After a nurse—neither the name nor appearance of whom Jamie could remember—had prodded at his naked body and assessed him as going through withdrawal, she had placed him on the counter of the nurses station and taken a full body shot of him with a digital camera from above. To Jamie, still reeling from the fever dream that was minimization, it looked like an alien spaceship, come to abduct him into an alternate reality. It was.

The nurse had placed a tiny pair of turquoise scrubs at his feet and, once he’d pulled them on, brought him to a single bed in the corner of the geriatric unit with the curtain permanently pulled around it. On the bed were a little over a dozen other freshly minimized people—freshmins, the nurses called them, more often than not in a disparaging tone—who were almost all in the same position as him: they were vacillating between feeling sure they were about to die and hoping that they would. If not for the plastic wall that rose fifty opaque, pewter centimeters into the air and surrounded the mattress on all sides, he felt certain that he and at least half of the other vomiting mins on the bed would have jumped off the edge the minute they’d arrived.

The bed itself wasn’t entirely uncomfortable. Yes, the mattress and sheets were all hospital standard, their starchy and stiff texture pulled taut underneath him and further magnified by his size, but he imagined he was living in the lap of luxury compared to the carmine stains he’d started seeing pop up in alleyways over the course of the last year. Then again, after his third straight day of vomiting, he wasn’t so sure he preferred his position. The minimization itself was a paralyzing fugue state that lasted a standard three hours, and he’d only regained control of his limbs half an hour before the withdrawal-induced nausea and sweating welled up inside of him.

There were four metallic troughs wedged where someone had cut long, thin rectangles into the mattress. Each one ran horizontal to the bed, and they ran up its edge in equidistant increments, like the lines on a measuring cup. They reached three quarters into bed’s width, leaving enough space that any of the mins could walk around them instead of risking a leap. From the bottom of the bed to the top, they were respectively filled with vomit, feces, water, and liquidized food. These top two troughs had thin metal sheets dividing them into twenty equal sections as well, to ensure whatever minimal sanitation they could. In all, it was a DIY job; medical providers were still in the preliminary research phase of figuring out how to best care for minpeople—asking for funds from the government.

Whichever nurse was in charge of their unit—their single bed was described as its own unit—would change each of the troughs three times a day, leaving a total of one glorious half hour in which no miasma emanating from their own filth stung the freshmins eyes and lungs. Otherwise, most of the nurses existed solely to ensure that they were all still breathing once per hour and to tsk their unnecessary disapproval at whatever new arrival had failed to reach the vomit trough in time. Once per day, they would load the minpeople onto a tray, bring them over to a sink, and let them bathe themselves one by one while another nurse changed the unit’s sheet. The only amendment to the schedule was the occasional family who would arrive to take away a relative on the unit after they’d detoxed. That or the gruff man whose job it was to go from hospital to hospital with a bright orange cage to bring all the neglected minpeople to The Ralph Wallace Shelter for Minpeople.

On his fifth day on The Minpeople Unit for Detoxification, or MUD, as the hospital staff called it, Jamie was less delirious and his insomnia cleared up enough that the shadow of the night nurse woke him from a three-hour nap. Her light blue nametag read Caroline Byrne in large sans-serif letters and underneath that, in smaller font, Student Nurse. He looked up at her and she looked back only for a moment, her hazel eyes pausing no more than two seconds on any of them. If someone had asked Jamie what he was looking for when he stared at her eyes, he might have told them he was trying to figure out how she felt about them, but the truth was he already knew. He was hoping to find any trace of evidence that he was wrong.

Student Nurse Caroline paused her pen’s movement on the clipboard and leaned her face close to a lower corner of the bed, where a withered elderly womin lay in a corner close to the trough of vomit.

