The little boat was alone on the wide, wavy sea.

The clear shimmering waves lapped and licked at the yellow plastic hull, bumping it back and forth with light batting motions that were almost playful, making it bob and turn helplessly.

My unsteady legs struggled to resist the constant swaying and bouncing of the brittle floor beneath my bare feet, as I followed a path around the box of plastic that was the inaccessible cabin down the sternside where I leaned over, staring out as far as I could see.

The sea was bordered on all sides by a white canyon that rose up vertically into the heavens. Some way into the depths, the clear waters ran into what looked like two rounded sandbars, that spanned along the broad sea channel. Not the actual sea floor, but a false bottom, which concealed the floor below.

Something made a wet splash on the other side of the boat, and then the air quaked with musical cadence that rippled through the tension of my skin, triggering muscle twitches in different places of my body. My body hair lifted and trembled to the disturbance. Never mind the source was something so mundane as indolent female humming. Intermittently, another falling missile made a wet splash into the sea, like a thrashing fish.

The water towards the boat’s bow churned as an enormous object slid in sending the boat into a hazardous little dance. As the boat settled, a great long extension like a dolphin probed up under the hull. It curled over rapidly and flicked straight again, sending a spray of water flecking against the plastic. I didn’t react fast enough, and a huge drop smacked into my front, slamming me onto the inner side of the boat, and the humming crackled into thunderous giggling.

The surface tension of the water had me stuck there, as if incredibly heavy, for an instant, before it drained off me again, allowing me to get to my feet. I ducked further under the paper umbrella propped up by tack in the center of the boat, actually a cocktail umbrella that shaded me like a commercial café parasol.

Something like a basketball plopped onto the parasol, and the flimsy paper buckled but managed to hold up. A shiny blob ran off the end of the paper shade, collecting on the plastic deck, clear but iridescent with oily colors.

The harmonic thunder broke suddenly.  Before I could help myself, I rushed to the bow of the boat, moving out from under the edge of the parasol to seize on the quiet, calling up:

“Hey! Caref—!“

A giant white blob came bombing down from the sky. My eyes bulged in alarm as it expanded at sonic speed before it hit, my back smacked into the boat floor and there was just frothing blizzard everywhere. A copious buzzing cocktail of oily petroleum and soap suds tingled my flesh all over, and filled my head with torturous bubbles that felt like they were taking scrubbing brushes to the sensitive epithelial membranes of my airways and mouth. I smeared my hands over my face and body, desperate to wipe it off.

Her booming voice made my eyeballs jitter in their sockets.

“DID YOU SAY SOMETHING?”  

She couldn’t see beyond the parasol that I was stuck to the boat floor, squirming in pain.

Rolling onto my front, I threw up a pint of frothing vomit, which seemed to burn through and clear my stinging throat. Then carefully waded through the puddle of oily bubbles and grasped the bow edge, craning my head up at the megalith emerging from the sea at one end of the pearly white canyon.

The sea encircled and clung to a pair of colossal, jutting boulders – breasts – rising and falling rhythmically upon the water surface. Further up, a dark stone protruding from each boulder; a nipple with a diameter equaling full height of my entire body, which I could have stood on like a platform. Soapy rivulets rolled down from the neck, over the breasts.

Somewhere in the water’s depths below the breasts, I was intensely aware of the shadowy crevice on the sea floor, like the entrance to some hidden underground cave.

My eyes climbed the staggering boulders to the humps of bare shoulder and the bony ridge of collarbone. A curtain of glimmering wet hair was pulled around the side, running down one of these shoulders. The matted jungle of ropes oozed big drops down the upper arm draping over the rim of the canyon. The other shoulder was cocked, the hand lifted to the head, threaded into the lathered bunches of hair, caught midway through massaging the scalp.

I was frozen and silent, mesmerized by the stupendous spectacle of her naked, dripping girth. As I watched, the lifted hand made an absent-minded combing motion, sending a tress of wet hair flicking out. I threw an arm up protectively as frothy spray hailed around the boat, pattering against the parasol.

My voice leapt out of my chest:

“You’re raining on my boat.”

