What none of these men or women knew was that their earth was not alone. From their perspective, it was Earth-A in a multiverse of possibilities, many of them similar, many of them different. One such parallel earth was Earth-B. Like Earth-A, it once had a 9 ½  year old 5th grader named Timothy Scribener, and a 29 ½  year old teacher named Mrs Long, who had returned to teaching to support herself after becoming a widow. Instead of being in a boys preparatory school in North Sydney, they were in a co-educational school in Wahroonga, which ran from kindergarten right up to 12th grade, though the high school premises were next door to the prep school.

Here is the detailed account of how Timothy learned the hard way not to help himself to someone else’s food without asking.

Mrs Long explained to the class how to do various aspects of geometrical calculations involving isosceles and right angled triangles, and then left the class to do some of the exercises in the text book. Timothy looked up from his work, and noticed Mrs Long taking a piece of candy from a bag and putting it into her mouth. He watched her place the bag back in the top drawer of the desk.

Later that day, during the lunch break, he could not help thinking of the candies. She’d never miss one, he thought, mindless of the fact that it was still stealing. He snuck back into the class room while everyone else was at lunch, opened the bag and took one of the sweets, put it into his mouth and enjoyed it until it was gone, and then turned around to see Mrs Long looking into the room from the doorway.

“So you stole one of my lollies!” she said, walking over and sitting down.

She pulled him towards her, put him over her knee and spanked him repeatedly.

Timothy never forgot the spanking, and refrained from stealing again. On one occasion, he took an orange from a rubbish bin, ate it and found himself vomiting at home that night.

Early the following year, Timothy was walking to school, and came to the start of the fence. He noticed that he only came up to an inch below the height of the fence. He was sure that he had been almost a foot taller than it in the past. He was wearing a short sleeved shirt and school shorts, and just noticed that the shorts now went all the way down to his knees, and the shirt sleeves reached his elbows.

In no time at all, Timothy deduced what it took a fictional fellow named Scott half a movie to confirm. He was getting smaller. Timothy knew that he couldn’t go into the school now. The change in his size would not only arouse suspicions that he himself was unable to explain. It would make him more prone to bullying by girls who would soon be sufficiently bigger than him.

Surely the answers could only be found in the school science laboratories. If he could ever analyse his condition and cure it, that was the place to do it. He would have to sneak in after school.

For now, Timothy hid himself in the bush land beside the school. He read the novel on the school reading list, which was still in his bag, and ate his packed lunch. After school, he waited until everyone had gone, and then snuck into the science laboratories. Mrs Long was the science and mathematics and singing teacher, but he doubted he would get sympathy from her. He had taken her food without permission, which he realised was wrong. She would be unlikely to support his endeavour to use the science laboratories after hours, and he would feel a spanking all the more, now that he had lost a foot in height.

She was Mrs Long, and he was becoming Mr Shorter, he briefly mused, which took some of the edge out of the nature of his condition. Timothy began rifling through some text books on nutrition, growth, and then the more complex material. Some of it was simply too difficult for a 6th grader to comprehend, and he found nothing that would explain his sudden reduction in size. (On Earth-B, the conditions which caused it were not the same as those which 29 chapters of developments have uncovered on Earth-A).

Timothy realised that he could not go home either. His condition had to be hidden from everyone. The boy could do nothing but run to the nearest shopping centre, where he would not be recognised, spend his entire week’s allowance on food supplies and then return to the bushes beside the school.

The next morning, he awoke in the undergrowth where he had slept, except that he found himself with more room to move. He stood up beside his backpack to find that it was taller than him. He was now only a foot tall!

“How much longer (or shorter) is this going to go on?” he wondered.

If he continued to shrink, he would no longer be remotely considered a member of regular society. There was one advantage. His food supplies would now last indefinitely, and after that, well he just didn’t know how small he’d become. Timothy ate heartily and then resigned himself that the science laboratory would be no more help to someone who could no longer climb up onto the benches.  In fact, at only a foot in height, he would soon be down to a size where he would lose all contact with the school. Mrs Long was his science teacher. Maybe he could find a way to leave her a hypothetical note asking for help with a problem such as his. That was it!

He waited until school ended, and everyone had gone. Then he made his way to the classroom and took a piece of paper and pen from his own desk.

Dear Mrs Long,

If a person suddenly started reducing in size for no apparent reason, how would you try to solve the problem and get him back to normal size? Could you please leave your answer in a folded note on this desk?

Anonymous.

It didn’t occur to such a young boy that she might put the curious question together with his absence from classes and begin wondering about him. All he knew was that he had to get her help, and that she would be unlikely to help someone who had raided her lollies last year. He had begun to notice how beautiful she was, and regretted having made such a bad first impression in the days before he’d come of admiring age. Yet now his main priority was to keep from dwindling completely between anyone’s notice. While he could still climb, he took his remaining food supplies up to the top drawer of her desk, left the folded note to Mrs Long on the desk, and pulled the top drawer open. The bag of candies was still in there too, but he would not be touching that, except to use its soft pile of candy as a mattress. Timothy managed to pull the drawer almost completely shut from the inside, and hoped that Mrs Long would not notice the small opening. He would be close to any information she wrote in a reply, but remain unnoticed by her. He manoeuvred the bag of candy into a suitable shape and lay down on it for the night, having left his backpack in the bush.

In the morning he awoke to find that he was only six inches tall. He ate what he could of his remaining food supplies, and pulled the rest to the very back of the drawer, aware from memory that Mrs Long kept the candy bag at the front and didn’t open the drawer all the way when she wanted a lolly. All morning he waited and heard Mrs Long and the students arrive. He heard her teaching the lesson, and then saw the drawer open a little and her relatively giant sized fingers reach down for the bag.

“It’s a good thing she hasn’t found me,” he thought, “She might think that I hid in here to steal more of her lollies.”

At the end of the day, he heard everyone leave. He forced the drawer open a little way, climbed out, and lay down on the desk and pulled the drawer shut. Walking over the desk, he knew that he would not be able to open the drawer from the inside or the outside if he shrank again. He would need to hide on her desk.

“I’ll just have to wake up tomorrow, see how small I am, and hide in one of her things,” he thought.

Then he noticed a sheet of paper folded on the desk. He unfolded it and read:

Dear Anonymous (Student?/Teacher?),

I’ve never encountered a shrinking person before. I doubt that it’s even possible, so I couldn’t begin to discover a way to counter such a process. I wouldn’t worry about it,

Mrs Long.

So much for help, he thought. All he could do now was to make the most of his new life at tiny size. At least he would be close to the most beautiful person he’d ever met, though she wouldn’t know it. Timothy climbed into her tissue box and slept on the pile of tissues until the next morning.