Mark wasn’t sure how it happened.  He just knew it happened.

He was sitting on his living room couch one day, eating a bowl of ramen and watching Naruto when he began to feel light-headed. The light-headedness turned into a stomachache, which forced him to put his bowl of noodles on the coffee table in front of him and curl up in a bowl, holding his stomach and squinting his eyes in pain.

The pain became so unbearable, Mark let out a scream. Eventually, sitting in the curled-up position with his eyes closed led to him falling asleep. When he woke up, the pain was gone. Something felt different, however. He stood up to notice the couch was the size of a major city with no buildings, cars or people. He looked around to see each end of the couch was the length away from him as Las Vegas was to Los Angeles.

How had the couch become so…big? He walked to the end of the couch and looked down. The white carpet on the floor below seemed to be over 200 feet away. He then looked ahead of him to see his bowl of ramen which was now the size of The Bean in Chicago.

How had everything around him grown? Or was it that he had shrunk? Either way, how had this happened?

He needed to reach out to someone. But who? He hadn’t spoken to his mother in four months, and his father was all the way in Florida. He reached into his pocket and discovered his phone was also very small. At least that had shrunk along with him.

It took him a moment, but Mark finally thought of who to call. How had he not thought of her before?“Hello?” the woman on
the other line said

“Ame! You’ve got to help me! I’ve somehow shrunk to the size of an ant and I’m not sure how to get back to normal size!” Mark had called his best friend, Amethyst, who he called Ame for short. The two had been best friends since the second grade, and had always hung out and were there for each other, even now into their late twenties.

“What?” Amethyst asked as if she hadn’t heard him.

“I’ve shrunk. I need help. Can you please come over?” Mark asked her.

“Yeah. I’ll be right over. Is the door unlocked?”

“I sure hope so.” Mark didn’t remember if he locked the door before going to bed the night prior. If it was, Amethyst wouldn’t be able to get in the house because, well, how was he to get to the other side of his one-bedroom apartment?

“Okay. I’ll be over in a few minutes,” Amethyst said before hanging up. Mark once again found himself looking at the now giant bowl of ramen. Despite having somehow shrunk, that wasn’t his main concern at the moment in time.

“I’m still hungry,” he said to himself. “Why did this have to happen now? Why couldn’t it have waited until AFTER I finished my lunch?”