The swift reply clapped the air:

“YOU KEEP CREEPING UP ON ME WHEN I’M NOT LOOKING.”

“Well, I can’t steer this thing.”

Every time her prodigious ass shifted against the tub bottom, or her thighs rubbed, there was a hair-raising sound; a grinding squeak, and the lap and suck of the disturbed water pulled my plastic vessel closer to the wall of her midsection.

The hand resting on the bath rim slid down into the water with a great crash, nearly spilling the boat over.

A moment later, a loud scratching sound started me. It came from beneath the boat, like the sound of hooks scraping against the plastic, before punctuating itself with a couple of sharp taps. I twisted over the edge of the boat to locate the source; a finger like some great sea serpent, the long flashing nail poised against the outer hull. I held my breathe. A flick, a twitch of the finger could capsize the boat. The nail tapped the plastic again.

Thinking she was trying to get my attention, I stared back up at her face.

The great eyes had become caught on the boat, and watched me curiously. Tiny droplets clung to her long lashes, trembling each time she blinked, or joining the thin trails of water running down her nose. The shining wet lips were pressed together slightly. Her expression was inscrutable, but fixated on me. Only her eyelids moved, blinking very slowly.

“What?” I called up.

“EVERYONE NEEDS TO CLEAR THE VICINITY RIGHT NOW. THAT’S YOU.”

“I can’t steer, that’s what I said.”

“WELL…CAN’T SAY I DIDN’T WARN YOU.”

There was a deep gurgling rumble sound from underwater like the eruption from a huge underwater volcano geyser. The water around the boat suddenly turned into a hot tub, gaseous jets stirring the water, displacing giant bubbles and shooting them up bobbing to the glassy surface, and exploding, sending wisps of spray against my cheeks and flecking into my eyes. I gripped the edge of the boat tight, knuckles whitening.

“Oh…gosh damn…” I said miserably, as the air brimmed with noxious sulfurous odor, “I’m going to suffocate and I’m not even underwater.”

Even as I drew breath to say these words, stink piled on stink until it filled my head and cramped my lungs tight and caused my eyes to water until they were red. My diaphragm spasmed in and out as I was overcome by a coughing fit. For an instant I was convinced I was melting like a candle in the sweltering oily fumes, and was afraid my hair had been set on fire. The steamy air made my vision blur, and then rumbled my body with inescapable words that I felt as much as heard:

“ALL PERFECTLY NORMAL, JERRY. IT’S AIR. WE ALL BREATHE IT, ALL THE TIME.”

I struggled to enunciate through the coughing.

“Th-that was not n-normal.”

“YOU ARE SUCH A LITTLE DRAMA QUEEN.”

“King.”

“YOU HEARD ME. AND IF I COULD DO LITTLE FAIRY PUFF FARTS LIKE YOU, BELIEVE ME, I WOULD.”

“My hair is smouldering.”

“FINE. LET ME GET YOU OUT OF THERE,” she offered. At the same time, the fleshy bridge of a finger extended down and hooked its tip over the edge of the boat.

Thinking she was offering to lift me out of the bath, I wandered up to it, climbed onto the shiny plate, like a shiny marble floor under my bare feet, and balanced as it rose up into the sky. The wetness of the nail should have made it more slippery, but actually caused my bare feet to stick to it a little, due to the surface tension of the sheen of liquid coating the keratin.

Half way in its well-intentioned journey, the finger succumbed to sudden whim, rocketing me higher than the bath edge. As the air whizzed past, her great face tilted back against the edge of the bath until neck tendons bulged and the hollow of the neck shadowed. My eyes widened as the floating plate platform oriented itself down over the upturned face, directly above the puffy pink ridges that were the lips. The nostrils blasted me with a gust of warm air before the nail tipped, I slid straight off and dropped into the crevice parting the puffy lips, where I had one terrifying instant to contemplate being sucked down into the crevice and fall into the dark pit which contained the tongue like a caged animal, ready to awaken with gleeful curiosity at sharing its cavernous quarters with a tiny playmate to flick around, examine and inevitably squash.

