He hadn’t eaten in days. His hands and lower arms were stained black, covered in grime as he crawled up the coil of fabric that twisted like a great tree towards the dappled white sky. His entire body ached, his skin burnt raw from endless hours pushing through the beige jungle.

His chest heaved as he rolled onto his back. Stale air filled his lungs, the dead scents of dust and old sweat filling his nostrils. He wouldn’t survive much longer. He gritted his teeth and regained his grip on the strand of fabric.

The slope was just over forty-five degrees, a single trunk of off white hair that pushed up through the endless pale forest that surrounded him. It had been almost three days since he had shrunk.

Shrunk. The idea was absurd.

It had taken less than an hour to climb that first strand. His body energised, he had thrown himself up the outcrop of fur and looked out across the vast expanse of faux fur carpet that stretched around him in every direction.

It had left him senseless at first. As he clung to that single strand of fur, swaying above the heads of a million others, he had looked with wide eyes at the world that surrounded him. An office chair, an impossible black shape lost in the distance loomed over him. Walls of pale brown, now clearly the varnished sides of unfathomably sized furniture, surrounded him. The nearby legs of a bed rose like two immense towers to vanish amongst clouds of grey sheets.

He had been sick. He had screamed and cried out and been sick again.

It was impossible.

The world around him was grossly proportioned, immense and bloated, a whole impossible universe.

It had taken him longer to climb down.

He descended, hand over hand, into the shadow clad space between the carpet fibres. The earth was thick with debris not unlike leaves upon a forest floor. A musty, worn smell pervaded it, clinging to his flesh as he walked dazed between the towering fibres.

What light shone in from a distant window had faded as he walked. His direction was aimless, his mind racing with questions he had no one to ask. He tried desperately to make sense of his situation, to try and put reason to how such a circumstance could have come upon him.

It was impossible.

He had fallen into melancholy, his tiny frightened form curled in the recess of a twisting white column when she appeared.

At the time she was nothing but a storm of sound. Earthquakes that shook the great boughs around him like frail leaves, shadows that drowned the world in darkness, wind that tore the air from his lungs.

He weathered the hurricane in his shelter, sobbing with fear as the world tore itself apart. Around him the fauna of the forest fled. Insects the size of rats, their many legs pumping furiously beneath their pale humped backs, swarmed around him as they fled the mighty assault upon the earth.

Eventually the maelstrom had faded, the harsh yellow light that fell upon him like a false sun dying with it. He trembled in the twilight, fear gnawing upon him before letting exhaustion take him, drawing him into a sleep shattered by nightmares of monstrous things.  

He woke early, his world still bathed blue by the predawn light that filtered down from the heavens. He began to climb.

Once again he pulled himself upwards through the twisting canopy of grime hung threads. The sun was almost up when he reached the top. She woke minutes later.

The sound of a phone alarm ripped through the air, rousing the gargantuan figure upon the bed from her slumber. She hushed it, a hand as pale as porcelain and large enough to swallow a cruise ship slamming into the wailing alarm.

He screamed her name as she rose upon the bed, his voice growing hoarse as he prayed that his housemate would find him amongst the wild and tangled mess of her bedroom rug.

Her footfall silenced him.

He watched frozen with a mix of horror and awe as her foot swung over him, the smooth tan sole becoming a false sky before dropping to the ground beside him.

The impact shook the earth. Atop his vantage point he clung on desperately as the world swayed beneath him. A mile of white forest was compressed beneath her; a thousand tiny animals screamed their last as her great weight pressed down upon them.

He closed his eyes and tucked his head into his chest as her second step rumbled through him.

His stomach churned as the great white strand swayed beneath him. He opened his eyes slowly, his head pounding painfully as he took in the world before him.

Her foot was a mountain range. In the distance her toes settled upon the forest, their caps tipped with toenails decorated with chipped red paint. From her ankle her legs rose upwards into the sky, endlessly rising either side of him almost to the edge of sight.

His housemate, a million miles high, stood over him.

She shifted, her simple movement sending tremors through the earth. She wore an old band t shirt to sleep in. It was black, the same colour as the underwear that dominated the sky above him.

He had barely registered her as she stepped forwards, her rising foot spawning tornados as she walked across the room.

His mind reeled as she moved away from him. What could he do? In the distance her footprint still depressed the forest. Clearly he could not remain where he was. He was lost amongst the fabric, a miniscule speck with no chance of being noticed.

He watched her with fascination as she went about her morning routine. Everything she did was exaggerated and done with impossible speed. He could barely comprehend how something so immense could move so quickly.

She exited the room, sweeping a towel about her waist and causing the ground to buck as she crossed the room and closing the massive white door behind her.

He climbed down quickly, his heart beating a furious tattoo in his chest.

She wouldn’t notice him, he would be killed by a careless footfall. The idea drove into his mind like an iron nail. He rallied against it. No, he would find a way.

Beyond the now flattened forest lay bare floor, varnished wooden boards where he would be infinitely more noticeable. He had already begun the journey when she returned.

He cowered as she strode over him, shaking the world with ever step. Her shadow drowned him as she reached over for her phone. Beneath a crooked strand of fibre he listened as her voice rang out like beautiful thunder, her cute Edinburgh accent unchanged by her years living in their student dorm in the States.

She left, eventually, and his journey began in earnest.

He walked with grim determination, trudging through the mire of dust and debris without stopping. Every so many miles he would begin to climb, crawling hand over hand like an insect to chart his progress.

He began two days ago and had survived so far.

She had come and gone three more times since then. Each time her presence was catastrophic, her very existence in the room throwing it into turmoil. He had avoided her so far though only just. The previous night she had returned, kicking off her shoes and strolling through the room.

Her huge toes, clad in grey socks, had almost caught him. They plunged into the earth less than fifty yards away from him, the ball of her foot churning into the ground before sweeping forwards leaving the wind to howl in her wake. His chest had pumped furiously as he lay panting amongst the filth. Too afraid to move, he remained still until she returned to bed and darkness fell. He had survived. He had been lucky, he had always been lucky.

Now the bare wood lay just before him, from his look out it was barely an hour’s walk. He would make it into the open and from there he would get her attention and then. And then he didn’t know.

She was his housemate, his friend. She would help him he knew though he had no idea what that meant. Surely there would be questions; how this had happened being chief among them. In truth he did not know. His only concern was to be noticed; his main priority to survive.