When my sight had recovered from the blinding flash, I say that I was in the middle of a green field. Around me stretched a large park. Surrounding it was the jagged skyline of a big city. And further up, in the sky? There I saw my workshop's ceiling, its shining light bulb serving as a sun to this shrunken land that sat in a Petri dish on my desk, bringing light to the billions who inhabited it—myself now among them.

I smiled. My invention had worked perfectly.

Bringing my left hand up, I pressed some buttons on a device I was wearing that looked like a digital watch. With it I could send a message back to the machine I'd used to shrink myself, telling it to bring me back to its glass chamber at my normal size.

Once I was satisfied that this device was working correctly, I set out to explore the tiny city I was in and study its culture. I spent hours going around, taking in every scrap of information I could. Thankfully, none of these people recognized me as the giant who watched over their world, or who knows what they would have done. I suppose such a different perspective must have made me unrecognizable to them.

As I walked through the streets, all of a sudden I heard a noise that sounded like it came from outside the Petri dish. I looked around, trying to find its source, but with all those skyscrapers around me, I couldn't make anything out. After a while, some TVs nearby lit up with footage of what was happening outside of the city, and what I saw on them made my heart skip a beat: There, on the screens, was my twin sister, Tina.

What was she doing there? Wasn't she supposed to be at soccer practice? She was wearing her uniform, but it was as clean as it had been when she'd put it on an hour ago. Practice must have been canceled; that was the only explanation for her being back so early, in this pristine condition. I'd been so sure that she wouldn't be back for another couple hours that I hadn't even bothered to lock the door as usual.

I stood frozen in place, watching Tina along with other people who had gathered around this TV, waiting to see what she would do. The last thing I wanted was to be stuck here while this Petri dish was at her mercy, but I also didn't want to leave this place prematurely and be faced with prying questions about how I had suddenly appeared in the room with her and what all these devices were for. Best to wait and see if she left on her own, I thought.

The camera followed her as she wandered around the workshop, thankfully keeping her hands to herself. Then her eyes turned towards us and she started coming closer. An uneasy murmur arose from the crowd, whose alarm grew with her every step.

Finally she stood before us, so close we could finally see her in the sky. Her size was beyond comprehension; her head alone was probably the size of Jupiter relative to us microscopic people, and as she looked at us, it felt as if hers were the eyes of God, here to pass judgement on us. Panicked, I reached for the band on my wrist and punched in the command to start warming up the resizing chamber. Trembling in fear, I looked at Tina, hoping that she wouldn't mess with the city before I could get back to normal.

Suddenly her hand appeared in the sky, with a finger outstretched and hanging right above us. At its descent, I instinctively ducked and curled up, covering my head, but of course it didn't crash into us; it only tapped on the Petri dish's lid. Still, the sound was deafening, a rumble as of a thousand tons of TNT going off at once, forcing us all to cover our ears, shaking both the earth and the air around us. Boom, boom, boom, it went.

When the sound stopped, I ventured to look up and yelled as I saw her taking the lid off. She set it aside, leaving us without protection. When she brought her finger up again, it seemed this time we would really be snuffed out under it.

But the finger stopped mid-fall. She turned around and left, disappearing from view. I let out a sigh, thankful that she would be leaving us alone for now. My relief wouldn't last long, though, as a glance at the TV filled me with abject terror. Tina, I saw, was headed right for the resizing chamber. By then it was almost fully warmed up; the humming noise it was making must have alerted her to it. She stopped to examine it, then she looked down—at the power cables, I realized. I screamed internally as she walked to the power outlet, yelled “Stop!” as she reached for the plug, and almost fainted as she pulled it out, sealing my fate.

I reached for the controller on my wrist, ignoring the curious glances from the people around me, and tried some of its buttons to make sure I'd seen it all correctly. The only response was a message saying that the resizing chamber was without power. Until someone plugged it in, which could well take minutes, hours, days, or even years, I would be stuck there with no hope of return. It could even be that it would never be plugged in again, in which case I would spend the rest of my life like this, a microscopic inhabitant of the Petri dish world. And so long as Tina remained in the room, “the rest of my life” could prove to be a very short time indeed.