The next second I went flying up on a spurting fountain of water before spinning back down like a bottle rocket. My body struck a springy protrusion that had been sticking out in my downward trajectory, and stuck there. It was her nipple, like a leathery red pouffle but pushed out sideways.

Triggered by my contact, the red bulge throbbed faintly against me, which transformed into a vibrant shiver as bubbling laughter rang out from above.

“OH, REALLY?” her murmur beat against my eardrums, pretending to be scandalized, as if I had chosen my landing place, or was clinging to her nipple by choice, rather than surface tension. “I FELT THAT, YOU LITTLE PROVOCATEUR!”

She left me in place – affixed to the hardened erogenous nub like a picture on the wall – for the rest of the bath, and even for several moments as she carefully dried herself. Eventually, a fingertip bulged into my direct sight, lining itself up, and giving the nipple a little flick, sending me flying onto the ruffled cloth of her damp towel.

*

My upkeep routine continued to play out day after day: getting my daily standing ‘dab’ wash, doing my best to power through the piles of food I was given at mealtimes, being put to bed in the pillowy, if skin-flake dusted navel, climbing out each new morning.

Jennifer had taken time off work for the time being to look after me, but we didn’t know how long this was going to work out. It was another thing we didn’t discuss in depth. My funds covered us, but she enjoyed her work and got too much nervous energy being at home. However, she couldn’t stomach the thought of leaving me on my own, either. I was wracking my brains on how to work around this; or at least how to convince her that I could be trusted on my own, but I was coming up short. She had resolved to be my keeper – literally keeping me in her possession almost all the time – and she refused to budge on her position.

It seemed I had abundant free time with not much to do, but this was misleading. Because I was so tiny, it took forever for me to physically get anywhere or do anything, so much of my time was spent wandering, like some miniscule nomad in the never-ending desert of magnified surfaces; rustling carpet fibers (very rare because Jen wouldn’t let me on the floor), wood panel, glass top, and lush rolling surfaces of Jen’s body (also, admittedly rare, because my tiny ticklish movements vexed her).

On the tenth day since my second miniaturization, we got a surprise visit to the house.

It would not be the first surprise.

It started simply enough, with a knock at the door. I knew at once the visitor must be someone who’d come by the house before, because they ignored the newly installed door bell.

She got the door. There were rapid voices; frequent interjections by her. She sounded angry. The male voice kept doggedly muttering below her vehement exclamations. Then her voice went quiet – seemingly mid-sentence. There was muttering. Her voice had lost most of its volume. Then footsteps bounded up the hallway.

“WHERE IS HE?”

An older man’s voice, faintly tinged with a French accent.

Then a man burst into the living room, scanning the room with dark, purposeful eyes.

Remigus de Lautrec, we meet again.

I saw the machine tucked under his arm and knew it was him immediately, even before I’d seen his face. It looked different than I’d last seen it, some weeks ago, when it had the inconspicuous design of something found in a garden shed. I remembered it had a half-exposed steel canister fitted into a plastic outer casing that had dials and switches on one side, and a black handlebar.

Now the apparatus had undergone a radical makeover. The tough plastic outer housing had been upgraded to an alloy that shone like molten chrome, distorting reflections into rainbow moiré fuzz. The semi-exposed inner canister was now a multi-segmented black drum, one end glowing faintly. The dials were all gone. Where they used to be, there was just a sleek screen, whose lights projected up off the screen like a hologram, and looking like a table of numbers side-by-side as if converting time zones.

My eyes finally lifted to roam the extensive geography of the man’s facial features, and my anxiety jumped up, suspecting for a moment the man was a total stranger. It was Remy, but it didn’t look like him. Like the machine, he’d had a makeover, an extreme one, and not necessarily for the better.

His skin was coarser, tanner, brow lined, shadows under his eyes, and he had scars around the side of his jaw, which looked long healed. His widow’s peak had receded remarkably; the remaining hair around the sides of his head had gone silver. His brows were bushier and his eyes – which used to shift around nervously – were now grave and pensive. Last time I'd seen him, he seemed to have mentally recovered from his own excursion down to ankle height, but with the look of him now, maybe not.  He looked weathered, like he’d blown in from a terrible storm.

