He walked out of the staff room and wandered across the school grounds. Noticing a bush track, and keen to stay anywhere that reminded him of Colleen, he walked along the track and came to the very place where he didn’t know that Colleen had eaten Henry.

He heard the sounds of the students making their usual playground noise during the lunch hour and it was all hollow and meaningless in his ears. When school resumed after lunch, he left the grounds unnoticed and went home.

In the months ahead, the bush track became his nostalgia place, the last place he’d been to that had any association with Colleen, being a part of her former vocational school’s grounds. Every Saturday, when the school was deserted, he would go through the grounds and along the bush track, and think about whatever was going on in his life: the selling of the gold, the things he would spend some of it on, and whatever else kept his mind active. He began to explore the pathways which ran from the rock through the valley beyond, and managed to go a slightly different way almost every Saturday, until the day he went further than ever before. While he was walking, the valley’s trees suddenly disappeared. He was in a completely different form of countryside. All of the foliage seemed to be gigantic.

Was he having a relapse from the process of having been shrunken and enlarged all those months ago? He stepped backwards, and found that the valley woods had reappeared. Then he stepped forward and found that the gigantic garden had reappeared.

It must be a portal to a giant land, he thought. He imagined that he would be as small to the inhabitants of this world as he had been to the inhabitants of earth during his time as a reduced man. He decided to explore the giant garden and make it an extension of what the valley behind the school had been as his nostalgia place. He made his way through a huge flowerbed, marvelling at the beauty of petals which were so large. He’d never had time to appreciate the flowers in the meadow, when he’d had to spend all his time hiding underground.

Darkness seemed to descend overhead, and he looked up to see if the giant sky was likely to deliver a lot of rain onto his head. However, the shadow was not caused by clouds, but by a giant long skirt. He looked upwards further, until his eyes fell upon the face of a giant lady staring down at him. It was Colleen.

They looked at eachother in silence for several moments.

“I guess you know I had to destroy your machine,” he said.

“I assumed as much. I still had the designs. I built another one and had my friend Frances Woodfield use it on me, before I gave it to her,” said Colleen.

“I did try to find you again. I’ve been to your house, but it was gone. The school told me you’d left your job there. In the end, I never thought I’d see you again, and now…”