at what was to become of her.

Then… nothing. The pressure stopped. She was alive, if only because there just was not enough pressure to break her while the shoe’d foot was dangling in the air.

Then one final idea crossed the woman’s mind. She could try to squirm into the toe section. It would be hard, but it was possibly the only place she would have a chance at surviving. 

Well, with one push, she propelled herself in this steamy grave about 3 inches. In her scale, rather than the giantess’s. But she continued. And continued. She grabbed onto the insole, scraping her body, ripping her clothes, and looking more and more like shit, but she kept on getting through. The foot was widening as she continued, telling her this was the right direction in the darkness of Tartarus.

Then, she finally made it. She passed beneath the toes of the foot, now within the toe of the shoe. There was space. Space! She could breathe again! It still smelled like a stinky foot, but it wasn’t all just a foot!

Letting herself rest on one of the giant toes, she caught her breath. She would have to get used to this for a while if she wanted to survive.

“Is… this… enough… height?!” Aiden grunted out, pants between each breath. The crevices and ridges embedded into the wood of the desk were ample enough to climb, but the work of the ascent was a far greater toll than either of the pair were used to. Ironically, Micah had recently earned the distinction of the more athletic of the two; a healthy mind can only exist in a healthy body, after all, and so he began to jog with frequency.

Jogging, while better than nothing, was not an exceptionally useful skill to translate to rock-wall climbing, especially without ropes. Aiden had grabbed the phone and been the first to attempt to scale the leg of the desk, but Micah was slowly and surely catching up to them. The progress was negligible, though it still was a bit annoying to Aiden that he couldn’t beat Micah in the one area Aiden felt he would have an advantage; in the end, they were both geeks.

“It should be enough! I hope,” Micah finished under his breath, a strained action. The bookshelves were a far more scalable surface, but it would be far harder to establish contact compared to the much more observable desk. Either way, there was no way to check now. Last Micah checked, the phone was already on 6%, and even on airplane mode it was dwindling too fast for his liking.

“I-I-I’m slipping!”

Micah’s head turned upward to see the two legs and arm of his friend dangling from their crevice.

“Aid!” Micah shouted, perching himself and reaching a hand up above as Aiden’s fingers slowly slipped from their space, ultimately losing purchase and sending the teen plummeting what seemed like seven stories below.

“No!” Micah yelled, an adrenaline-boosted maneuver allowing him to grasp onto Aiden’s flailing hand in the half-second he had before Aiden passed by, but a maneuver that only resulted in Aiden exchanging the phone with Micah, who could only look down in horror as he watched Aiden tumble downward in somersaults, until finally…

Thud.

Silence.

Silence.

Then:

“I’m okay!”

Aiden allowed himself to be grateful that the massive drop was, in fact, closer to two or three feet, at least before his mind went to pondering the other physics properties that had now gone topsy-turvy since they had been shrunk.

“Good to hear!” Micah shouted. Then he looked at the phone in his hand. 4 percent.

Gripping it, used his single dangling hand to type a new message into the message box.

-----

Sharon finished readjusting her flat before placing her feet once again on the floor. She scuffed them about, finding joy in something as trivial as the scraping sound the soles made against the linoleum to ease her boredom. 

Dooo Weee Dooooooooo.

A text?

Sharon pulled her phone from her pocket, a smile and frown creeping at once on her face as she saw it was a set of messages from Micah. She knew this before checking the phone, of course; the ringtone was the Doctor Who theme, something Sharon did herself to know when her son was texting her, and a cute gag to one of her favorite old TV shows.

As the texts scrolled across the screen, her eyes widened.

HELP MOM. WE’RE SHRUNK. COME TO THE LIBRARY; WE’LL BE ON THE GROUND. PLEASE. THIS IS NOT A JOKE.

Then:

thank god, I got away. MOM, you need to find me on a desk! look ON the desk! it’s the only way! I don't have time to explain; my battery is

What the? Shrunk? The messages came so rapidly in succession; were they sent at the same time? Or was there a delay in being able to get a signal? That could explain why they were so different in tone. Was it even Micah who was texting?

Then, as Sharon scanned and rescanned the messages, she chuckled. It was definitely Micah, alright.

The second message was what gave it away. It was written exactly like someone trying to send something out quickly, but still ensuring proper punctuation and semicolon usage was being adhered to. The battery going out was a cheeky joke, but emblematic of a problem he has with not charging his phone as often as he should. All that said, it was clear that whatever he wanted, it was going to be in the library, and was most likely only to be tangentially related to anything having to do with school.

Welp… Sharon pocketed her phone. It was time to find out where the rest of the school had gone. She stood up and began to walk briskly through the room, out the door, to the library. It was only a hop and a staircase away after all.

It was a simple plan.

Micah ran it through in his head, one last time. The plan was simple.

He was going to make contact with his mom. Then… he faltered at what would happen with that aspect of the scheme.

He glanced back at his dead phone. He saw Aiden, waiting patiently on the ground, quite pooped after the pair’s arduous journey upwards that had culminated in only one of them reaching the top of the desk. Far out, past the solid hardwood plains of the writing surface, he could catch a glimpse of the dust-like students, all collected about the big black box as though it were an item of religious significance.

Micah shuddered. He ran the numbers in his head once again, and assured himself internally. “Yeah, this should work.” 

He paused in his thinking. A chill overcame him. Perhaps it was draft of the cold room. Then he repeated to himself, a near indiscernible shudder in his own voice. “This should work.”

