It seemed Remy was aiming the machine now.

Or, I guessed he was. It was difficult to see what was happening, I was getting cricks in my neck from twisting it around and craning it back so much.

But I did see clearly what happened next.

Reality folded apart and curved around, revealing a dim tunnel where the faint traces of entering light speckled and smeared and bent like paint in the rain. As the walls of reality got closer to the tunnel, they bent and corkscrewed around the edge, most of it not actually penetrating the substance of the darkness.

At my previous sizes, the tunnel had been awesomely intimidating enough, but now it was a gaping leviathan; a celestial black hole that filled up my entire visual field when viewed head on, a wall of something purer and richer than darkness itself, darker than the moonless night sky.

Gazing in, I now found myself too horrified to take a single step closer; it was like stumbling upon the entrance to an abandoned mine shaft at midnight, and being told to run inside to the end, to see how deep it went. I was staring into a black maw that was intent on swallowing me alive, the only sane response was to turn and run the other way.

The terrible object staring blindly at me would have been entirely invisible to Jennifer, at least from where Remy had directed her to stand. Good thing. I had once asked her what it had looked like when I had shrunk the first time. From my point of view, I had tripped into the portal and awoken shrunk. But to her, there had been no bending of reality, black tunnels, or corkscrewing passages. Initially, this had me puzzled, but I’d come to understand that from most angles, the tunnel was invisible; walking around it caused it to fold up by perspective illusion, like a piece of paper being turned sideways. This was why it was important to aim the machine properly and position all third persons out of the way, so you got the open angle, and witnesses only got the folded up one.

Then I saw it running along in front of me: the gossamer white ribbon of the laser pointing into the tunnel along a slight diagonal angle, the only source of light not being bent or blurred by its proximity to the black sphere.

My muscles twitching with apprehension, I forced myself to start following the tunnel, trailing the white laser. At first nothing happened. In the past, these passages were practically instantaneous – ‘jolts’ we called them. But this one was taking longer. Was that bad? Was something wrong? My mind flitted anxiously. Then I remembered Remy’s instructions: don’t leave the tunnel before reaching the end of the laser. I took a deep breath, my walking pace relaxed. Just be patient.

As I kept going, and with nothing but the void surrounding me, my mind began to wander.

It was weird, Remy had never actually named his machine, like ‘time cannon’ or ‘portal splitter’ or something cool. Maybe he was figuring out the copyright.

Then I realized something odd was happening: the tunnel perimeter had shrunk, as if I was walking away from it, rather than travelling deeper inside. The closer I moved in, the more it seemed to move away.

But the tunnel was not actually shrinking; I was growing.

YES!

My heart trilled with joy. It was actually happening, after all this uncertainty and despair and frustration and waiting, I was going to rejoin normal human civilization again. No longer would I be an object of peculiar fascination, at the risk of being mistaken for a toy or a pet. I was going to get to be boring and normal again, unnoticed in groups of people; no more pity by the male sex, no more coddling by the female sex. I would be able to wrap my arms around Jennifer and lift her off her feet, we could go outside together hand in hand, and me in the driver seat taking her to her favorite clubs and restaurants and dance and sit across from each other, our eyelines level, kissing over the tabletop and holding hands underneath it, strolling down her favorite other haunt, the boardwalk by the Bay. I would take up new work somewhere – with a normal sized body I could be anything I wanted, anything – and be a normal boyfriend who went out the door at nine and came home at five and showered his girlfriend with affection in the normal way. Everything would be different, and we would finally achieve the kind of normal, settled, stable relationship that had eluded us the first time…

All of these thoughts zipped through my mind as I was running now, giddy, racing the white laser like a sprinter trying to obtain a new best record. The black tunnel perimeter continued to gradually constrict inwards as I grew that much nearer to my goal. Literally grew with every step.

I couldn’t see Remy anymore, but the surrounding room was all but forgotten anyway, there was just the dream zooming towards me with open arms, I was about to crash into normal reality again, so near I could almost taste it, could feel it’s warm, long-promised embrace enfolding my rapidly up-sizing body—

A flesh-colored wall-like object dropped in front of me, and I smacked into it face first. My feet scuffed over the ground, legs tripping over each other. Right before I ended up on the carpet, the wall curled fiercely around my torso, squeezing my ribcage in, pushing all the air out. Since I’d just been sprinting and puffing, this made my face go red.

My feet touched off the carpet as I was zoomed into the air. There was a sucking feeling, like the cling of surface tension, then the perimeter of the tunnel seemed to burst like a bubble; the colors of reality tumbling in like curling ocean waves, shrinking the black tunnel down into nothing.

In the tight embrace of my containment, I gasped for breath, blinking dumbfounded at the walls of the living room boxing me in; the walls, floor and ceiling closer, now with perceptible boundaries. Now the room was bigger, gratefully so, but it still wasn’t big enough. My head wasn’t up high up where it should be and my feet weren’t touching the floor – they were a long way up from the floor.

There was a flash of unpleasant déjà vu as I looked around at everything; the furniture, walls, objects lying around. I didn’t need to pull out measuring tape to work out how big I was. I was scores taller than I had been five minutes ago (if the tunnel had even lasted that long), but still only back to my previous size, approximate to a mouse. Not big enough. When the tunnel collapsed, all of my dreamlike visions and aspirations had melted with it, like mirages promising an oasis that turned up a dusty sand dune.

How could it have gone wrong – again? What had happened? I’d been so, so close.

All my giddy elation was twisting into raw frustration. My vision blurred as if my brain was refusing to accept the reality before me – actually caused by tears leaking from my eyes.

There was a dropping sensation, a ‘whumphf’ of impact, and I came to rest on Jennifer’s knee as she sat on the sofa. Her warm hand encircled my naked body, keeping me contained. No longer a floating titanic monster, just her recognizable hand, but blown up in size compared to me. Big but manageable; with fingers stretched out I could have laid on her palm like a single bed.

