It was just Stuart and I home. Jennifer was at work. I was sitting on the couch, reading a newspaper. This was possible for me as long as I was in the mood to walk up and down the paper, and physically pull the page over like a bed sheet. Getting regular dispatches from the outside world was a vital pastime when you couldn’t leave the house on your own.

The doorbell rang. A moment later, I heard Stuart stride down the hallway to see who it was. It sounded like he was at the door for a little while. I went on reading.

Finally, Stuart strode back into the living room, with a huge grin on his face.

“JERRY,” he said. “BIG NEWS.”

Coming just behind Stuart, another man entered the living room. It was a short man with grizzled black hair tapering into a prominent widow’s peak over his forehead. He looked just as excited as Stuart did.

My mouth gaped.

It was none other than Remy, the backyard inventor I’d met at the GPR party, whose backfiring time machine had shrunk me.

My eyes jumped now to the familiar object he was gripping in his arms. With a flicker of alarm, I realized it was the time machine – familiar, but not identical. It now looked a little different, like it had been altered.

“—NOT ‘BIG’ NEWS,” Remy corrected. “NEWS ABOUT BIGNESS.”

He stopped on the carpet and surveyed me for a second.

“HOW ARE YOU DOING, FRIEND?”

I jerked up from my seat on the couch. My hopes were rocketing despite my rational attempts to quiet them – Remy’s visit could only mean one thing.

“Remy!” I said. I was so hyped up my voice came out a breathless squeak, but I didn’t care. “What are you doing here?”

I knew why he was here, and he knew I knew, and evidently Stuart knew as well but Remy humored me anyway.

“WE GOT HER GOING AGAIN, BABY!” he said. “GET READY TO GROW!”

“Are you serious?!”

He nodded, giving the machine an excited little shake.

“But don’t we need another Flip to happen?”

“NOPE. THE FLIP JUICED UP MY MACHINE MANY TIMES OVER.”

“What took you so long?”

“FORGIVE ME FOR THE DELAY, BUT I HAD TO BE PRECISE WITH THE MATHEMATICS. WE DON’T WANT YOU TO SHRINK AGAIN – DOWN TO NOTHING THIS TIME!”

At that, I shuddered.

He continued:

“WE'VE GOT TO GET YOU RIGHT ON YOUR PREVIOUS HEIGHT, OR CLOSE ENOUGH. SO I WAS DOING THE CALCULATIONS OVER AND OVER.”

“Remy,” I said, calming myself. “I’ll take any growth. Three feet tall is better than what I am right now.”

“OF COURSE,” he nodded, “BUT DON’T BE HASTY NOW. WE DON’T WANT THE OPPOSITE PROBLEM, EITHER; YOU SHOOT UP PAST THE SKYSCRAPERS.”

He was right; that didn’t sound marginally better than the current situation, either. Sure, it would give me greater physical capacity, but I didn't want the military to run in and shoot me down like King Kong.

“SO HOW DOES IT WORK?” said Stuart, staring at the machine.

“JERRY’S GOT TO JOLT AGAIN,” said Remy.

At Stuart’s bewildered expression, Remy added:

“—THAT MEANS ENGAGE THE MACHINE.” His voice transformed into the detached academic that I’d heard back when I’d first shrunk and he was talking about the anhedral and dihedral stuff. “BUT HERE’S THE STICKING POINT: WHEN JERRY JOLTED THE FIRST TIME, HE WENT THROUGH A TINY HOLE. THAT’S WHY HE TURNED INTO A TINY GUY. SO HE MUST GO THROUGH A BIGGER HOLE NOW TO MAKE HIM A BIGGER GUY.”

I frowned. Something didn’t sit right. When I’d used the machine at the party, I’d seen angles from which the warp tunnel shrunk down into a point, like a perspective illusion, but I hadn’t gone into the tunnel at those angles. I was sure of it.

“Are you sure?” I said. “I thought you said going forward in time made you bigger?”

His eyes flickered with uncertainty for a brief moment.

“I’VE ONLY DONE THE MATH FOR BACKWARD TRAVEL. I’VE NEVER TRIED JOLTING FORWARD, SO I DON’T ACTUALLY KNOW WHAT WOULD HAPPEN. YOU HAVE TO TRY GOING THROUGH A BIGGER HOLE, JERRY; THAT’S GOT TO BE IT. OTHERWISE…” he scratched his head, his eyes scanning in thought, “…I HAVE TO RETHINK SOME BASIC EQUATIONS. MAYBE EVEN TAKE APART THE MACHINE. RE-OPTIMISE HER FOR JOLTING FORWARD. AND THAT COULD TAKE A LONG TIME. YEARS, I – ”

I shook my head furiously.