Even his fashion sense was new and alarming. He wore articles of clothing I couldn’t identify with any brand or style, and little of it matched: a strange-collared, sleeveless coat, jersey and pants made from something like leather but ribbed and ultra-flexible looking, sneakers with a sleek design almost like a sports car. A mechanical looking gold watch on one wrist, and on the other wrist, metal studs in a circuit pattern. I guessed it was some kind of jewellery glued onto his skin, except there was a similar metal design on the side of the machine, near the holographic panel – bizarrely, like an anode and cathode pair. He must really love the machine if he was going getting tattoos or jewellery implants in honor of it, I thought darkly.

My hackles had raised at his appearance, and not just for its eccentricity. Due to the routine of our previous run-ins, the stage felt set for a duel, rather than a genial reunion between old friends. And I’d been burned by this magic trick before.

Jennifer dashed out in front of Remy, making straight for me on the table. The world darkened, Remy, the living room, and herself lost to me, as her fingertips closed in like collapsing walls, making me feel as if I was being smothered all around by firm, vanilla-scented pillows. As the pressure increased, the pillows turned into mattresses. Increasing again, the mattresses turned into thick foam walls. Then brick walls, the ridges of fingerprints growing abrasive.

I could no longer breathe or move. My ribs began to bend inwards and my muscles were like overinflated balloons they were so tight. My body throbbed and stung like a zit being squeezed, and pretty soon more than just pus was going to explode out.

When Jen said she didn’t like to pinch me, well, this was why. In order to ensure I didn’t accidentally slip out from between her fingers, the necessary pressure she had to apply onto my body was intolerable for more than a minute or so. She would only pinch me in an emergency, and to her, Remy’s appearance must have presaged one to justify capturing me between her fingerprints. Even though it hurt.

My feet left the table. Then in one swooping go, the pressure released as her fingers opened again, I dropped through the air and landed on the cushioned bed of her upturned palm, trying to breathe through painful rib cramps and twinging joints. Long shadows stretched over her palm as her fingers curled up over my head, providing her hand with a natural canopy.

“Remy,” I started, when my body had stopped throbbing with pain, “how did you get inside?” I had to shout at the top of my lungs to ensure I was heard.

His footsteps thudded nearer as he must have seen me conveyed into Jen’s hand. He probably had not heard me, though; he had been too far away.

“GREETINGS JERRY,” he intoned somewhere over my head, and in a voice that was gruffer than last time we’d spoke. “ARGH…” he groaned under his breath, “…YOU ARE THAT MUCH SMALLER THAN I EVEN REMEMBER. THIS MUST NOT GO ON. WE ARE GOING TO FIX YOUR FUTURE.”

My brow creased in wonderment. Even the way he spoke sounded different. No more of the jarring, ‘trying-to-sound-hip’ slang I remembered, punctuated by blathering, nasally nerd-speak. Now his voice sounded firm and assured.

“You want to use the machine again?” I sighed.

“WE MUST. IT IS DESTINY.”

Jen scoffed.

“NO. YOUR DESTINY IS TO LEAVE. NOW.”

Remy ignored her.

“JERRY, WE MUST SPEAK ALONE.”

“JERRY'S NOT GOING ANYWHERE WITHOUT ME," Jen insisted.

“What do you want, Remy?” I said.

“IT IS TOO MUCH SIMPLY TO SAY,” he replied. “WE MUST UNDERTAKE ANOTHER PASSAGE. IF IT DOES NOT HAPPEN TODAY, IT WILL HAPPEN NEVER.” He gave a pained sigh. “OVERLOADING THE TACHYONIC COILS DURING THE GEOMAGNETIC FLIP WAS NOT A CLEVER IDEA—”

“You only realize the machine was a mistake now?”

“THE MALFUNCTION WAS NOT MECHANIC; MY INSTRUCTIONS TO YOU WERE VAGUE. BUT THE MECHANICS HAVE BEEN OVERHAULED; SHE IS NOW BOOTING A QUANTUM A.I. INTERFACE TO AUTOMATE EXECUTIVE FUNCTIONS. I DON’T GIVE YOU INSTRUCTIONS ANYMORE, JERRY, WE START HER, I INPUT THE RESULT INTO THE PROGRAM, AND GO.”