Tina made her way back to the work desk, but instead of playing with the Petri dish, she sat on my chair and kicked her bare feet up onto the desk, each of them thudding down to either side of the Petri dish, their impact bringing terrifying earthquakes. There they rested, dominating our little world's horizon. Far behind them, we saw Tina pull out her phone and start playing around on it, her feet rocking from side to side as she passed the time.

I stared agog at her monolithic soles, each of which was big enough to snuff out this world and another like it with a single step. Her toes were each somewhere between the Earth and the Moon in size, and it would have spelled doom for billions had they come into the dish.

As it turned out, however, her feet didn't even need to touch the dish in order to wreak havoc in it. Already their smell wafted over it, suffusing our entire atmosphere. Dozens around me started gagging as the stench hit them in full force; I myself was about to join in, but I mastered myself and remained standing. Over time, the stench became more bearable, if not more pleasant, as we all grew accustomed to it, yet I, at least, continued feeling heady until it started to dissipate into the rest of my workshop.

But though this discomfort had dissipated, we were soon accosted by more material dangers. Above us, my sister's came together, meeting each other with the back of one against the sole of the other. Rubbing against each other, they brushed off bits of sand and dust which came to rain down on us. Such a little thing, it might sound like, until you realize that each grain of sand was big enough on its own to wipe a city of the map. We looked on in dread, seeing these gigantic meteors fall towards us, always fearing that the next one would kill us all, yet despite the constant thundering and rumbling of distant impacts around that city, the city managed to avoid them all.

After this destruction there was a peaceful period in which Tina only sat playing on her phone. Seeing she had settled down, some began to relax. I knew better than that, though. Whatever Tina was playing, wouldn't entertain her for long—no game ever did—but as to what she would do once she grew bored of it, I had no clue.

No more than five minutes after the rain of meteors on us, Tina put her phone aside and looked down at us thoughtfully, idly scrunching and stretching her feet above us. Then she pulled her feet off the table and leaned in, examining us more closely. She came so close that and her breath now reached us, blowing with all the might of a hurricane, knocking many of us to the ground.

Holding on to a telephone pole to support myself, I gazed up at her. Her face was unreadable. Did she have any clue what was sitting before her in that little dish? Could she know that she held the lives of billions before her? And what would she do if she did? Would she show us mercy, or want to play with us?

Sitting up, Tina's monstrous hand reached for us, her titan fingers pressing against opposite ends of the wall surrounding us. The world started shaking as she lifted us off the table. To her credit she was very careful with it, but for those of us in her hands, even the slightest jerkiness to her movements was magnified a million-fold, making it impossible to stand without some supporting object.

Then her face appeared above us with pupils as pitch black voids staring down at us—voids so black I felt they might consume us all at any moment. She exhibited not the slightest understanding that what she held was anything more than a strange object she'd found in her brother's workshop. She could destroy us all right then and there and she would never have known that she was responsible for ending the lives of billions.

We were nothing to her.

After a while, it seemed she'd satisfied her curiosity, and she was reaching to put us back on the table when disaster struck. The dish slipped from her fingers, and the next thing I knew we were tumbling through the air with everything around me turned to chaos. A second later it smashed against the floor, and all the little world was left scattered around, likely looking to my sister as nothing more than a pile of sand.

When I recovered from my fall, I saw I was in the middle of a vast wasteland where nothing living could be seen. Nothing moved save for me; it seemed I was the only survivor of the cataclysm. As I would eventually discover, this was thanks to a side effect of my shrinking that made me hardier against physical trauma than the other microscopic people.

My contemplation of the ruined world was interrupted by the rumble of my sister's footsteps. Above, her gargantuan figure towered over all creation, looking down on her handiwork with the same face she'd worn after spilling soda on our mother's dress—not at all the face you'd expect to see on someone who'd just snuffed out more people than she could ever count.

She picked up the Petri dish and set it back on the table, then leaned over to look at the remains of the little world. I saw her foot rise above me, its sole becoming my whole sky before crashing down. I survived the impact, much to my disbelief, but anyone else who might have survived the fall could not have survived her sole.