“No, your theory makes sense.”

I desperately wanted to believe him, after all, he was the expert.

“Big hole; grow. Small hole; shrink. If you’re sure, Remy, then let’s do it. I need to be able to go outside on my own again.”

He nodded.

“ONE MORE LITTLE COMPLICATION,” he said. “YOU CAN’T LIFT THE MACHINE. SO I HAVE TO PRESS THE TRIGGER FOR YOU. I’LL SHOOT A HOLE YOUR WAY AND YOU WALK THROUGH, OKAY?”

“Fire away.”

Remy hefted the machine up into a ready position and gestured for Stuart to get behind him.

“YOU, SIR, GET BEHIND ME – ”

“IT’S STUART,” Stuart said politely.

“STUART, WHATEVER. I NEED YOU OUT OF THE WAY.”

Stuart dutifully went over and stood behind Remy.

Meanwhile, I climbed off the couch and walked around on the carpet.

“Where do you want me, Remy?”

He pointed a little way beyond me, over the other side of the room.

“WHAT SAY WE HAVE OURSELVES ANOTHER COUNTDOWN,” Remy began, “3…2…1…”

He pulled the trigger and space divided like a curtain.

…Except, not in front of me, where it was supposed to. It divided in front of Remy and Stuart, blocking them from my view.

Panicking, I began to sprint back over the carpet to get through the warp before it collapsed again. Meanwhile, it looked as though Stuart was trying to backpedal to clear himself out of the tunnel, and Remy was trying to stop him.

Half way across the floor I heard Remy’s voice, but kind of distorted, like he was speaking in a cave:

“NO, NO, DON’T MOVE! GET AWAY FROM IT! STOP! STOP! NO, NOT THAT WAY! – WRONG! THIS IS REALLY WRO – ”

Stuart yelled in terror, but as if from some strange angle, as if he was downstairs or upstairs or in another room (and their house only had one floor anyway). Then the warp collapsed and crashed inward, down into nothing.

And Remy and Stuart had vanished.

My stomach dropped.

Oh fuck, I thought.

Something had gone terribly wrong.

“Guys?” I called out, my eyes bouncing from place to place around the room.

Then my gaze dropped and I found myself staring at Remy and Stuart, and they looked back at me, and we all shared the same eyeline from the carpet.

Oh fuck, I thought again.

Really, really fuck.

Now they had shrunk, too. They were my size. Meanwhile, the machine hadn’t done a damn thing to change me back.

Stuart grinned when he saw me, and spread his arms out warmly.

“Jerry, it worked! Welcome back!”

I blinked.

“Stuart,” I shook my head sadly. “Look again. You’re not in Kansas anymore.”

His eyes lifted away from me and began to whirl around, taking everything in. At the same time, his face fell and slowly went white – almost as white as his platinum blonde hair.

On the other hand, Remy's cheeks had gone faintly red, like he'd been slapped. Then his mouth screwed up.

“How?!” he wailed. “It was watertight on paper – I swear!” He let out a strained sound like he was trying not to cry, and started to massage his fingers into his brows with vexation.

“It was a bigger hole, but – it was too big! It swallowed us!”

When I looked back at Stuart, he was hunched over, retching dryly; the reality of the situation having caught up with him. I went over and patted his back awkwardly.

“You okay?”

He straightened, wiping spit off his mouth with the back of his hand.

“Sheesus, Jerry,” he groaned weakly. “Is this how things look to you all the time? Everything stretches over my head – everything! I don’t think I can take it. I feel so vulnerable and insignificant.”

“You’ll get used to it,” I said. “Hopefully.” I took a step back, putting my hands on my hips. “Hate to say it, but you haven’t seen anything yet. Just wait until you see a normal size person.”

“What is that?” Remy suddenly howled.

He was gawping in despair at his machine, once again, not having endured the same elastics of spacetime, and lying inconspicuously on the ground some feet from us, appearing to the three of us giant size. Well, at least to him, this was novel, but I was tempted to remind him that the machine had looked like this to me for a long time now.

Probably a good thing I didn’t say anything, because the sight of his humungous machine seemed to cause something inside Remy to snap.

“No! She fit in my hands! Now she is useless! I made her and now look! I’m her Frankenstein and now she’s a monster!” He continued to babble incoherently, waving his arms about.

I could only smile grimly. There was something karmic about it, even, at least for Remy, in particular, who I felt was most responsible for this whole affair. And maybe for Stuart a little, too, for the part he played in taking me to the vet that one time…

Remy eyed my smile and glared.