I twisted around inside her grip until, looking up, found her profile viewing me from just above. Even though she was still massive compared to me, she was paradoxically smaller – at least than I remembered. Smaller and bigger at the same time. It was like seeing double. I had to stare and blink at her for a moment until the illusion cleared.

She gave me a small smile.

“SURPRISE,” she said dryly. “IT WORKED.”

Her voice rumbled, but didn’t make my ears ring, as before. It was like there was white noise in my ears and everything sounded muted. But there was no actual noise, it was another perceptive illusion. Everything was quieter. My brain expected her voice to sound louder, by habit, and was trying to process that it didn’t, telling me that my ears must be blocked or something. Very disorienting. I shook my head, trying to get the feeling to clear.

“What??” I said shakily. “But…” Then I yelled out: “Remy! I don’t think it—!”

“BABE, REMY LEFT,” she said gently.

Twisting around in her grip again, my eyes flashed around the room. Sure enough, there was no one there. It was just us on the couch. No sign of Remy anywhere. Not even his machine.

“Where’d he go…?” I began, feeling faint.

“HE DID SAY HE WAS GOING TO LEAVE US ONCE YOU’D GROWN,” she reminded me calmly. “HE MUST HAVE LEFT WHILE I WASN’T LOOKING. DIDN’T REALIZE IT WAS SO URGENT, THOUGH.”

“No,” I said slowly, “he jolted with me, but he went somewhere else.”

“RIGHT,” Jennifer replied, unable to keep the disinterest out of her voice. “I DON’T KNOW ABOUT YOU, BUT I’LL BE ECSTATIC IF I NEVER SEE THAT MACHINE EVER AGAIN.”

My mouth hung open as I tried to process everything through my stunned, sluggish brain. I said weakly:

“If you’d just waited another minute it would’ve made me normal again.”

She gave me a long expressionless look, then said quietly:

“I PRETTY MUCH FIGURED THAT, YEAH.”

“Then why did you pull me out early?”

“I HAD TO, BEFORE IT HURT YOU. LOOK WHAT HAPPENED TO REMY.” She shrugged. “DO YOU EVEN KNOW? I DON’T. HE COULD BE DEAD.”

“I don’t think he’s dead,” I said slowly, as if saying it and believing it made it true. By her flippant tone, I don’t think she really believed he was, either.

“WHATEVER. ALL I KNOW IS, HE DISAPPEARED WHILE YOU WERE GROWING. MAYBE HE WALTZED OUT THE DOOR WHEN MY BACK WAS TURNED, BUT IT FREAKED ME OUT THAT SUDDENLY HE WAS GONE AND I HAD TO GET YOU OUT OF THERE BEFORE YOU WERE GONE, TOO.”

Her voice didn’t match what she was saying. She didn’t sound freaked out.

Ignoring that, I thought out loud:

“He must have jolted back in time – I mean, forward, back to his own time – back to the future,” I said before I could help myself. “That’s how the machine operates. That’s what it’s supposed to do. It’s a time machine.”

Maybe the ‘back to the future’ line was a touch hokey for her liking. She rolled her head right back with exasperation.

“I’M SERIOUS: IF I HEAR THE WORDS ‘TIME TRAVEL’ OR ‘TIME MACHINE’ OR ‘TIME WARP’ EVER AGAIN, THE ONLY ‘JOLTING’ YOU ARE GOING TO BE DOING IS JOLTING UP AND DOWN IN MY HAND AS I SHAKE IT.”

My mouth clamped shut again.

I’d told her before that the machine was a time machine but she refused to accept it. She had always assumed I had hit my head during the jolt I’d undertaken at the ‘Flip’ party and a resulting concussion had caused me to dream up the time travel aspect. She had never seen a demonstration of its time travelling power. As far as she was concerned the machine was a size-changing machine all along, if not a downright death trap. Only, Remy had looked older, but that could be chalked up to serious illness.

I changed tack:

“Look, I know this thing had risks. Big risks. But given the opportunity for me to be full size again, don’t you think the risks were worth it?”

“TO GET YOUR SIZE BACK?” she said flatly. “NO. IF THE RISK WAS YOU VANISHING INTO NOTHING; THEN NO.”

“That’s what this whole enterprise was for,” I said, a little hotly, “getting my size back. You’re acting like that’s a surprise.”

She said in an odd, quiet way:

“IT WAS A SURPRISE.”

The argument was hopeless. She looked different now, and not just deceptively ‘smaller’. It was her expression; the way she’d used to look at me when I’d first been shrunk, or the morning after, a dreamy kind of disbelief, and fierce coverture. It unnerved me.

It was a look of hunger; both the pain of it and the relief of imminent satisfaction in equal measure. Inconveniently, I remembered we hadn’t had sex since I’d been shrunk to a centimeter tall: ten days. That had to be a very long dry spell for her, intolerably long, nearly stretching back to when dinosaurs walked the planet.

Maybe the look she was giving me was only another perceptive illusion because it was quickly tamed again, subdued to something gentler. Her fingertip extended towards my face to gently scratch and tickle my cheek.

“WHY ARE YOU LOOKING AT ME LIKE THAT?” she said, sounding on the verge of laughter.

I sighed, slumping comfortably against her warm flesh as I resigned myself that this was my world now, and it wasn’t the best of all possible worlds, but it wasn’t a bad world either. There might have been realms worse – Demodex land, for instance, and other alternate ways Remy’s story could have ended, where I died and Jennifer never forgave herself, or even worlds worse than my death, where she was shrunk and I never recovered from the cataclysmic shock of it.

And in comparison, this didn’t seem half bad.