The clacking of the tough-bottomed flats of Sharon’s shoes began to reverberate outside the library, before the door opened. Micah stood up, his heart experiencing an unparalleled euphoria as he saw the deific face of his mother survey the room with confusion. Just the sight of someone familiar was enough for him, and he waved his arms, yelling out, “Mom! MOOOOM!”

The miniscule vocal cords of his couldn't carry much of a soundwave, however, and Ms. Kingsley simple spoke to herself in a low tone, “What on earth was that boy going on about? Shrunk?”

She examined the text again. Fortunately, Micah was nothing if not clear and succinct with his texts. It indeed read that he had, somehow, been shrunk. Whether it was some sort of inside joke or prank to play on his poor, unsuspecting, only two standard deviations past the middle of the bell curve IQ… mother… she did not know. So she closed the door behind her, the shockwave sending Micah off balance a bit with the gust of wind accompanying it, and stepped inside.

“Hello? Is anyone here?”

Micah yelled back in response, “Yes, please! I’m here! Mom, look at me!”

And to no avail.

The woman walked around, taking a full lap about the library, looking for any sign of humanity. Her footsteps kicked up a light storm of dust everywhere they went, and as Micah saw this, he could only imagine what the rest of the class was going through right now. And Aiden… Aiden.

Micah ran to the side of the desk and looked out underneath, searching for his friend. Thankfully, he caught a glimpse of him. “Aiden!” he yelled.

Aiden gave a thumbs up. 

“Aiden, can you get up here?! You need to try again!”

“Oh… uh, okay!” It was an easy enough job of convincing his friend he probably wanted to be on the desk rather than beside it. And yet, it was at that moment that Sharon was finishing her lap around the library, hands on her hips, getting increasingly more frustrated, both at the lack of communication, the obtuse antics of her son, and -- come to think of it -- a nagging feeling of annoyance in her shoe. Sharon didn’t know if it was a pebble, a crumb, or something. But whatever it was, it had been a nuisance for long enough.

Reaching down, Sharon removed her stockinged foot from the flat, tossing it aside. In the interest of an even stride, she took the other one off, placing both feet on the cold floor, flexing her toes. She would deal with the shoes later, but for now, she needed to find her son. And a thought was occurring to her.

What’d that text say again?

Sharon took her phone out again and reread the message: “‘look on the desk’?” she said out loud. With a glance at the nearest desk to her, she finished her lap.

Micah saw her arrival, accompanied by her sudden realization, and he felt a moment of triump. But then, his mathematically-inclined brain could see the writing on the wall. By which, of course, he meant the angle of Sharon’s trajectory to the desk, which brought her on a direct collision course with…

“AIDEN--”

SPLORCH.

It was quick. This giantess was incomprehensibly quick. How on earth could something so big move so fast?! He didn’t even have time to scream; he hadn’t reached the foot of the desk leg yet. And now, right where Aiden had once been walking on the ground, the manicured, nylon-blanketed, gargantuan nails of Micah’s mom had replaced him.

Micah’s blood ran cold. But there was no time for that. It… it would be fine. It would all be fine.

Sharon reached the desk and looked at it, having difficulty making out precisely what was on it. Micah saw the face get closer, and his heart began to pound as his mom’s face scanned the desk, now literal inches (big people inches) away from him, and yet she still appeared to be having trouble pinpointing his location. Waving his hands once again, Micah yelled out, “MOM! MOM! I’M HERE! I’M WRITE HERE!”

That seemed to do the trick. Sharon’s eyes darted to where the sound had come from, quickly reaching Micah’s position. Her eyes widened, and she realized there, on the desk, waving his hands around just like any other person… there was her fourteen-year-old son.

“What… the… hell?! Micah, baby?! Is that you?!”

Micah nodded, and Sharon reached her hand out, placing it palm-side up upon the desk face. Her fingers were roughly the size of Micah’s height themselves, so he had trouble pulling himself up upon their girth. He fell down into the divot of her palm,  and collected himself as Sharon gentle raised her hand up to her face.

“Oh my goodness… you’re the size of, of, of, an ant!” 

Micah nodded. “Yeah, mom. I… I… well… I messed up. I…” Tears began to leak from his eyes as his mother looked down at him, endless, insurmountable worry upon her gentle face. He thought about Aiden, about the rest of the students, lost and alone, about the countless other kids in the building that might’ve been caught in the crossfire, and he just began to unravel.

“I-I-I… I was just trying to…”

“Shhh… it’s okay baby… I’m here…” Sharon coo’d, an index finger from her other hand approaching the pit within which Micah stood, and this finger was what Micah had to hold onto in order to retain any semblance of togetherness.  He knelt down and hugged the fingertip, feeling the love and warmth of his mother embracing him, totally and utterly, from just her little finger.

Micah sniffed. And he collected himself. “Okay, okay, I’m fine.” A bit of snot dribbled down his nose, which he quickly wiped away. He turned back to his mother, face a bright red, and Sharon raised her hand closer to her face so she could hear.

“Okay, thanks Mom. Now, I need you to do something. For me. It’s the only way to get us back to normal.”

His mom nodded. 

“I need you to walk over there. And grab that box on the ground.”

“I’m on it, sweety!” Sharon tip-toed to the other end of the library, maneuvering between the desks until she finally reached the black box. Looking down at it, she could see a few dozen small ant-like creatures scurrying about. This piqued Sharon’s curiosity, but not before Micah issued another request. One that would leave the mother quite confused:

“Now, before you pick it up… Do you see those ants on the ground near it? I need you to crush them. For me.”

“Uh, I’m sorry? You said, ‘crush them’?”