Using her foot, Tina swept all the incriminating evidence away, leaving it tucked away in a corner of the workshop where she thought it wouldn't be found. I would have been left in they corner with it too, had not a thin layer of sweat on her foot left me stuck to her sole like a speck of dust. Once she had finished sweeping the debris away, she wiped the sole of that foot against the back of the other, and I was brushed off onto it. There I remained, tucked away in a minuscule wrinkle on her skin, with her foot as my entire world.

As she left my workshop, I saw myself forced to cling to her for protection against the dangers of this new microscopic world. At night, I wandered across the plain of her foot, drinking from the vast lakes that sprang from her sweat pores and feasting on bits of dead skin cells, doing my best to stay alive.

It was a miserable existence, but an existence nonetheless, and so long as my wrist device still had some charge, there was a chance that I might be able to get back to normal one day.

With the passing weeks I began to carve out a little niche for myself on my sister's body. Her foot my Earth, her face my sun, I spent every day living as a pitiful dist mite on her skin, slowly adapting to her daily rhythms, clinging to her so I wouldn't be washed away in the shower. Such total dependence changed me. It changed the way I thought of her. Sometimes I couldn't manage to see her as my sister anymore; she was a goddess to be prayed to and propitiated that she might bless me with plentiful sweat to drink, dead skin to eat, and protection from the elements. I never would have expected the life of a dust mite to be a spiritual one, but there it was.

One day, as I waited in her shoe, I sensed her going up to my workshop, as she'd taken to doing ever since my disappearance. As always, I prayed for her to plug the resizing chamber back in, but in truth, I had almost lost hope by then. The controller was nearly out of power, though I had long since begun rationing it by turning it on only once a day, then once every other day, then once a week, only to check if the chamber was by chance plugged in. It never was.

The world went bright as Tina took off her shoes. Looking around, I saw the chamber, and noticed that she was looking thoughtfully at it, as she sometimes did. Then I saw her turn elsewhere, and followed her gaze to the unplugged cord. She went to it. She held it in her hand. She held it before the outlet. And plugged it in.

I almost couldn't believe it. The machine was plugged in again. I would finally be able to go back to normal. I wanted to start it up immediately, but remembering what had happened the last time I did so, I decided to wait for Tina to leave.

She stepped back and looked at the machine with an air of expectancy. After a while, she sighed and left the room, carrying her shoes with her. As she walked down the stairs, I checked my controller and confirmed that it could communicate with the chamber. Not knowing how much power I had left to work with, I hurriedly punched in the command to resize me. After five minutes, I was consumed in a flash of light, reappearing in my workshop.

My steps were shaky as I stepped out of the chamber—my clothes dirty and worn, my body thin and dishevelled. I walked around, seeing everything as if for the first time, and breathed in the fresh air. After all this time, it almost felt wrong for it to not be filled with the smell of Tina.

A second later I heard the door me creak open and Tina came poking her head inside. Her eyes went wide as she saw me. I rushed over to her, hugged her tight against me, and thanked her a hundred, a thousand, a million times over for having saved me, though I would never tell her what exactly she had saved me from. Tears streamed from both our eyes as we embraced, happy to be holding each other again.

Much later, once I had settled back into my normal life, I went back into my workshop, where the resizing chamber still stood. I still hadn't told anyone save for Tina what it did, and even she didn't know the full extent of what had happened to me, though I'm sure she suspects much of it.

After all that, you might think that I would have lost all interest in this shrinking business, dismantled the chamber and its controller and smashed the pieces with a hammer, right? But despite all the danger and discomfort I went thorugh, looking back I recalled wonders of the microscopic world and the strange spirituality I'd experienced and, after a time, I decided to shrink myself again.

But this time I wouldn't be working alone. I told Tina about everything and she agreed to watch over me when I shrank and to explore microscopic landscapes. I equipped my wrist device with the ability to communicate directly with her phone, transmitting my messages and images of what I saw so she could share in my awe. Now I spend days at a time as a speck of dust on whatever part of her body she chooses to put me, exploring and sharing my pictures with her. Strange as it is, I don't think I could possibly be happier.