Claire walks through her backyard and around the side of her house, she stops when she reaches the pavement and looks at her destination, Michael and Amy’s home across the street. Having left her sunglasses back on the beach towel when she found the truck full of people, Claire has to lift a hand to her head to shield her eyes from the sun. She tries to spot the machine on the porch but it is just not visible to her from where she currently stands.

   “This stupid machine better not see me” she mutters to herself as she resumes her journey, walking far to the side of the Parker house and soon reaching the back of it. She turns the handle and pulls the back door open before stepping inside, unlocked just as Michael had said it would be.

   Although she had never been inside, Claire knows she has no time to waste admiring her neighbor’s home’s interior so she finds her way to the stairs and quickly scales them. She locates Michael’s office with ease and approaches the desk. Kneeling down, she opens all of the drawers and searches through them until she finds what she's looking for. She takes the small silver device in her hand and looks it over quickly before tucking it away in the right pocket of her light blue jean shorts.

   Claire standd back up and travels speedily back down the stairs and towards the front door. She opens it slowly and peers out onto the porch, spotting the machine to her right. Cautiously, Claire takes her first steps outside and pulls the front door shut behind her, never once taking her eyes off the machine. She kneels down and places her hand underneath the sphere, Michael’s instructions still fresh in her mind. After turning the gear-like knob to the left, the power source falls free of the machine. Claire holds onto it. It's fairly heavy but she manages to set it down gently on the porch before standing back up. She knocks on the machine a few times with her fist. “Guess you’re turned off now, huh?”

    Now Claire is ready for the most important part of her mission: securing the shrunken people.

   She descends the two porch stairs and briefly checks the grass for signs of life before taking her next steps. She continues stepping carefully and soon reaches the spot Michael had told her to look for, the rock to the right of the bottom step.

    Keith and the four women stationed with him on the rock are startled by the sound of something behind Michael and Amy’s home. Soon they can hear very faint sounds coming from within the house. “Is that… could it be the girl? Claire?” asks Brandi. The group hears the front door on the porch above them being opened slowly and then the slam as it is sealed shut. Then they listen as someone begins fiddling with something on the machine.

“I don’t know. If it is, I bet we’ll know pretty soon” replies Keith. Everyone on the rock stands up, anxious to find out if their rescue has arrived.

    Booming footsteps are birthed as whomever is on the porch draws near. A shadow falls over the group but they can't even yet see what is casting it. Suddenly two enormous black flip flops come down as if from the heavens and land directly in front of the rock, the body of their wearer stretching far into the sky above.

   Keith and the women stare straight ahead of them at the massive yet beautiful looking feet that lay before them, their presence dominating the landscape. Standing on the rock, they are just high enough to be able to look down and see the ten toes with nails coated in a deep black polish.

   They stand in awe, captivated by the enormity of the girl before them. She has to be even larger to them than Amy had been before she too was shrunken by the machine. She seems taller, and she likely is as Amy was always considered quite short. But one thing is certain, her feet are larger than Amy’s. They know this for certain as they had been up close and personal with Amy’s feet when she almost crushed them beneath her twice after returning home from the store.

Smiles find their way onto everyone’s faces. They are saved. “He did it! He actually did it! Michael got this girl’s attention and sent her over here to pick us up.” says Keith in an excited tone.

    Claire looks down at the rock just in front of her feet and spots the people on its surface. “1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Okay, looks like you’re all there.” Claire’s feet twitch softly. She giggles, the size of her toes in comparison to the man and four women on the ground somehow amusing her. She kneels down to get a closer look at them. “Okay… so how are we going to do this? I didn’t bring anything to carry you back in so I guess I’ll just have to use my hands.”

   Claire puts her hands together and sets them on the grass in front of the rock. “Okay, little people, climb on. I’ll take you to the rest of your group.” The tiny man and women comply and Claire can’t help but giggle again at the sight of five actual people climbing into her hands.

    The group doesn’t even need to climb down the rock. They are able to simply walk off of it and onto the girl’s hands. After they're onboard she lifts them to her beautiful young face and they stare up and into her blue eyes. “Careful little ones, don’t fall off.” Soon they are raised much higher as the girl stands up.

    Claire begins her journey back to her home, her cargo safe in her hands. She crosses the Parker’s lawn, makes her way across the street and soon finds herself in her own backyard once again.

    Keith and the others haven’t even bothered to try and stand up whilenbeing transported. They just lay there, cradled in the soft skin of Claire’s palms as they wait to reach their destination.

    Claire steps onto the back deck and prepares to enter her home. She realizes she won’t be able to grip the handle and open the door with her hands full.

    She looks down at the people she's carrying. “I won’t be able to open the door with my hands like this. Hmmmm.” After a few seconds she thinks of a solution. She slips her left foot out of her flip flop and kneels down in front of it. “I need a free hand to open the door with, I hope you guys don’t mind.” Without giving anyone the chance to object to the idea, Claire pulls her hands apart and tilts them downwards, dropping the little people as gently as she can onto the black foam of the sandal. She picks it up and places it in her left palm before standing and heading back towards the door.

    Jennifer can’t believe she is laying on some girl’s flip flop. She tries not to think of how the girl probably sweats in them when she wears them, although the smell of feet is definitely present and making suppressing such thoughts quite difficult. It isn’t overly unpleasant, but the scent is in the air with each breath she takes. “Thank god this nightmare is almost over” she thinks to herself as she is carried towards the home in which she will meet up with Michael and the rest of the group again and finally be returned to her normal size.