“Look, Mom, I need them to be crushed for this to work. Those… ants.”

Meanwhile, the students on the ground, meandering around and near the box had suddenly perked up as the booming voice of the giantess that nearly stepped on the group during her first lap around the room said something that most certainly did not inspire confidence.

“Hol’ up, hol’ up, what?! What’d she say?” yelled Ryan, who beseeched Ms. Wraith with fear in his eyes. “Did she just say ‘crush us’?” 

Iasmin interjected, “No, wait, what? Huh? Why would she say that? Ms. Wraith, why would she say that?!”

Ms. Wraith had no clue as Sharon had one foot atop the other in an act of benign confusion. She was transfixed by those feet, not out of any affinity or fondness for women’s feet, but just out of fear and consternation once again of the power they wielded. She thought of Micah, and began to ponder, just what exactly was that boy trying to do?

The nylon’d feet of Sharon Kingsley stood still perhaps a foot away from the group, and by extension the device. They were small, yes, but they should still be visible from the size of someone like Sharon. Whether they would be identified as humans was a different matter entirely. Sharon inquired further in confusion, and Micah, still struggling to justify precisely why he wanted this done, began to stammer, thus making his miniscule voice even more difficult to hear for the titaness: “Ah, uh, well, the thing it, it, like, the machine, it won’t, like, work if there are any living things nearby. S-small living things. Like, ah, bugs. So, you’ll have to crush them.”

“But aren’t you a small living thing?”

Micah stammered once again, “Shoot, well, ah, yeah, but I’m close enough to you that you should be able to shield me from any ill effects.”

“Ah…” said Ms. Kingsley, still fairly unsure of the whole ordeal. “Well, I still don’t know… didn’t you say the rest of your class was shrunken? We would need to make sure they’re safe.”

“Oh, don’t worry about them, they shrunk in a different room. They should be fine.”

 Ms. Kingsley rubbed her chin and put her empty hand on her hip. Then, with expert precision and care, she raised the hand within which Micah stood up to her shoulder, depositing him upon her blazer.

“Okay… hold on tight, honey. Grab my hair if you need to.”

And she raised her right foot.

As panic and fear spread through the ranks of the children, Ms. Wraith could recognize the acquiescing expression in the eyes of the god-like woman who stood above them. She could see them as human. She had to be able to identify these people as human, couldn’t she? She just had to!

But the lifting of one foot in the group’s direction was not the most inspiring act of confidence. As a matter of fact, this foot raising up, eclipsing the small group of students was enough to cease any conversation or speculation. Ms. Wraith knew not whether Sharon herself was aware, but every one of them could see there, plastered on the soul of the shin sock, was a splotch of red. Guts, blood, and skin, smeared and distorted to the point of simply being meat, unidentifiable. It was most likely an accident, but they still knew that they were face to face with one who had managed to take a life and was now intending to do so again.

Ms. Wraith took executive command.

“EVERYONE, RUN!”

And then they ran out, in all different directions.

Ms. Wraith saw the group, many of whom were her own students, all split up, some of them trying to stay with their cliques. The largest such group of cheerleaders had managed to link up through nonverbal communication and were now dashing their way across the linoleum floor. Unfortunately for them, Sharon was quite the efficient giantess, and she chose to target first the most populous group of “ants”. Her foot came down, and Ms. Wraith’s heart leapt into her throat as she saw her own pupils, those she had been trusted to train and nurture and cultivate, hold their hands up in fear as the apocalyptically huge ceiling of flesh and fabric descended upon them, reducing the group to nothing but dead cells and bits of bone and blood. Once Sharon raised her foot from the sight of her first kill(s), a thin strand of the viscera connected to the flesh before snapping. It was no longer possible to even differentiate between the four girls any longer; they had become one in their demise. On the bright side, it was easier to differentiate between their remains and the remains of the poor victim that had already peppered Sharon’s sole.

“Oh, oh!” Ms. Wraith could only croak, holding her hand to her mouth and collapsing herself as she witnessed the grisly sight. But Sharon had no intention of allowing these targets a period of rest; the longer she waited, the longer they would have to get away!

She targeted another nearby student, Ryan. The kid’s general silence in class was able to mask the fact that he was indeed quite the runner, and he had managed to cover a significant amount of distance compared to his peers. In most situations, his speed would be to his advantage. In this one, however, sufficiently distancing himself from the group had marked him as a target, and he needed to be removed from the equation before he could escape. And so, Sharon readied the aim of her foot once again, unloading and allowing the full weight of so many hundreds of thousands of tons of pure mature woman descend upon the miniscule young man. He splattered audibly, a horrifying noise which was itself preceded by a horrifying scream.

As this occurred, one of the runners, Mark, who was not quite as fast as Ryan but still pretty quick had been heading in a similar direction to the young Ryan. Upon seeing his companion get crushed, however, he decided to shift his course. Mark huffed, exerting himself with as much effort as he could muster, but was spotted anyway. Not wishing to lift her foot up from the ground for such a close target, Sharon instead slid her foot on the tile in Mark’s direction. This action created an audible squelching sound as the blood and guts created a sensation of squishy friction with the floor. Upon reaching Mark, still running his heart out, Sharon raised her big toe, dropping the lone, fat digit upon the young teen.