“Mrs. Bishop?” The coffee and cigarettes on Caroline’s breath shrouded the unit with more potency than her shadow. To most of the minpeople, it was a smell welcome for the vicarious feeling it lent them. Mrs. Bishop didn’t move. “Heather Bishop?” Caroline exhaled deeply and all that Jamie could think of was how desperately he wanted caffeine in him. A single puff of a cigarette. “Heather?” Still the womin didn’t move. “Another overdependent freshmin,” Caroline muttered to herself. “How do you let yourself get like that, to where you’ll drop dead without a fix?” Her question was rhetorical and muttered, but it grated on all the minpeople on the unit who were lucid enough to hear it. From her breast pocket, she pulled out a white stylus with a black rubber nib. She leaned in again and said, “Mrs. Heather Bishop, speak now or forever hold your peace.” Heather Bishop held her peace. Caroline prodded the womin in the shoulder once with her pointer finger, her hand inside a robin’s-egg-blue latex glove. Then she used the stylus to pull Mrs. Bishop’s chin open, and pushed the tip into the womin’s mouth.

Jamie no longer had coffee on his mind. He stared in horror as the giant hand assailed the dead woman’s body. She had wizened, tan skin and her fingernails were covered with chipped black polish. Her scrubs, which were standard size for all minpatients, hung loose around her withered corpse. Jamie thought he recognized her as a woman he’d once fought with for a panhandling spot. When he couldn’t look anymore, he turned his gaze up to the bored face of the intern. She watched the fingers on her spare hand as she twirled them around a loose lock of her brown hair, checking her watch in intervals while she waited for the instrument to make its measurements.

Nurse Caroline had started to hum a tune to herself when the stylus beeped. Jamie flinched at the speed with which the student nurse pulled it up to her eyes to read. She sighed, looked at her watch again, and scribbled something on her immense clipboard. Then she walked away, leaving Heather Bishop lying on her back, stretched out on the bottom of the bed with her eyes open, her mouth agape, and her limbs at odd angles.

Jamie turned to look at the faces of the people around him. “Is she…” he started. Half of the other freshmins were too delirious to care, and the other half were, like he’d been, staring at the womin. He met the eyes of the man next to him. “Is she going to just leave her there like that?”

The man raised his thick eyebrows. “You’ve been that out of it, eh? You didn’t notice when Keith dropped dead two days ago then?” He spoke with a Scottish brogue.

They watched as an emaciated young woman walked over to Heather’s body. “Heather,” she said. She placed one hand and then the other on the elderly woman’s shoulders. “Heather.”

Jamie could feel his heartbeat increasing back to the tachycardic rate he’d had for the past four days. “I see,” the man mused. Jamie looked at his bare feet. “What cocktail are you coming off of then?”

The woman began to shake the Heather’s body by the shoulders. “Heather, if you’re faking, just tell me. She’s not here.”

“Just… Just heroin,” Jamie said.

The man raised his eyebrows higher. “Ah, yes. Just heroin.”

Jamie glanced back over at Heather Bishop’s body and found himself unable to look away. “A lot of it.” He wondered how many degrees of separation he’d had from her. They were both mins in the same hospital and he had vague recollections of meeting her. At most, she had to have been the friend of a friend of a friend. “What’s your drug of choice then?”

“Ah,” the man smiled and rubbed his hands together like a scheming cartoon villain. “I’m a coke man myself.”

The young woman began crying onto the corpse’s shoulders. “This isn’t funny,” she said. “Yvette’s going to take care of us, remember? She’s going to come as soon as our seven days are over. She’s going to pretend to have a place.”

Then, as if defending his honor, the man added, “But I enjoyed a speedball here and there. A little dope never hurt anyone, now did it?” He chuckled.

“Heather,” she keened.

At that moment, Nurse Caroline returned with headphones in her ears and a Ziploc bag in her hands, and the man’s smile drained from his face. “I’m just protectin’ my innocence,” the girl sang to herself as she pulled a pair of felt-tipped tongs from her pocket. “I’m just protectin’ my soul.” Then, in a curt tone, she said, “Move away from the body, ma’am.” The thin womin clung to Heather’s body, refusing to move. Caroline shoved her away with the felt section of the tongs then grabbed Heather Bishop’s body and placed her in the bag.

The womin shrieked and ran back to grab onto her friend, but she was out of reach almost instantly. “Stop!” She shrieked as she beat her fists against the plastic wall, but if Caroline noticed, she didn’t show it. “Stop, you fucking bitch!”

Student Nurse Caroline lifted the bag up to eye level, rattled the flimsy plastic container until the corpse arrived at the bottom, then pressed as much air out of it as she could. With a zip, it was sealed. “I’m never gonna let you get close to me.” She placed the bag on her clipboard and, with a thin marker, wrote something on its label. “Even though you mean the most to me.” She hummed her way back out of sight to the nurses station.