    Claire steps into her house and pulls the back door shut behind her again. She walks through her kitchen and doesn’t stop moving until she reaches the coffee table in her living room. Looking down she can see the five little people standing around the truck where they have been waiting for her to return. She kneels down in front of them as she had before with her knees planted into the plum colored carpet and she sets her flip flop and its passengers down on the table next to the little blue truck. The sandal is quite a bit longer than the vehicle. She could have taken the truck and placed it on the front of her flip flop and then formed a line with a few more tiny trucks just like it up the length of it before one reached the heel.

    “Uh… why are they in your shoe?” asks Michael as Keith and his group jumps down from the sandal and onto the table.

    “I was carrying them with both hands and I couldn’t open the door. I had to improvise.” Claire grabs her now unoccupied flip flop from the table and reaches behind her. She lifts her left leg a bit to help as she slips the sandal back onto her foot.

The women from Keith’s group run across the table and hug their husbands and boyfriends after reaching them, relieved to see that everyone is safe.

    Claire leans in a bit and watches the reunion of the little people on the table below. “So… what happened? Why was I your last hope?”

    “After we shrunk, we thought we could get Amy to see us on the lawn. She had gone to the store to get a couple things before we shrunk. We tried to get her attention when she got home but she just wasn’t able to notice us down there” says Michael.

   “Yeah, and she almost stepped on us at least twice” adds Jennifer.”

  Amy blushes and again feels bad about what she had almost done to her friends and her husband.

    “She sure noticed my truck though” says Jim in an annoyed tone. “She played with it under her feet like it was a damned toy.”

    “I thought it was one! Who could blame me? How was I supposed to know you guys shrunk yourselves and your truck on my lawn while I was gone?!” yells Amy, defensively.

    “So we tried to come up with a plan after the machine shrunk her too. You’re our only neighbors, you and your mother. I know she’s away for work right now and so you were our best hope for being rescued and returned to our normal sizes” says Michael.

    “Oh yeah, wow, I understand” says Claire after listening to the tale told to her by the tiny people.

    “Okay, so you followed my directions? The power source has been removed from the machine on the porch?”

    “Yeah.”

    “And you were able to find the handheld device in my office?”

    “Yeah, I think so. This is it, right?” Claire reaches a hand into her pocket and pulls out the device before holding it up and showing it to Michael.

    “Yes, yes that’s it. You did great, Claire. Okay, let me teach you how to use it.”

    Claire looks at the device in her hand. “Can’t be much harder than figuring out how to use a cellphone, can it?” she asks.

    Michael and a few others laugh, they remember he had said almost the exact words earlier in the day when talking about the device. “Okay. Well, you see that first blue button, on the left? That sets the device to shrink things. The one right next to it, the second button, that setting is for returning things that have already been shrunk to their original sizes. There’s a little trigger-like button on the back of the device. After you enter a setting, you just pull that and it fires.”

    Claire flips the device over in her hand and studies it. “Okay. And what about the third blue button… and all of these other smaller ones? What do they do?”

    “We don’t need to worry about those. I can teach you about it a little more sometime if you’d like but for right now all we need to worry about are the first two. Alright, so you wanna try it out on something to get the hang of it before you get started on restoring us?”

    “Sure…”

    “Go get something to shrink and bring it back.”

    “Okay.” Claire rises and walks into the kitchen. She returns to the table carrying an apple. She kneels down and sets the fruit on the table in front of the group of people. Even the apple is ridiculously large compared to the group. It’s taller than the truck. Everyone looks up at it, some of them can’t help but think of the a story they’d read years ago, James and the Giant Peach.

    “Alright Claire, let’s see if you remember what to do.”

    “Okay, so I press… this first button, and then…” Claire reaches forward and aims the device at the apple, “and then I just pull the trigger.” She pulls the trigger and watches as the apple disappears in front of the small people standing on the table. She has to lean in very close just to check if it’s still there at all. “WOW it works!”
   
    The ten people on the table watch as Claire brings an index finger towards the apple. She wants to feel it. She brings the finger down very lightly and the tiny fruit explodes at her touch, the group jumps in surprise, some of them find themselves hit with pieces of it.

    “OOPS!” Claire laughs. “I must have put too much pressure on it. Is everyone alright down there?”

    “Yes, yes, we’re all fine. Go get another one and shrink it so we can make sure you’re able to restore it before you start helping us” says Michael.

    “Okay.” Again she ventures into the kitchen and returns with an apple. She places it in the same spot as she had the previous one before kneeling down.

    “The device is already set to shrink so you don’t need to push the first blue button again. Just aim and fire when you’re ready.”

    Claire nods, raising her hand and pointing the device at the apple. She pulls the trigger and the fruit dwindles away to a tiny red dot in front of her. “Okay, so now I just press this second button… and then pull the trigger.” Claire squints, aiming carefully at the incredibly small fruit.

    The group sees Claire’s finger pull back on the trigger and they cannot prepare themselves for the sight of the apple returning to its full size. It’s like watching a balloon inflate to immense proportions almost instantly. Some of them gasp, the amazement granted to them by the shrinking technology they’ve discovered exists today thanks to their friend Michael still hasn’t worn off. Watching the apple grow again delights them all as they now know they’re just minutes away from being returned to normal and the end of this whole ordeal.

    Claire reaches down and grabs the apple from above with her fingers. She extends her arm and reaches over the group below, placing the apple out of the way at the back of the table.

    Michael claps his hands. “Alright, Claire, looks like you’ve got the hang of it. Now, one at a time, you can set us down on the floor and return us to our full sizes.”

    Claire looks down at the ten little people gathered together next to the small blue truck parked on the coffee table and smiles. “Nah.”