If being crushed by her foot proper was akin to having a building dropped upon you, then being crushed by the toe was a bit like having a two-car garage fall on top of you. In this case, however, the toe did not vaporize him instantly, instead breaking most of his bones and restricting his movement, while also giving Mark an up-close and personal interview with the scent of the feet of a woman who had been hard at work all day. The bulbous appendage, wreathed in the black nylon like a shroud, had landed on Mark, sending him to the ground face-up and covering him mostly completely, though the elastic, rubbery nature of the woman’s skin meant that he was not completely in a vacuum. As a matter of fact, he was close enough to the edge of the toe that Ms. Wraith could even see his hair peeking out.

This did not last, of course. With just a little bit of effort, the screaming, crying, muffled Mark’s body began to give, and after only a moment his body collapsed in on itself, and blood shot from beneath the toe like a high-pressure water balloon.

Not content to let only her right foot have all the fun, Sharon raised her left foot, easily dispatching of several stragglers who had attempted to take refuge beneath the nearby desk. With only one swipe of her foot, the group of students were splattered against Sharon’s heel. 

Iasmin, one of the last students alive, saw this. She had attempted early on to run in the opposite direction of Sharon’s movement, at first attempting a similar plan to the students of taking refuge beneath the desk. However, in the execution of this plan, she had an even better idea: she would sidle up directly against the leg of one of these desks. It was a much harder-to-spot location than simply being out on the open against the linoleum floor. 

So, she split up, lagged behind, and quickly darted to the nearest desk leg, putting her back directly against it.

The maneuver took a lot out of her, and as Iasmin leaned forward to catch her breath, she felt the familiar boom reverberate through the floor accompanied by screams. Iasmin felt a yelp well up as she just barely saw from the corner of her eye the big black foot descend on the group, crushing them by the heel, and rolling them outward from underneath the desk, their fleshy masses losing any and all material as they traveled until the group simply consisted of a streak on the linoleum floor.

Bile welled up in Iasmin’s mouth as she prepared to gag, feeling nothing but horror at the likelihood that it could have been her.

This would prove to be one minor mistake (minor as, ultimately, it would not have made much of a difference), as before she could regain her balance and stand up again, her doubled-over form found itself face-to-face with Sharon’s prowling toe. It mashed the young lady against the metal bar of the desk leg, folding her like a taco-shell as her spine caved in on itself, before splattering her against the cylinder. Sharon removed her toe from the desk leg’s base as she slid her foot away, once again having nothing to identify the formerly promising young woman with, with the exception of a pastel-colored strip of Iasmin’s old hijab that had been pasted by her guts and organ bits to the face of Sharon’s toe.

Up above, Micah watched the massacre with a similar, detached disgust, hoping that his own calculations had been correct. The young student cared about few things, admittedly, but he most certainly did not wish for his peers and classmates to find themselves obliterated by his mother’s feet. However, this clashed directly with one of the very few things he did care about: his grade. Micah knew that if the group grew back to their previous size and told the rest of the school about what happened, then he would certainly have his honor status revoked.

But there was another way. A way that everybody could walk away happy.

Time dilation. A combination of atomic redistribution and the melding of the fabric of space time. The machine worked; it would simply be a matter of turning a dial to reset things to the way they were. And if his mother was accurate enough and she managed to kill everybody successfully, then the reorganization would return everybody back to life, and to their normal size, retaining no memory of this freakish, hellish incident.

Hopefully.

On the other hand, anybody living would only have their atoms reorganized, and therefore keep all the memories of what happened. For Micah, this was not a problem (unless the PTSD from watching his classmates be on the receiving end of summary execution was considered a problem) but if even one person let this story get out, Micah could say bye bye to ever seeing the interior of Cambridge University. ADX Florence, maybe.

It was while he ruminated on this that he heard a worrying sound. “Whoops!”

Then the surface upon which he stood began to slant.

Micah was beginning to fall. His mom slipped, likely as a result of trying too hard to crush everything quickly and all at once on the smooth floor barefoot. As a result, while she tried to regain her balance, Micah started to slip himself, sliding down the fabric slide of his mother’s shoulder. Desperately, he remembered his mother’s advice, “Grab my hair if you need to!” and reached out to attempt to take hold of his mother’s forest of ropelike hair that fell around her head, successfully wrapping his hand around a strand before dangling helplessly from her head.

“M-M-MOM!” Micah stuttered, out, before the strain of holding onto the rope got to him, and he began to slide down, friction burning his hands. “ACH!” he yelled, letting go, and descending to the floor below.

“Micah?” cried Sharon, turning her head and trying to use her peripheral vision to glance at her shoulder. “Micah!”

Sharon got down on her knees, attempting to locate her wayward son on the floor, simultaneously smothering the last remaining running students under her kneecap in a total accident.

Micah had fallen behind the machine. Once he got his bearings and stood up, dusting himself off, he heard a sound he did not want to hear again. 

“YOU!”

Ms. Wraith, her face contorted into a mixture of fear and primal rage, had the idea of taking refuge behind the box herself. She executed this plan after the first half dozen of her pupils fell, and had been hiding, praying ever since. Now, it seems her very very specific prayerful request had been answered.

Micah backed up from his advancing teacher. She may had been a woman, but she was older, and Micah was not exactly a star athlete. Needless to say, he was quite scared of whatever she had in store for the child. 

“What the fuck did you tell her, Micah!?”

“I-I-I-I I promise, there’s a good reason for this!” said Micah, holding up his hands in a peace gesture.

“Oh yeah?” cried Ms. Wraith, grabbing the genius’s shoulders and restraining him. “What might that reason be, precisely?”

Micah looked in her eyes, reckoning his teacher’s rage, and in an act of uncharacteristic physical ability, he wrested himself from her clutches and began to sprint around the black box, back in the direction of his mother.