As his rapid-pace words crashed over my head like a wave of incoherent white noise, my brow furrowed with confusion.

“Well…that sounds even more complex than last time, so count me out.”

More complexity could mean more things could go wrong, and Remy could have even less hope of knowing how to fix it, if there was even enough of me left over to fix.

The second time I’d been around the machine’s operation, I’d been reduced to the size of a mouse. The fourth time; the size of a rice grain – my current size — and I was now down to my last poker chips; I couldn’t afford to place another big bet on my size. Any more ill-fated jaunts of reduction and I’d end up trapped inside the fuzzy, moisture-logged microbial land of subspace. Then my immediate ‘destiny’ might include being snacked upon by one of the microscopic Demodex mites that lived on Jennifer’s eyelashes.

Now I found myself traipsing on the shadowy folds of the soft platform of the curled up hand without realizing it. This must have tickled the owner, because the overhead canopy of fingers twitched and rippled, before the giant index finger of her other hand slithered in beneath them and prodded at me, the extended white nail edge jabbing my shoulder, dumping me over onto my front, my fall cushioned by her soft, warm flesh. As the fingertip retreated again, I got to my feet and made an effort not to move.

My eyes traced the shadowy channels lining the inside of her palm, intersecting, splintering and curving off, and recombining. My brain was at work coming up with some persuasive reasoning to compel Remy to ‘undertake another passage’ over the front door’s welcome mat and down the front driveway. I knew from previous experience that when angry, Remy could snap and throw a fist, and I didn’t want to inadvertently get Jen in the firing line. In unarmed mano-el-mano (or, more precisely, mano-el-irmã), she could have dropped him on the floor with some Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, but he was armed with the shiny new machine and I wasn’t confident he wouldn’t try to shrink her down in self-defence.

The long-denied joy of holding her in my arms again held no attraction to me if it meant we were both stuck in this vulnerable position. The thought was too horrifying, too shattering to even consider. I would have gladly sacrificed myself to the Demodex than tempt a world which contained a Jennifer in miniature, even if I was normal size again. I would have never told her because it would have made her scoff or laugh or even pity me, but the thought that I could accidentally physically hurt her with my bare hands – particularly in an attempt to show affection – struck me cold.

Suddenly, something else Remy had said made an impact somewhere in my brain. My eyes went wide.

“Wait, did you say, ‘quantum’?” I blurted. “Since when does that technology even exist?” Then again, since when did time travel exist? Since when could people be shrunk?

Remy’s grainy voice hummed with electricity:

“I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION, NO?" 

My eyes rattled over the holographic numbers flashing on the machine's panel, none of them projecting the current time or date.

“How long were you working on this?" I said. "It looks like it’s had you up all night.” That was an understatement; with his thinned gray hair and darkened, lined face, he looked like he was in recovery from a serious illness.

“AH, SLEEPLESS NIGHTS,” he said with brittle amusement, “MANY. BUT WORTH IT.”

There was a jostling motion. Jennifer had slid up onto the edge of the table, cradling her hand – carrying me – on her thigh. Maybe she was settling in to hear a big story.

Remy corrected himself:

“OR, IT WILL BE WORTH IT, ONCE THE LAST TANGLE IS IRONED OUT.”

I cut in:

“Assuming you don’t make me even smaller—”

“THIS...THIS PROBLEM IS BIGGER THAN YOUR TARGET SIZE, JERRY.”

There was quiet for a moment, as we waited for him to elaborate. It went on for so long that I wondered if he’d changed his mind about using the machine after all. But then he took a deep breath and began:

“I WILL TELL YOU A STORY,” he said impatiently. “FICTION, I PROMISE. ONE DAY, A MAN UNDERTOOK TO TRAVEL DIHEDRAL…”

From outside the cup of Jennifer’s hand, Remy’s voice started bounding around, suggesting he was pacing around the carpet now.

“…BUT THE PASSAGE OPERATOR – AHM – COMMITTED AN ERROR, AND INSTEAD THE WOMAN WENT DIHEDRAL...” 