“Bastards,” the man said, his accent growing more aggressive with his tone. “Nurses.”

“Nurses.” Jamie nodded.

“Aye,” the man said. “The whole bloody NHS.”

Jamie felt sick to his stomach, but instead of running down the length of the bed, he took a seat. “Should we go comfort her?”

The man mused on it. “Ah, I don’t know. Give it a few minutes. She looks like she’s about to be sick.”

“I think I might be too.” Jamie looked away from the young homeless woman and back to the man next to him. “What’s your name?”

“Leo,” the man said as he sat down next to him. “And yours?”

“Jamie.” They shook hands. “Nice to meet you.”

“How old are you?” Leo asked. “Don’t look older than twenty-four, I’d wager.”

Jamie nodded. “Then the drugs’ve aged me four years,” he said. For a minute, they both watched as the frail young woman who’d tried to rouse Heather dry heaved onto the spot where she’d lain. Jamie realized he couldn’t stand the silence. “How long have you been here in hospital?”

Leo stroked his beard. “I’m on day six or seven now, depending on if we’ve passed midnight. You know,” he said, with a glint in his eye, “you can tell how long folks have been here by how far up the bed they are. It’s split almost in half that way. The nurses always place the new folks at the bottom, and then as people develop appetites… Well,” he shrugged, “here we are.”

Jamie nodded. “Bollocks we don’t have a clock,” he said.

“Or that they never turn the bloody lights off. Those three minutes every hour whenever a nurse sticks her head in all our faces are the best rest I get.” Leo said. “Plus, some of them aren’t so bad in certain departments.”

Jamie looked at the older man, then turned onto his side away from him, and closed his eyes. He couldn’t have cared less about Nurse Caroline’s breasts. Leo was, at this moment, however tenuously, his only sure acquaintance in the world; otherwise, he would have cursed him out for his blatant disrespect of the scene they’d witnessed only seconds before.

“Oh, don’t be like that,” Leo said. “I’m just trying find the bright side.” Jamie didn’t respond. “So where are you headed after here, then? Have any folks that’ll take you in?”

Jamie considered it. “Guess that’s up to them.” He hadn’t spoken with anyone in his family in a little over two years, but the nurses would have tracked them down and called them by now. The chronological gap in communication itself didn’t loom quite as large as the distinct possibility that even his minimization couldn’t mend the rift that had caused it. He knew of friends who’d been taken back in once they were physically incapable of shooting up, let alone getting their hands on a bundle in the first place, but he was unsure that his family was so forgiving.

“Me, my old lady’s taking me back, thanks for asking,” Leo said. “Said she’s glad she’ll finally be able to put me in my place.” Jamie turned back to him and queried him with his eyes; nothing frightened him more than being entirely at someone else’s mercy, especially someone with reason to be vengeful. “Oh, don’t give me that look. I’m sure she’ll enforce the rules, but that’s just how we joke. I’m sure she’ll miss my size,” he winked, “but she’s a good woman. Thank god we were separated when I got the bug and I never gave it to her. Better that than that shelter, anyways. No offense to you, if that’s where you end up.”

Jamie nodded. He stared into space, his gaze directed at the thick fibers in the sheet beneath them. “When’s she coming to pick you up?”

Leo shrugged. “If I haven’t lost count and this really is day seven, should only be about nine more hours. Whenever she’s awake, really.”

A pale teenage girl with royal blue hair approached them. Her scrubs had a thread sticking out of the shoulder that, to a normal person, wouldn’t have been longer than 3 centimeters, but if she hadn’t been anxiously chewing on it, she would have had to continually brush it out of her face. “They can’t… they can’t just do that, can they?” she said. “Dump her in a bag and… Poor Sylvia…” She was trembling. “She said they were in a camp together.” She chewed on her string as the two men looked on. “What’s going to happen to her body?”

Jamie felt his heart sink again. He’d been on the brink of distracting himself.

Leo scratched his chin. “I didn’t bother to ask, to be honest with you, lass. I assume if she’s got a family they’ll let them know.”

“And… and if she doesn’t.” The girl had her each of her hands on the other other arm’s elbow, and she hunched her shoulders.