“GET BACK HERE!” yelled Ms. Wraith, beginning to follow the boy before the black box lifted, ascending and casting an eclipse-like shadow over the two.

“Micahhhh?!” Sharon cried out, looking underneath the machine, needing to use both hands to lift the weighty thing. There, both Ms. Wraith and Micah could see the controls, still glowing softly beneath the mechanical components. But Micah had no wishes to see the controls at the moment. All he cared about was reuniting with his mother. He ran into the shadow of the box, waving his arms, saying, “Over here! I’m here! Mom!”

Ms. Wraith began to follow him, but stopped, upon seeing the face of Sharon. She had not spotted him yet. “Micahhh?!” she repeated, still encompassing the floor beneath her in shadow.

Micah’s enthusiasm began to wane as confusion crept in. He called out gently, “M-mom?”

Then, he looked around him, and his face became the epitome of fear. 

Before Micah had the opportunity to even run, Sharon dropped the box, likely on accident, as she reasoned that her son must be somewhere else.

Micah was directly under the box.

Ms. Wraith saw the sight and felt a twinge of sadness come over her as the last of her students was obliterated, entirely on accident, by the cruel, uncaring woman above them.

But this itself would be replaced by fear, as the box’s controls, activated inadvertently by the sudden impact, began to glow. Sparks emanated from the object, and Sharon stood up to put distance between herself and the box. “What the… what the?!” she yelled as the box began to once again emit a solid glow, bright enough to fill a football field. It leaked out of the mechanical seams of the box, blinding Sharon with blue until finally a BURST of a blue shockwave, upending the desks, blowing over the bookshelves, and circulating through the entire school.

Ms. Wraith woke up in the library. A piercing headache felt like it split her skull open, and for some reason she was laying on the floor.

Ms. Wraith groaned, dusting herself off as she grabbed the nearby desk to pull herself up to height. Her vision was blurry, but she could recognize several people laying on the ground, each similarly appearing to awaken from their own naps, a group that included every student in the library, Micah and Sharon Kingsley, as well as… another woman Ms. Wraith had not seen before. She was dressed in casual attire, and looked like a parent, but appeared more haggard than the rest.

“I… what happened?” groaned Iasmin.

“The last thing I remember is… we were all here to find Micah… and then this… blue light?” said Ryan stuttered out. 

While one could argue that is what just occurred, Ms. Wraith knew this omitted several important details. Details that any sane person would never forget. But as the rest of the students compared notes, Ms. Wraith’s eyes widened as she inched closer and closer to the realization: none of them could remember what happened.

A group that included Micah.

The only one who did not speak was the other woman. She was silent, stress-induced bags beneath her eyes lending the notion that all was not as it seems.

“Did… did it work?” Aiden came to in the corner of the room, looking around for his best friend, Micah. 

Micah was rubbing his head, and responded to his friend, both oblivious to what happened, “I… can’t remember. Must’ve been, like… a chemical leak? I think that could’ve screwed with the machine-- hey!” Ms. Wraith grabbed Micah’s arm, escorting him out of the room while carrying the machine in her other hand. Sharon, who had been getting her own bearings, followed the pair outside the library, crying, “Wait, Micah! Ms. Wraith?”

They exited the library as a few confused teachers exited their own rooms. Ms. Wraith began her interrogation, saying, “Do you remember anything that happened over the past several hours?”

Micah, not expecting this sudden grilling, was quite perturbed by the urgency in Ms. Wraith’s voice: “N-no? What happened?”

Sharon was catching up with them, and without waiting for the interrogation to end she collected Micah up in her arms, crying, “Oh, Micah! I’m so glad you’re okay, my baby!”

Micah, never one to deny a hug from his mother, accepted the embrace but remained confused, saying, “Thank you, mom, but, uh, what did I do? What’s wrong? Did something happen? I just activated the machine, and it didn’t seem to… do anything?”

Now it was Sharon’s turn to be confused. “B-but you were… you were small! Tiny! Rice-sized!”

“I… I was?”

“You were,” confirmed Ms. Wraith, obtaining a look of appreciation from Sharon for corroborating the story. “We all were. We sent you to get help from your mom, and you…” Ms. Wraith faltered at mentioning the deaths and accidental murders. 

Then it hit her.

Ms. Wraith did not die. She did not die. And she remembered what happened.

Sharon did not die. And she remembered what happened.

Micah died.

Ryan died. 

Iasmin died.

Everyone else died. And they could not remember.

It was a twisted bit of moral calculus, and Ms. Wraith intoned out loud, “Dear God,” as she collapsed and tried to lean against the wall. “Dear God…”

“Ms. Wraith? Are you okay?” Micah trotted to his teacher’s side, attempting to help her back up. “Do you need some water?”

Ms. Wraith looked in the eyes of her student and reckoned an honest concern for her well-being. It was so sickeningly genuine that it caused her stomach to churn. And tumble. Far more than it had when she witnessed any number of her pupils get eviscerated under the foot of the woman who currently clutched her heart as she witnessed this genuine act of kindness her son expressed toward his teacher. 

Micah could not remember making the decision to have his mother crush all these people. He was exactly as he appeared to be: a scared, smart kid who was confused.

Ms. Wraith gulped. What was there to gain, really, in telling this child that his mom had utterly obliterated every one of his peers under her foot? Nobody remembered, not even the woman who did the crushing.

“Micah… I need to have a conference with your mother, in private.”

“Oh… okay,” said Sharon, and the pair walked down the hall a bit. Ms. Wraith swung into a room that Mr. Jean was limping out of, looking dazed and confused, and closed the door.