I rubbed my palm against my face, closing my eyes.

Remy’s grizzled, ill appearance, his low, deadened tone of voice, his bizarre, mismatched wardrobe. It was confirmed: he was completely insane. He’d always been a little bonkers, and now he was more than a lot bonkers.

I hadn’t caught it at first because it wasn’t a flagrant type of screaming mad. It was a subtle crazy; you could almost make sense out of what he was saying.

For instance, in foggy memory I recalled ‘anhedral’ was the plane along which you reversed in time, but following slight angular deviations from the anhedral would cause you to reverse in size instead. At the perfect angle, you reversed in time with only a few millimetres height loss. Unfortunately, it seemed I flunked geometry: I had previously deviated from the correct angle, and shrunk to an extreme degree, without any corresponding time jump.

…And if travel in the vicinity of the anhedral plane caused downsizes, it seemed to mean that travel towards the dihedral plane caused forward time travel – hypothetically, at least – or corresponding physical upsizes. 

Remy went on:

“…BUT AH, SHE IS TOO DIHEDRAL. THE OPERATOR IS UP AGAINST THE WALL. THE MAN IS SNUFFED BY THE DISTORTION. IT WAS NEVER MEANT, AND MUST BE UNDONE.”

“Remy,” I interrupted, “I’m into this time travel stuff, but I’m not an expert. You have to dumb it down a little for us.”

He hadn’t heard me.

“MAY BE FICTION, JERRY,” he said, no longer rambling, but direct, “OR MAY BE NOT. IT IS UP TO YOU, FRIEND.”

Even if fiction, it sounded sinister. The words were making more and more sense, but the picture coming to light was too stark to be believed. Jennifer had been silent, I think she understood it even less than I did. She didn’t know about the anhedral and dihedral stuff.

What bothered me the most was Remy’s tone. In the past, whenever he’d propositioned using the machine with me, he’d always been breathlessly excited, like a little kid getting the excuse to goof off. But there was none of that boyish energy now, just urgent entreaty. He wasn’t propositioning we use the machine to satisfy scientific curiosity, but because something really bad was going to happen if we didn’t…But—

“How do you know—” I quickly changed tack. “How did you come up with that story, Remy?”

He paused, then said:

“WHEN THE FORMER AND THE LATER MEET, THEY MUST CANCEL OUT. MY FORMER WAS SET TO COME TOMORROW, BUT FOR MY DEVIATION. IT WAS NECCESARY. BUT NOW I, TOO, MUST PART.”

"What? You're not making sense."

Jennifer snickered under her breath like she thought that was just putting it too mildly.

“THE BACKWARD GATEWAY WAS VERY WIDE,” said Remy, solemn as ever. "BUT I AM HERE AGAIN.”

Suddenly what he was trying to say hit me with sickening clarity. The air seemed to leave my chest like I’d been punched.

“You’re not from here, are you Remy…?”

I was trying to remember to keep my voice loud. Just how wide was his backward gateway? His hair had not been gray when I’d seen him last, but black.

Now his voice had acquired a tone of relief, as if I was finally speaking sense.

“I DEVIATED HIM, JERRY, AS I TOLD YOU. HE WAS THE ONE IN MY STORY. HE WAS ONLY TRYING TO HELP BUT HE WOULD HAVE RUINED EVERYTHING. I SPEND MY ENTIRE LIFE REGRETTING IT. NOW, AT LAST, I AM BACK AND ABLE TO FIX THIS FOR YOU…BEFORE HE CAME.”

“JERRY,” Jennifer barked, losing her patience now with Remy’s obfuscation, “WHAT IS GOING ON?"

Letting her question hang for the moment, I said to Remy:

“Oh, no. You’re going to fulfil the cycle. You’re going to make –whatever it is—happen again, like a closed loop.”

“NO, NO. NOT CLOSED LOOPS. BRANCHING CHANNELS. THE QUANTUM A.I. STREAMS THEM. AND WE ARE SWITCHING THE CHANNELS TODAY."

This was getting too heady for me. I was half tempted to throw my hands up and race along with Remy, do whatever he said, just to make it all go away.

