Day One

Maybe we shouldn't have been surprised that viral shrinking syndrome turned out to be an STD, but... hindsight is twenty/twenty.

Of course, at first nobody knew that some people could be carriers without actually shrinking. I'd had no way of knowing that Violet had been infected. For that matter, I hadn't known that she'd been cheating on me, either.

It had taken only a few minutes of searching on medical sites and news stories on the internet to understand what had happened. And to be fair, she was distressed to the point of hyperventilation when she woke up to find me naked on her second pillow. I was barely an inch tall.

"I swear, I had no idea, but this is still my fault. I'm so... I'm so sorry. I'll make sure you're taken care of. I... I promise."

The red, splotchy cheeks on her gigantic face were real. The beach ball-sized tears that drenched me were real. The warm, soft caress of her Olympian fingers when she lifted me up look me in the eyes was all too real. The chestnut rays of her iris shone out from the center of her eye, and it was beautiful. Her pupil was a deep, obsidian window into my girlfriend's soul. It tightened in ever-deepening focus on me, and somehow, that - not the shrinking, not the colossus holding me - was the most surreal part of my experience so far.

"I'm going to keep you safe." Her eye lost focus on me for second, releasing me from its event horizon. "I'm going to put you on the dresser and I need you to stay there, okay? I'm going to go out for a bit," she said, her pupil contracting into a terrifying bead of concentration. "But after I come back, I'm not letting you out of my sight."

Violet did exactly as she said she would. Two hours after she'd left me alone to sit and wait in her silent room, she entered through the door carrying a bag loaded with crafting supplies and a looking of exhausted, steely determination. When she picked me up, I couldn't help but notice that her hands had been rubbed raw and smelled strongly of soap. A little bit of dried, red crustiness stained a minuscule area beneath her thumbnail, apparently missed in whatever scouring she'd subjected herself too. I knew that the art supplies store whose logo was emblazoned on the bag was just a block away from Justin's apartment. Justin, Violet had confessed, had been the other man. Justin, Violet had explained, must have had the virus and spread it to her. Justin must have also shrunk recently, but Violet hadn't said so and I didn't ask. I didn't want to know where the crimson flecks falling from her nail had come from.

By the end of the day, she had rigged up a functional attachment for her earrings so that I could safely tether myself in her ear. She would be able to hear me, and I - microscopic and otherwise useless - could keep her company while she went about her everyday life. Until there was a way to reverse my condition, I thought it was a good enough solution.