“Jerry, what do we do?” he blathered, waving his fists. “You’re the pioneer of this miserable condition; you’re the Gulliver who has sailed these waters before us, you tell us how we are supposed to live in this Brave New World? How are we to take all this?”

“Take it like a taste of your own medicine,” I said, trying not to sound smug.

“This isn’t a medicine, you bastard, it’s a poison!” he gasped, looking like he wanted to tear his hair out. Or he wanted to destroy something with his hands, at least, and with nothing in sight small enough to tear into, he launched at me with hands around my throat. We fell onto the carpet and tumbled around before Stuart set upon us and physically separated us, being the biggest of us all, over six feet in normal size and still having that comparative size advantage over us although shrunken.

Only later I was able to appreciate the situation from Remy’s point of view. He had the most at stake. He prided his own knowledge of time travel, and the shrinking had slapped his ignorance in his face. It shook him that his own machine, his ‘baby’, could uncaringly turn against him, and he didn’t know ‘her’ as well as he thought he did. The actual size change was only a somewhat more incidental embarrassment.

“Hey now!” Stuart chided as we all got to our feet and dusted the carpet lint off ourselves. “We’re in a real dangerous position already. Let’s not all kill each other within the first five minutes. We have to help each other, after all, we only have each other in this.”

“And Jennifer,” I pointed out.

“But she didn’t get…” Stuart began automatically. Then he got an expression like he'd just heard someone had died. Then he slapped a hand to his forehead.

“Oh, no…” he groaned, “…Jennifer. Oh man…I didn’t even think. What’s she going to say?”

“Say? I think we should worry more about her bite than her bark,” I said darkly.

Remy flicked me an anxious, confused look. To him, Jennifer was just a name. He didn’t know her like we did.

Not wanting to worry him, I said quickly:

“Anyway, Jennifer’s not due home for a few hours, so put that aside for now. We have more important things to figure out.”

“Yes, like…well…my little problem,” Remy interrupted.

“I think we all have a little problem here, buddy,” said Stuart, gesturing his arms out.

“No, I mean: where am I going to go? – How am I going to go?”

“Are you married, or kids at home?” I asked.

“No.”

“In a relationship?”

“Yes – “

“Does she live with you?”

“No,” said Remy. “And the second thing: it’s a ‘he’. But there is no ‘us’ after this; we are over.”

“Hey, let’s not assume anything,” I said. “Maybe you should tell him and just see what he says. He might want to help you.”

“No,” Remy shook his head resolutely, his eyes angry. “We were already in trouble. He said I was too controlling. Now, he’ll never listen to me anymore. He’ll laugh at me. He must never know about this!”

“You’re welcome to stay here while we figure things out,” said Stuart.

“Thanks,” Remy said sadly, wringing his hands, “I can’t go home like this, can I?”

We then spent some time discussing some other practical issues of our situation. I reassured both of them that with practice, they could be scaling the furniture like spider monkeys – like I did. Neither of them sounded very hopeful. Neither of them were fitness fanatics. Remy was a nerd, he sat in his garage tinkering with junk, and Stuart was bookish, exercised irregularly – his sportiest hobby was chess.

I wasn’t much better myself but I used to use the pool and gym almost to obsession in a failed attempt to get over Jennifer, and continued to enjoy the outlet offered by physical activity. Still, I mentioned how the reduction would increase their muscles regardless, make them faster and stronger over the next few days.

“And also…uh…I should warn you…” I gingerly brought up the increased circulatory thing. This information failed to make an impact on Remy – probably meditating on his doomed relationship again.

Stuart, however, was starting to look a little queasy again. Particularly when I suggested one of the side effects would be that his junk would turn into a log of lumber and become trigger-sensitive for unwanted excitement at all and any time of the day.

“That might sound like a good thing,” I went on cautiously, “but let me tell you: it’s not! It’s going to suck for a little while and there’s nothing you can do. You just have to get used to it.” 

Stuart was rubbing his face like he was trying to wake up from a bad dream. So I dropped the subject again and moved onto advising them on bedding, food and bathroom issues.

None of us noticed as it gradually got dark outside; the windows were quite some distance above our heads, after all, and the living room light was already on. Remy was carrying on a long, semi-incoherent conjecture on how he might get us back to normal, but none of his projections were very hopeful. Each one sounded a little more desperate and far-fetched than the last. I began to space out; his breathless voice becoming a drone...

Then, from down the hallway, the sound of the front door opening and shutting.

We all froze and went dead quiet.

A second later, footsteps thundered down the hallway.

Stuart let out a small, almost voiceless yip.

"Oh my God..."