Jen must have picked up my indecision and it seemed to worry her. As I vacillated, she announced:

“NOT INTERESTED.”

She said this as firmly and dismissively as if Remy was a door-to-door salesman.

“Jennifer,” I cut in, “if I don’t do this, I think something weird is going to happen, and I’m going to die.”

Her face was blank, restrained, as she brought her cupped palm up, and me, right up under eyes, bathing me in long sweeps of her warm breath. It was like she was trying to peer into my soul.

“IT SCARES ME,” she said finally, unable to bring herself to say any more.

“The idea of spending the rest of my life like this scares me.”

“DON'T PUT THAT ON ME," she pleaded. "DON’T MAKE ME CHOOSE."

“You don’t have to choose,” I said firmly as I stared up at her, balling my fists. “It’s my choice. Let me make it, goddamn it.”

Her eyelashes began to flutter with a succession of stunned blinks. Then her eyes closed and brow crumpled like she was trying not to cry.

I looked down, putting my hands on my head. She rarely cried and it threw me off guard. Also, her imminent tears were at risk of bombing me like water balloons.

“I’m sorry,” I said, pained. At the same time, how could I blame her without being a total hypocrite? If our roles were reversed I might have done everything humanly possible to keep her away from the machine, too. But then I wouldn’t want her to be perpetually stuck tiny either. It was too hard to even imagine.

“Look,” I added, trying to sound optimistic and reassuring, “I think Remy has got this thing working properly now. He understands it a lot more.”

—And thought: he’s had a whole lifetime to figure it out.

With her eyes still closed, she pressed a hand against her brow. Then, taking a breath and composing herself, she looked away.

“IF YOU MUST…BUT I’M GOING TO HATE IT. I’M GOING TO HATE EVERY SECOND OF IT. THE MOMENT – THE VERY MOMENT YOU GET BIGGER, YOU HAVE TO END IT.”

Remy had gone silent but, somewhere unseen beyond the cup of Jennifer’s hand, I could hear him fiddling with the machine.

Then he must have switched it on, because there was an electric snap that made all the hairs on my body rise, as a low humming filled the air, so powerful that it had vibrations coursing through my bones and my eyeballs were shaking inside the sockets.

“I MUST BE THE OPERATOR SO I WILL TAKE JERRY THROUGH,” he said to Jennifer. 

“Wait,” I stopped him. “Won’t that make you grow as well?”

“WE MUST SEPARATE,” he replied. “YOU ONE WAY, I WILL GO...ELSEWHERE.”

“Okay,” I said, feeling more confident knowing Remy would be diving into the deep end with me. Of course, it hadn’t helped back when he’d gotten himself shrunk, one time. But this Remy seemed older, wiser, and had a more mature, commanding presence, like he really knew his shit backwards and forwards.

Not seemed older, I reminded myself, was.

“I’ll do it.”

I clapped my hands together and began bouncing up and down on the plush surface of Jennifer’s palm, shaking my arms like I was going to go run a race. Then I stopped and gazed up at her, who was watching me blankly, her eyes beneath her long lashes, shadowed and remote.

“Let me do it,” I said. “Please.”

I got down on my knees, making a begging gesture with my hands, shaking them for emphasis. Acts of worshipful begging tended to open doors with her. I was probably overselling it, resembling some tiny naked pagan cultist in prostration to a great stone goddess come to life. But I didn’t care what I looked like, the practical reality was, I had no way off her hand without her assent.

She stared down at me in silence, her face drawn, not even a flicker of a self-satisfied smile. But finally, she gave a long, low sigh, and the world outside her palm bumped as she slid off the table. 

“WHAT'S GOING TO HAPPEN TO HIM?” she said to Remy, who replied:

“ONE BRIEF PASSAGE AND YOUR AMOR WILL BE RETURNED TO YOU FULL SIZE, AND I WILL BE GONE FROM YOUR LIVES.”

Judging by Jennifer’s cold reception of Remy, the latter part probably appealed to her almost as much as the former part. Possibly even moreso.

“’FULL SIZE’ MEANS…MY HEIGHT,” she confirmed.