Leo shook his head. “I don’t know. I’m sorry.”

“I don’t understand,” she said. “They can’t just do that.” She looked back and forth between Leo’s and Jamie’s eyes. Neither of them responded, and she took a moment to process it. “They can’t,” she echoed, quieter this time.

“You’ve never been to hospital after an OD before, have you?” Jamie said. His voice was hushed.

“I’ve never OD’d,” the girl said. “I don’t even do drugs.” Seeing their disbelief, she insisted an explanation. “I had painkillers in my system because I sprained my ankle pretty badly. I stuck to my prescription, but, since I have minutiosis, the doctor assumed I was a jun—” She blushed an apology for the close call, then continued. “An addict. But it doesn’t make sense. My prescription is in the NHS system. They didn’t even believe my mum.” She bit her nails. “No offense to anyone who does drugs.” Her eyes began to water. “I don’t even know if my mum believes me anymore. I’ve been on this stupid ‘unit’ for three days and she still hasn’t come to get me.”

Leo nodded, pondering how to gently break whatever might need to be broken to her.

“See, the nurses don’t view us as addicts,” Jamie scowled. “You were right—we’re junkies, a waste of resources and time. No matter where we are, we’re a waste of space, but when we’re in hospital, taking up beds, it’s even worse. Nobody really wants us alive so much as they don’t want our deaths on their hands. Us being shrunk is a blessing to them and to the whole fucking NHS, because now we all only waste one bed.”

The girl chewed on her string.

“Come here,” Leo said. He extended his arms. “Don’t mind him.” She hesitated—he was not only a stranger, but an old junkie min to boot. “It’s alright, love. I don’t bite.” She placed her back against the plastic wall, slid down next to him, and received his embrace.

“So nobody cares about us?” she asked. “Now that we’re minpeople?”

Leo continued to hug her, but remained quiet. Neither he nor Jamie were experienced with their size, but they already acutely understood the treatment.

“It’s alright,” Jamie said. He clutched his stomach. “You’ll get used to it.” He stood up and headed down the bed.

Leo watched as the younger man went to comfort Sylvia. “Never mind him,” he said. “What’s your name, love? How old are you?”

“I’m Cass,” she said. “I’m fifteen.”

Seven more visits from Nurse Caroline and four from Nurse Erin, who worked the morning shift, and, sure enough, Leo’s wife arrived to take him home. She was a thin blonde woman in her forties, and she placed Leo in the breast pocket of the men’s overcoat she wore. “I got this just so I’d have somewhere to keep you,” she said to him, and stroked his head with the pad of her finger.

“Ta,” Leo said to her, though she couldn’t hear him. Then to the minpeople on the bed: “Guess I’m a pocket square now. Bye lads!”

“Cheers,” Jamie said.

“Good luck!” Cass waved.

“You too, love,” Leo said. Then his wife, with him in tow, walked off, complaining to him about all the paperwork that had held her up.

“I hope he knows what he’s doing,” Jamie said as he knelt down in front of his personal square of water to scoop it up to his mouth.

“Me too.” Cass sat down on the wall near him.

Jamie patted his face with his wet hands to wake himself up. He could feel his stubble growing. “So how’d you sprain your ankle?” he asked Cass. “You know, since you’re not an addict.”

Cass hesitated. “I was...” She looked away. “I was at a party and I got really drunk. And I fell down the stairs.” Then, as if trying to defend her right to be blamed for her situation, she said, “It was my fault for sneaking out and getting drinks from guys in university. That’s how I got minutiosis.” She fiddled with her string. “Now everyone knows what a slut I am. Even my mum.”

Jamie looked at her. She didn’t return his gaze. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I guess shouldn’t have asked.”

“It’s fine. You didn’t know. I guess I just never thought it was going to be me.” She sighed. “I know that’s part of what they warn you about in the speech they give you about staying safe. But I only did it like five times total.” She fiddled with the thread sticking out of her scrubs. “I always told my mum I was out studying with my best friend, so now she knows I’m a liar too. It makes sense she hasn’t got me yet.”

“Hey,” Jamie said. “She’ll be here. I’m sure it’s just the doctors and NHS bureaucracy doing their best to hold things up.”

