As hard as the boy tried to deny it, the familiar feeling of cold covering his entire body was returning in full force. Freezing, biting, tickling his insides and spreading out to the tips of his fingers and the backs of his eyeballs. With a breathless gasp, Alex felt himself shooting downward, the environment swimming madly around him for an instant before he stopped, landing on his back and opening his eyes.
Even just lying down, he could tell the difference already. Staring upward from his vantage point on the chair between his mother’s legs, the folds of her olive skirt hanging loosely on her toned quads, Alex got the distinct sensation he was staring out of a canyon and up into the sky above. He struggled to his feet, shaking wildly, and felt hot tears begin pouring down his cheeks as the hope began draining from him quickly. How could he possibly get help when he was this small? Even if he walked out onto the table in plain sight, screaming his mother’s name at the top of his lungs, could he even be recognized as a person?
How small had he become? The size of a grain of rice? An ant? A speck of dust? It was impossible to tell from where Alex stood, and for the most part, the tiny lad didn’t care. “You’re going to die,” he whispered bitterly to himself. “You’re going to…”
Alex leapt to his feet, slapping himself in the cheek and stomping his feet in frustration. He had been raised better than this. Never to give up. Never to accept defeat in the face of impossible odds. Of course, before, it had just been on sports teams and grades in school. Now, it was for his life, and yet it didn’t feel truly different to Alex. It seemed his whole life had been building to this moment: his chance to prove the strength of his spirit and will. Taking a deep breath, Alex charged toward his mother’s titanic right leg with quadriceps the size of tectonic plates.
Clambering over the rolling folds of skirt fabric, Alex immediately noticed that, at his newly reduced size, the material of his mother’s clothes had become more like thick ropes, crossing over one another in a loose patchwork. Perfect for climbing. Gulping, Alex stared up at his mother’s leg, which seemed to stretch upward for half a dozen stories before rounding off onto the top of her leg. Shaking his arms out and taking a deep breath, Alex began round 2 of his gut-twisting ascent.
The climb up the side of Michelle’s thigh took just as long as the climb up her shins to her knees, as the distance had comparatively become similar after Alex’s second shrinkage. Out of breath and drenched in sweat from the exertion, Alex pulled himself onto the flat surface of his mother’s leg again, gasping for oxygen. He had made it in one piece. Now, he just had to get to the table if he was to have any chance of ending this nightmare sooner rather than deader.
A dark shadow cast over Alex, completely encompassing him. Glancing upward, the boy realized with horror that the gargantuan hand of his mother was descending on him like a dropship of soft flesh and firm sinew. Even in the darkness of her shadow, Alex could make out the most intricate of details in the enormous palm lowering toward him. The creases ran along the pale skin like rivers on a jumbo atlas, and at his size, Alex guessed he could have fit rather snugly into one of these crevices in his mother’s hand. That was truly how far he had fallen.
At the last moment, the boy ducked to the side as quickly as he could into a space on the thick fabric ground not cloaked in shadow, and was bounced to the side as Michelle’s hand came firmly to rest on her thigh, her son having survived by diving into the space between her pointer and middle fingers, stretching on either side of Alex like incredible, peachy tree trunks, scrunching inward at the thread ground. Realizing that Michelle was adjusting the position of the fabric on her leg, Alex gasped as a rolling tidal wave of skirt was pushed further along his mom’s leg to be more comfortable. With the last of his energy, Alex took a flying leap over the curling fabric rolls and ran along the length of his mother’s fingers, sprinting as quickly as he could and clearing the space just as Michelle’s hand balled into a tremendous, hot air balloon-sized fist, clutching at the fabric. Uselessly, Alex was sent tumbling backward toward his mother’s hand again as the ground was literally yanked in the other direction like an earthquake. Screaming, Alex flew through the air by the force of the shift, landing directly on top of his mother’s ring finger.
No sooner had the boy frozen for fear of being flung somewhere else, then he immediately laid down, clutching his body around the middle knuckle’s skin of Michelle’s ring finger. Gulping, the boy realized that even if he stretched himself out as far as he could from end to end, he still wouldn’t even match the width of a single finger on his mother’s hand. At this point, he was small enough to get a firm grip on the rubbery extra skin on his mother’s finger; despite the slenderness of Michelle’s hand, at such massive scale, the most imperceptible of thicker fat deposits were noticeable and useful to Alex.