“THAT IS CORRECT,” Remy said, somewhat distractedly. "WHERE HE STOOD PREVIOUSLY."

I hadn't stood at Jen's height previously – hovering a little shorter than her –but that was beside the point. 

Remy carried on:

"AND IT WILL BE AS IF HE WAS NEVER SHRUNK AND NONE OF THE PAST MONTHS EVER HAPPENED. ZAP!” He clicked his fingers, making my ears pop painfully. “ERASED! GONE.”

She looked away, and bit her lip.

He directed her to a spot in the room, where she placed me down on the carpet, by the big toe of her right foot. It had been several days since I had been on the floor – ten days ago in fact, when I’d first re-emerged from my previous ‘jolt’ in Remy’s machine, stared around the beige, dusty alien desert that was the carpet, and realized with a plummet of horror how truly tiny I was.

The view of my girlfriend’s face was immediately obstructed by the underside edge of her toenail, extending like a transparent bookshelf at my head, the underneath shadowed by the dark paste and debris that clung there. Maybe if she didn’t insist on keeping her nails a little longer than necessary the undersides wouldn’t attract so much mysterious, stomach-turning filth. At my size, I was small enough to have fitted in under her nail lengthways and that gunk would have adhered to me like glue.

Taking steps back, I got a view straight up her body that sucked the breath out of my lungs.

It was like looking straight up a mountain, immense legs converging to a torso that formed a complete wall reaching higher up into space. The carpet groaned as she transferred her weight from one foot to the other, and the bulges of toned calf and thigh muscles, paradoxically, like fluidly shifting boulders beneath the lush sandy expanse of her skin, peppered in the tiny dimples of pores and shiny white grass of tiny hair.

Clothing pulled around the form like the fabric of a hot air balloon, but extending in the suggestively adiposal globes shaping her hourglass hips and breasts. 

I had no hope of reaching her face from the floor; it ascended up to a ceiling hazy by distance, as if seen through a veil of clouds. She stared down at me as if from another world, somehow outside the planet – hovering up in the atmosphere – instead of standing on it. Her face was so far away I refused to believe she could even see me, or I must have been a mere speck – it was only that it was so comparatively big that I could still see it. Her brow was tense, scrutinizing, as if trying to figure out what I was. From her vantage point I probably did not even look human anymore, but an infinitesimal featureless blotch of color against the carpet, a blur, an upright-standing wheat grain. I could have been plucked up by a mother bird and passed down its baby’s gullet.

I’m an insect, I realized with a cold sweat, now more desperate than ever to proceed with the jolt.

Remy then directed her to go and stand across the room, out of the way.

She hovered above me, as if unable to wrench herself away. I waited for her to say something but it didn’t come. Instead, the tip of an enormous finger alighted upon the crown of my head, making an attempt to brush over my hair with as minimal interference as possible, but unavoidably causing my knees to buckle under its weight. My hair stuck to the finger; its surface faintly damp, as if she had kissed it.

Then it withdrew up into the sky again. She turned and padded back over the carpet, every gargantuan step causing the floor to quake, and carpet fibers to shiver around me, tickling my legs. I watched the creased underside of each mammoth sole lift, soar into the air, and drop as it receded across the floor.

“READY, JERRY?” called Remy’s voice. “I AM ENGAGING HER NOW. THE A.I. WILL CALCULATE THE OPTIMAL PATH FOR YOUR TARGET HEIGHT. ALL YOU MUST DO IS FOLLOW THE WHITE LASER. ONCE YOU ARE FULL HEIGHT, IT WILL POINT YOU OUT OF THE PASSAGE AND VOILÀ!"

“Simple enough,” I said, but he couldn’t hear me; from ground level, no one could anymore.

He quickly added:

“ONE FINAL DETAIL, BUT MOST IMPORTANT. YOU DO NOT EXIT THE PASSAGE BEFORE THE WHITE LASER'S DEMISE.”

“Got it,” I said, more to myself than anyone.

This could actually work, I thought to myself. And if it did – boom! – old me again.

My nerves were firing up, I was pumped, skin prickling. The danger made it even more attractive – exciting – almost irresistible. I had to try. I had to know.