“Maybe she’s too busy,” Cass said, ignoring his assurance. “My dad died almost a year ago and my mum had to take care of me, my twelve-year-old brother, and my baby sister all by herself. I know I should have helped her instead of going out. I was just…” She took a deep breath to prevent herself from crying. “I was so sad. I needed to get rid of it. I thought I was going to explode.” She took another withering breath. “Maybe I did.”

Jamie sat in silence for a moment, hoping to give her a second to calm down. “I understand,” he said.

Cass rolled her eyes at herself, and wiped away a tear with her finger. “Of course you do. I’m sorry for being such a whiner.”

“It’s fine,” Jamie said. She gave him a dubious look. “Really. You’ve got plenty of good reasons to complain, trust me.”

“If you don’t mind me asking, um…” She thought of how to word her question. “Well, I know this is personal…” Jamied nodded his consent. “Well, why would anyone do heroin? Especially with minutiosis on the rise. Aren’t there other, safer drugs?”

Jamie cracked his knuckles as he mulled it over. “It feels good,” he said. “And it’s cheap.” He realized he was speaking in present tense. His non-sober days were behind him. “I knew it would kill me, I just didn’t care. I mean, I thought I knew it would kill me, and I knew it would at least kill my pain in the meantime.”

“Yeah,” Cass said.

He shrugged. “The problem is I’m not dead. I mean, my life is over, but I’m still living. I don’t know.” He shook his head. “It just felt so good, you know? Now people who don’t know me hate me and I can’t blame them, because everyone who knows me and isn’t also using hates me too. I pawned my grandma’s jewelry when she died to get high, and I was out of money by the time her funeral rolled around. I’m worth hating. I don’t know.”

Cass rested her head in her right hand. “There are some good ones, though, right? There are still people who care.”

As if on cue, Nurse Erin, a morbidly obese woman with her hair pulled into a tight bun behind a headband, leaned her shadow onto the unit. “Good morning guys!” Jamie and Cass stopped talking and looked up at her. “I have another freshly minted fellow here for you. Be nice to him.” She placed the tray with him on the foot of the bed and left it there while a young Asian man trudged off of it. She leaned in to the top end of the bed, and talked to the minpeople who were less immediately ill. “So, it’s slop for lunch and dinner as usual, but I figured I’d split one of my biscuits with you as a snack to break up the monotony. You better promise that you’ll finish the whole thing or it’s my butt on the line, got it?”

Cass smiled at her. With Nurse Erin’s massive frame looming over them, it would have been easy for her to feel like an animal in a petting zoo or a child in a playpen, but she put effort into believing that Erin saw them as people. That was most likely the truth—people who didn’t see them as people never bothered to be so kind. She waved her arms at her to grab her attention.

“Yes?” Nurse Erin asked. “What is it?” Then, almost immediately, she smacked her forehead. “Oh, I almost forget to tell you! Your mum’s here today to spring you out early. She finally managed to convince the doctor that you weren’t in the right place. Go figure, it’s only all over all of your papers. She’ll be half an hour at most, I promise. She’s just in reception now. Sound good?”

Cass smiled and nodded. Jamie looked up at Nurse Erin and tried to send her a telepathic plea: What about me? Will any of my family take me? Have you even spoken with them? Do they know where I am? Nurse Erin didn’t hear him. She grabbed the empty tray she’d brought the freshmin in on and walked back to the nurses station.

“See?” Cass said. “I told you. Blue skies ahead. For both of us.”

Erin returned an hour later to bring Cass to her family.

“Sorry about the delay,” she said as she placed the transportation tray down on the bed for Cass to climb onto. “Your mum’s with your siblings, and they don’t allow kids near the unit, so I have to take you back to her. Doctor’s orders.”

Cass hugged Jamie then stepped onto the platform. “Good luck!” she said. “I hope you hear from your family.” Then, with a single turn of Erin’s body, she was out of sight.

In the night, the new freshmin, an overdependent, died. He was twenty-three years old. Nurse Caroline didn’t arrive to find his body until forty-five minutes after the other minpeople had noticed he’d collapsed. She put him in a plastic bag while singing a song, and returned to the nurses station to drink her coffee.

The next night, a man with an orange cage arrived for Jamie.