Once in the room, Ms. Wraith shut and locked the door, placing the box on the table. 

“Sharon… you do remember the events of the past several hours?”

“Y-yes. I don’t know every detail, but I just know that, I saw my son, and he was really small, on the face of the desk. I grabbed him, and walked to the box, and then I…”

“I think I understand,” said Ms. Wraith, raising her hand. “Now, Sharon, what I’m about to tell you is going to sound just as crazy…”

And Ms. Wraith explained her hypothesis that only those who died while shrunken didn’t remember the events of what happened after the machine went haywire.

“But Micah doesn’t…” Sharon became white, and Ms. Wraith became solemn, nodding her head.

“You can’t tell anyone about this.”

“I… I won’t,” Sharon agreed. A cold sweat broke out on her temple. “Now, uh... there’s the question of what to do with…” Both women’s eyes traveled to the box.

---

“Micah, you’re a terrific student, but the library is not the place for your engineering experiments. You could’ve burned the school down! Imagine if it did more than just knocked us out for a few hours!” lectured Ms. Wraith.

“B-b-but--”

“No buts! I’ll be confiscating this until further notice,” said Ms. Wraith, brandishing the black box while tossing a glance at Sharon behind her son, who nodded in response.

“My research!”

“I might be more inclined to give it back had you not endangered our lives. You’re lucky your permanent record is still intact, young man.” Micah sighed, resigned in response, and returned to his mother’s side.

By now the remaining students were milling out of the library, now more or less cogent. Iasmin replied to nobody in particular, “Y’all better not have done anything weird while I was asleep.”

“Mom!” came a cry from down the hall. A female student, blond, peeked out of an empty classroom, waving her hand. “Where’d you go?” she asked.

The haggard woman who awoke in the library saw her and pursed her lips in consternation. She went to meet her daughter, blinking back tears as she exclaimed, “Jessica?! Y-you’re okay?!”

They embraced, and Jessica replied, “Yeah? I woke up and you were gone. Where’d you go?”

Flashes. They flashed through the mother’s mind. Images. Her daughter, hand reaching out helplessly. The only part of her body that had not been flattened under the colossal, unaware derriere of the titaness. Her daughter died before her eyes. And now, like a miracle from god, she was in front of her again.

She tightened her hug around her daughter, who was surprised, yet nevertheless warmly accepted it.

“We… we can work something out about your grades… we can work something else.”

As Micah and Sharon slowly walked down the hall, the mother caught a glimpse of the pair as they exited. She saw her as the pair paused in the hall and put the pair of shoes back on.

Those shoes.

Feet.

Her home.

That flat had been her home for the past several hours. Being inside it. Smelling it. Tasting it. Becoming it. 

Her heart sped up as she watched Sharon affix the shoes to her foot and start walking back out.

She needed them. That shoe. Those feet. 

Disconnected from her daughter, she tried to shake her head, get rid of those thoughts.

“C’mon, Jess. Let’s go. We can talk about your grades later.” She grabbed Jessica’s hand and pulled the confused girl down the hall. Staring at those confined shoes of the parent in front of their path all the while.

-----

“That oughta be a safe enough place for now,” Ms. Wraith said, descending from the step ladder. The black box was now on her closet’s top shelf. 

Clapping her hands together, Ms. Wraith felt herself relax for the first time all day. The box was shut off, and now, maybe, just maybe, they could put this entire hellish incident behind them all.

The memories of her students getting gored in increasingly creative ways was still fresh.

“I… don’t think I’m going to be getting much sleep tonight.”

Ms. Wraith closed the closet door and washed up for bed.

Meanwhile, in another another universe...

******

“C’mon, what’s the deal?!” shouted Stephanie, pressing down on her car as she adjusted and readjusted her seat in nervous twitch. It was only one of many dozens of car horns, an indicator of the gridlock that had engulfed the highway as a result of the rain.

Stephanie punched her horn a few more times in a rhythm, inaudible in the symphony of frustration, but it brought on a scant amount of pleasure anyway.

“UGH!!!” screamed Stephanie, banging her head against the steering wheel as she adjusted her mirror for the seventh time. At this point she might as well put the car in park. Gripping the gearshift, Stephanie struggled getting the metal rod to move.

“Shitty,” Stephanie swore, jiggling it with careful precision until finally it clicked.

Sighing, Stephanie unbuttoned the top of her blouse and put her feet up on the dash as she reclined back in her seat one more time, surely titillating a few imaginations of those fellow drivers who might’ve peered into the window of her vehicle, but her annoyance had inundated her from feeling any embarrassment and shame.

A metallic chime interrupted her reverie, Stephanie’s text tone. Glancing down, she saw that it was a message from Dylan. Hey mom. When are you getting home? :)

Stephanie sighed and moved a bit of hair out of her eyes.

She gripped it in her hands and maneuvered her fingers, quickly drafting her response: I will be a little late. Traffic is backed up.

Dylan replied, Okay I’ll start dinner. See you soon.

Stephanie: Love you :)

As Stephanie hovered her finger above the “Send” button, she winced in pain and dropped her phone between the seat and the median.

“Dammit,” said Stephanie, rubbing her thumb within her fingers from the electrostatic shock. “Weird…”

Retracting her feet from the dashboard, Stephanie squeezed her hand down between the seats and grabbed the phone, pressing the power button again and again to nothing but blackness.

“What the hell? This thing was on 76 percent.”