He had never heard giant footsteps before. I recalled they sounded like objects of furniture crashing from out a window onto concrete.

“GUYS,” Jennifer’s voice boomed, “I GOT PIZZA. YOU BETTER BE OKAY WITH THAT BECAUSE, FUCK IT, IT’S FRIDAY, AND BY THE TIME I –”

She strode into the living room, and stopped on the sight of the TV on, playing softly, but the sofas empty and the room seemingly inert.

“STUART…?” she called. “…JERRY…?”

“We’re down here,” I rang out, agilely climbing up the sofa until she could see me.

“WHERE’S STUART?”

Stuart let out a small cough.

“I’m down here, too,” he said.

He tried to climb up the sofa after me, but – not having had as much practice as me – was not nearly so fast at it. Plus, his limbs seemed to be trembling like mad.

“And me,” chimed in Remy, from the floor.

“WHAT THE FUCK?!” she bellowed, ogling us like we were aliens. “WHAT HAPPENED?”

Remy didn’t answer. I glowered at him and then said:

“We had another go at the shrinky thing. As you can see, it didn’t turn out so well. For them.”

She put her hands on her hips, her eyebrows coming together fiercely as she stared down at me.

“WELL, WHY THE FUCK DID YOU ALL HAVE A GO? WHAT DID YOU THINK THAT WOULD ACCOMPLISH?”

Finally, Remy conjured up his voice:

“Uh, excuse me, madam,” he was back in his ‘friendly neighborhood know-it-all’ mode, “we did not ‘all have a go,’ like rowdy teenagers dabbling with drugs at a puff party. We took stringent precautions. What went wrong was entirely unforeseen. You must understand, we are making contact with channels of physics that have never before been traversed, and – ”

Jennifer lifted two fingers in a dismissive gesture to silence him.

“SHUT UP JUST ONE SECOND. WHY IS STEWEY TINY, AGAIN?”

“I had nothing to do with this, Jen,” Stuart said, clasping his hands in front of his chest protectively, almost buckling to his knees under her fierce look, “I swear.”

“I’M NOT DOUBTING IT, SWEETIE,” she said with a kind of veiled menace. “IT’S NOT LIKE YOU AT ALL.” Her medusean gaze then rounded back on me. Because I was the only one smiling (in spite of myself), she took that immediately as a confession of guilt.

“DID YOU ROPE THEM INTO THIS, JERRY?” she said.

“Why would I do that, Jennifer?”

“I DON’T KNOW. YOU WANT FRIENDS YOUR OWN SIZE?”

“I did not. I would never force my size onto anyone else.”

“IF YOU’RE LYING, JERRY, I’LL FIND OUT, AND I’LL MAKE YOU FLOSS THE BACK OF MY MOUTH – FROM THE INSIDE.”

My spine remained straight, but out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Remy flinch and Stuart’s trembling became more pronounced.

Yeah, that’s right, I thought to myself, these crazy threats don’t sound so silly and implausible when you’re barely 4 inches tall.

“Remy’s smarter than I am,” I said calmly, “I don’t think he would have been coerced even if I’d wanted him to. We thought this was going to grow me back,” I shrugged. “But it just took in some new victims.”

Jennifer eyed the machine warily like it had evil sentience.

“WOULD SOMEONE SMASH THAT GODDAMN THING WITH A SLEDGEHAMMER, ALREADY?”

When Jennifer got angry at someone or something, the solution was invariably to smash it with a sledgehammer, broom, or frying pan. She was partial to creative, ludicrous threats, and always said that I would make a cute rug for the living room or throw blanket for her bed if only a Bösendorfer would fall on top of me (although at my current size, I might only be lucky enough to make a coaster or napkin). I knew her well enough to know these were just empty threats, but Remy did not, and it looked like her words were sending shockwaves up his spine.

“Oh, no!” Remy, clawing at his face. “You can’t! You must not! She’s still got potential!”

“FINE…” she said, turning away in disgust. “JUST…UGH…STUART, I WAS GOING TO ASK YOU TO SERVE UP WHILE I TAKE A SHOWER, BUT…” her sentence dwindled off helplessly. She ran her hands through her hair, shutting her eyes.

“I’M PUTTING IT IN THE OVEN. I NEED TO CHANGE.” She went into the kitchen and slid the pizza boxes onto the oven tray, flicked it on and marched out of the room again.

“OH MY GOD…” her voice came from down the hallway before the sound of the bathroom door shutting.

I turned to look at Remy. His eyes were boggled and his mouth slack.

“That went well, relatively speaking,” I said quietly. His unchanged expression said said he didn’t believe me.