It was then that Michelle began raising her hand back to the table. Realizing his chance, Alex clambered forward, terrified, toward the silver banded diamond wedding ring adorning his mom’s finger like a glistening beacon of his last hope. Just as he felt himself sliding toward the side of her finger to fall between the crevices and down to oblivion in Michelle’s lap, which by now was a couple dozen stories downward for Alex, the fifteen-year-old wiggled his body as tightly as he could into the space between his mother’s finger and the ring. It wasn’t much, but it was enough for the miniscule boy’s body to avoid toppling downward to imminent doom. Now, all Alex had to do was hope his mother didn’t tighten her hand into a fist, which would surely lessen the space between her ring and the finger and crush him insignificantly in the aftermath.
At last, it seemed, the boy’s patience was rewarded as Michelle’s hand brushed briefly over the tabletop. Wasting no time, Alex squirmed his way back out from under the ring and rolled over the side of his mother’s finger, landing painfully on his side on the cedar tabletop. An instant later, Michelle’s hand was reaching higher into the air. Then, taking a deep breath, Alex stood to his feet, waving his arms.
“MOM! HERE, I’M RIGHT HERE! MOM, HELP ME!” screamed the desperate and tired teen as loud as his vocal chords would allow. However, Michelle’s eyes showed no signs of darting around the table looking for the source of the nearly nonexistent squeaks of the boy, and instead reached for her cell phone, which had begun to ring so loudly that the dulcet and cheerful melody felt to Alex like he was pressing his ears against the speaker at a heavy metal rock concert, and he doubled over, groaning in pain and clutching his hands over his ears defensively.
Michelle grasped the cell phone, which to Alex by this point was comparatively the size of a large fishing boat, in her godlike fingers and powerfully lifted it to her ear, snapping it open confidently at the hinge. The ringing came to an end as the call began, and Alex stared upward, quivering from the shock.
“Hi, honey,” said Michelle, smiling sweetly. “How was your day? Good? Good, mine too… thanks, honey. Glad you didn’t forget this year?” she giggled, before rolling her eyes with a smile. “No, honey, of course I’m kidding, I know you wouldn’t ever forget again. You just better hope I like whatever it is you got me,” she said teasingly to her husband, resting the arm holding the cell phone on the table. To Alex, it was like looking at a rounded skyscraper shrouded in soft, toned flesh rising up into the air toward the jungle of chocolate brown follicles dangling silkily from his mother’s head.
“Alex? No, I haven’t seen him. I’m guessing he ran down the block to see his friends, I’m sure he’ll be back soon… yes, yes, I’m sure he knows it’s my birthday. I’m positive, in fact. Do you know why?’ she said with a proud smile. “He baked a cake and left it on the table for me. Can you believe that?” she asked, then chuckled, “Yes, that’s right… our son who’s going to end up living on Ramen when he’s in college actually managed to bake a cake without the house burning down. So give him a little credit, will you?”
Despite his terror, Alex couldn’t help but grin a little. His mother seemed pleased with the effort he had put into giving her a birthday surprise. Now, all he had to do was ensure he could spend the rest of it with his mom’s full knowledge of his existence. Taking a few steps back, Alex realized something important. As his mother continued conversing jokingly with her husband on the cell phone, her gaze was fixed casually on the coconut cream-chocolate cake he had baked for her, a smile still plastered on her enormous face. If Alex could at least get into her field of vision, his chances of being discovered seemed improved. It wasn’t the greatest plan, as she was mainly focused on the conversation with her husband rather than actually studying the cake, but it seemed the best option when she clearly was unable to hear even the loudest of her tiny son’s pitiful cries. Taking a deep breath, the already exhausted Alex began sprinting across the cedar tabletop toward the towering coliseum-sized birthday pastry he had created with relative ease just over an hour ago.
Panting heavily as he reached the glass plate base of the cake, Alex looked upward at his mother, hoping to see some sign of recognition in her tremendous green eyes. To his dismay, however, while Michelle was still staring at the cake, her eyesight seemed to be fixed at a point higher than Alex was standing. Looking upward, Alex moaned at what he knew was necessary to his salvation, yet would require even more effort on his part when he was already well beyond physically spent. Nevertheless, the boy’s drive was stronger than his attention to his aching body’s cries for rest, and gathering his strength, Alex leaped into the air just high enough to grab the thin edge of the glass plate containing the cake and clambered up, staring up at the massive thing to plan his attack.
The cake was easily as tall as his mother’s thigh. The difference here was that there were no thick, rope-like threads of a skirt to aid his ascent. To climb the almost perfectly vertical wall of sugary cream frosting and coconut shavings (each of which happened to be about as long as Alex’s body) would require some more clever tactics, not to mention expert control. Alex’s stomach churned. An ascent like this would make any regular rock climber shake in their boots, but the teen didn’t have time for the luxury of fear. He was on a mission, he had come this far, and he wasn’t going to let a simple massive improbability stop him. Rubbing at his temple to calm his pounding headache, Alex inhaled deeply and stepped forward to begin his climb.