Tossing it in the passenger seat, Stephanie readjusted her mirror as she returned her jittering fingers to the steering wheel, now with nothing to do to pass the time. Rapping her manicured nails across the leather repeatedly, she glared down at the sea of cars and finally spotted a bit of movement. Traffic was starting to clear!

“Oh, thank God,” she said, gripping the gear shift once again and pushing it forward. Stuck on some of the degraded mechanics, Stephanie once again swore and said to herself, “C’mon…” She looked up at the pulse of movement traveling slowly backwards through the line of cars until –

BOOOOOOOOOM!!!

The horns renewed with vigor. Stephanie grimaced as she adjusted her mirror once again, having caught a glimpse of what happened behind her. Turning, she saw just in time in the distance a pillar of blue light pierce through the clouds before dissipating in the foggy sky.

Stephanie’s heart palpitated. The sound was louder than thunder; it had made her jump. A blown transformer perhaps? It could be… but that didn’t explain the light show.

Stephanie adjusted her mirror once more, and this time she finally began to realize something was seriously wrong. Holding her hand on the mirror in place, Stephanie realized that the object was moving on its own, shifting slightly, squeaking gradually, turning, turning, without any input.

“What… what the Hell?” Stephanie let go of the mirror as it aggressively turned back, as if in anger at Stephanie restricting it. Stephanie’s eyes widened as her gaze expanded, realizing with fright that the entire car was jittering ever so slightly.

“What the?!”

Stephanie unwound her window and jammed her face outside. The movement of the cars ahead continued, but Stephanie’s hyperventilation only increased in pace as she realized that the parked cars themselves were beginning to slide backwards at excruciating speeds on their own, as though being pulled by some electromagnetic force. Behind her an Audi rear-ended a mid-sized Sedan, and both drivers got out to exchange obscenities only to incredulously realize what was happening.

“Oh… oh goodness.”

Stephanie looked up. The gap in traffic had finally reached her, and she breathed a sigh of relief as she yanked on the gear shift.

“Oh… oh no, not now, come on!” Twisting it in her grip, Stephanie took deep breaths as she jiggled and finagled the stick every which way in an effort to change gears to drive. “Work, work dammit! Oh God, oh God,” she whispered. Stephanie had no clue what it was that was happening, but she did not want to be anywhere near the source of that pulse.

Drivers were already exiting their vehicles behind and in front of her, much to Stephanie’s chagrin. She had already considered that calculus, and the option was still there. But right now, what she needed was speed. Stephanie knew not how she knew, all she knew was that something horrible was about to happen, and the only way that she would be able to escape was to leave this place as fast as humanly possible, which could only be accomplished by vehicular assistance.

As if to illustrate her point, another pulse erupted from the spot, and with renewed urgency, Stephanie managed to finally jam the gear shift into place.

“A-ha!” Stephanie cheered, slamming on the gas as she jet through the parked cars and narrowly avoided the mobile vehicles that had the same idea as her.

But her progress was short lived; even as Stephanie increased the pressure with which she pressed down on the gas, her velocity seemed only to slow. “C’mon, go go go!” she hissed, yet still her speed descended from 40 miles per hour to thirty, twenty, ten, until even as she floored it, Stephanie was traveling at a negative speed.

Gritting her teeth, Stephanie kept her foot on the floor as she kept the car stable with the steering wheel. Taking one hand off, Stephanie gingerly used it to unbuckle herself before she unlocked and opened the car door. It too was attracted by the magnetic pulse, and in a jolt of adrenaline, Stephanie kicked open, leaping out of her car and into the field as her vehicle was grasped by this unseen force of energy, flinging impossibly into the air at an angle, colliding with tree branches before disappearing into the nothingness that was the catastrophic wave of concussive energy growing more powerful and powerful with every passing moment.

Stephanie spit grass out of her mouth and got to her knees, wincing as she ripped off her wedding ring and saw it too travel through the air.

“What the hell is going on?!” Stephanie screamed to nobody in particular, a sentiment she shared with every other lucky commuter who abandoned their car in the highway as they piled up over one another – some with people still inside them – and traveled in massive waves to the origin of this electrostatic point. This was concurrent to the quakes; as they traveling inward, something else was coming out. And this something was getting bigger and more powerful with each passing millisecond.

Stephanie got to her feet, barely able to stay stable as she looked to the skies before the answer to her question was made even more indecipherable.

Out past the wall of trees, something was growing.

A big, black ball of taught fabric, Stephanie had to ensure that she wasn’t looking at some sort of balloon, or an explosive cloud of black dust. But no, this was rigid, it was round, and it was at least several a mile away. A distance that was quickly being bridged.

“Holy… holy…” Stephanie knew not what deity she wished to beseech as she took a step back. The black round… thing… was mountainous, appearing like a magical hill. It pushed against the trees, flattening them without care as it rolled through the forest in its expansion, and then, into the street. The cars that had been magnetized to its location were now clearly seen getting pulled in and under its embiggening, flattening into sheets of metal with ear-splittingly horrifying screeches. And it was with this horrifying sight that Stephanie now realized this wasn’t simply some sort of mountain.

She didn’t know what it was exactly… all she could tell was that the first part, the bulbous hill… it looked strikingly like a human butt, wreathed in a black skirt. The skirt was taut, something which made both the bounteous form of its wearer and the heat that the organism emitted clear. That this looked like a human woman laying down on her side was becoming more and more clear to Stephanie, even as she gulped and launched into a sprint across the emptying road, only taking daring looks back with extreme caution.

Stephanie gulped as her perception of the world fell apart; the eldritch circumstances of whatever creature threatened to engulf her entire life were now secondary. She simply needed to get away from here. But where was away? Whatever this was, it was still growing. Stephanie pumped her arms and took deep breaths, remembering her track-and-field lessons from college. Hopped the median wall of the highway and swerved between flying cars and traffic signs, all being caught and bulldozed beneath this woman’s improbably-sized butt. But Stephanie could do nothing except continue running –

CRRRRRRRICKRACKLE!!!

Stephanie did not want to look back this time, but she could tell that this woman had just flattened the median wall.

“Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit, oh my fucking God,” Stephanie decided now was probably the time to adopt a mantra, lest she go entirely insane. The last vestiges of sunlight were being stolen away by the moment. Not from the setting of the sun, but from its eclipse as a wall of flesh grew and expanded, getting larger and more mind-numbingly overwhelming with each passing moment. Its musty heat was coming out in pulses dictated by the heartbeat of this woman. Stephanie dashed into the trees, a haven she hopes. But they were snapped with as much ease as the last time – more so – like the toothpicks they were. Tears flowed from Stephanie’s eyes as she realized with resignation that she was about to die not knowing what she was killed by, or for that matter, who. With a sniff, Stephanie’s paced slowed by perhaps a fraction of a mile per hour.

Stephanie screamed even before she was flattened. The warmth that was nipping at her back became scorching and the anticipation of her fate was utterly unbearable. She wanted nothing more than to get it over with. And with a final trip on a fallen branch, Stephanie got her wish as she was enveloped in darkness. It took merely one moment, and it was over, the blood-red stain nowhere to be found, and likely never would be until Sharon Kingsley opened her eyes.

******

Sharon Kingsley opened her eyes.

The night air was cool and calm, an unorthodox juxtaposition from the confusion and trepidation she felt as she realized she was no longer inside.

“Micahhhhh?”

Sharon rubbed her eyes, remembering the barest inklings of what happened before she woke up. Everything was jumbled, she and Micah were together, there was some sort of box? A flash of light, and then…

It was all falling out. Evaporating by the moment. Sharon’s piercing headache prohibited her from accessing her fine memories. The aftereffects of electrostatic molecular redistributing were making her all wonky, and her higher order thinking was addled. She felt inebriated. All Sharon knew… all she felt that she knew… was that she needed to find her son. And if her son was around here, on this flat empty plane, it should be pretty easy.

“Micahhhhh!?” she called out again, planting her hands on the ground and pushing herself up until she was sitting on her knees. Her hands created dark imprints in the grey-green, surprisingly spongy surface. Sharon peered down at one palm and saw the odd dirt like clods, glinting slightly in the moonlight.

Sharon glanced down once again and raised an eyebrow at the tiny lights that seemed to flicker on and off on the ground beneath her. Some were white-ish, yellowish, grid-like. Others were more wild and red and spreading; these were concentrated near where her knees were diffing into the ground, where her hands had been, as well as all around her body.

Sharon shook her head. She was outside, that was all she knew. Now, she needed to find her son.

Sharon heaved, and brought one foot in front of the other with a world-ending thud. Her bare foot was still coated in nylon, and its outline in the world was clear.

“Dammit, I knew I shouldn’t have taken off my shoes,” said Sharon as she pulled her other sock off, finally freeing one foot after its long day of work and PTA meetings. Sharon stood to height, an immaculate sight of femininity to the terrified observers below, and she took off her other sock.

Resting both bare feet into the spongy surface, Sharon squelched her toes, sighing as she felt the tension in her underside melt away. She knew instinctively that in a strange place, it wasn’t a good idea to walk around barefoot. And yet, she somehow felt that she wasn’t going to be in danger of anything much for as long as she was here.

Sharon took a step, laughing a bit at how perfect print was that remained from the single trot, truly down to a tee. After taking the step, Sharon lowered her gaze and crouched, twirling on her other foot and driving the ball deep into the Earth’s crust, paste-ifying anything that had the slimmest possibility of survival, and she peered at the cavity.

“Goodness… even the ridges of the toe-prints are visible. Hey… what if…”

No, she shouldn’t, Sharon thought.

It would be uncouth. Totally befitting a mature adult like her. But… like… wouldn’t it be sort of funny?

With a curious grin, Sharon collected in her mouth a globule of saliva, and dangled it from between her lips.

The survivors of the carnage watched as the elastic and viscous fluid hung above them like a dwarf moon, radiating the heat and essence of their destroyer. It edged closer and closer to the crater formed by Sharon’s largest toe before it snapped off, drowning the last remnants of that corner of the human world in a flood of biblical proportions.

Sharon giggled as she watched the spit drop perfectly fill the toe print, like a tiny lake.

“Cute…” Then Sharon shook her head, feeling a bit of shame herself as she remembered that the goal was to find her son.

“Micah? Micaaaaaah?!” Sharon screamed as loud as she could, a scream that could be heard across counties and state lines, though Sharon believed herself to be calling to nothing except the moon and the clear sky of stars.

Sharon’s concern soon started to outweigh her curiosity, and her trek brought her hundreds of paces away from where she started. Luckily the sky was clear, and the moonlight easily allowed her to keep track of her footprints, letting Sharon know exactly where she had been. She didn't stop until easily a good three fourths of the vast plains upon which she had woke were covered with prints, and still no Micah.

“That little…” Sharon put a finger to her cheek in concern before locking her eyes on a piece of untouched and pristine gray land on the horizon. If Micah wasn’t here, Sharon thought, then she would go there. She would travel and search for as long as it took before Micah was back in her arms.