Martha woke up around the same time Jake did. She sat in her bed, stretched her arms, then rubbed her eyes. Her head was hurting too, but it was nothing a single painkiller couldn’t help with. She slowly got out of the bed, pushing the jeans she left on the floor aside with her foot. She was wearing a light grey pyjama pants and a white t-shirt, her sleeping clothes, and she felt somewhat proud of herself for having remembered to change before going to sleep. She slowly stepped out of her room, deciding to check on Jake. As her room was next to the front door, Martha immediately noticed his shoes. Good, she thought. He didn’t sneak away while I was sleeping. She stretched some more as she walked towards the living room, trying to be quiet in case he was still sleeping. In fact, she was a bit worried about him, wondering whether they have overdone it with booze the night before. Even if he was still sleeping, she would only take a look and leave him be.
Jake walked for several minutes now and the scenery didn’t change. Green as far as the eye go. Looking up was not much help either, what with the flora blocking the view from below. What little he could see was white. Perhaps the sky was overcast. As he continued he noticed something new. Something that wasn’t green, something that was in fact white, as white as what he thought was the sky up above and so he began to walk towards it. Soon after he realized, much to his relief, that he was no longer among the grass. But the relief was short-lived. He was now standing in front of a massive white object unlike anything he’d ever seen before. It was many, many times as big as he was. It had two stripes, one red and one blue, running across its surface in one particular spot, where Jake saw something similar to an entrance in a tunnel. And it smelled, the smell invading his nostrils even though he stood several feet from it. It didn’t take him long to realize he was now standing in front of a sock, the one he was wearing the day before. As he looked past it, raising his head, he noticed a massive structure looming above him, it being nothing other than the couch. He continued to look around, recognizing pieces of furniture and his strewn clothes dotting the landscape, all magnified to enormous proportions. Finally, he looked down, recognizing the plain stretching all the way to the horizon as the floor. And then that floor began to shake beneath his feet.
As Martha walked into the room, doing all her best to be as quiet as possible, she immediately noticed the mess on the floor. The socks littering the floor, the shirt hanging from the corner of the coffee table, the trousers covering the console, the blanket she gave him thrown into the corner and worst of all his underwear in the very middle of the couch. She shook her head and decided she’ll let him know her disappointment in a very few, very short words. Only then did she notice he was no longer on the couch. In fact, he was nowhere to be seen. She sighed, resigned. So he was not only naked, he was God-knows where. Great. She thought of calling out his name but the moment she opened her mouth she felt how dry her throat was. She needed a drink. As she was about to leave, she took one more glance at the mess around and it was then she noticed something curious by her feet. Something that looked like an ant, although it was a bit bigger than an ant, a bit lighter in colour and a bit looking as if it was standing on two legs. As if this morning couldn’t get any worse, now she had an infestation problem as well. She slowly lifted her right foot to crush the insect, but as soon as she did the thing sprung and ran to the side, disappearing under the couch in the blink of an eye. Martha sighed in frustration once more and swiftly left for the kitchen.
Jake stood and listened to the loud noises getting closer. The ground shook and his whole body shook with it. He turned towards the source of the sound to face whatever was coming but nothing could prepare him for that moment. When she emerged from behind the couch, Jake almost got a heart attack. Two impossibly long and massive legs ending in an island-sized foot each were walking directly towards him. When they stopped, ten feet or so from where he was standing, he could swear he saw particles of dust being blown into the air from the sheer impact. This is Martha, he thought. Of course, who else could it be? This colossus, this impossibly enormous being standing before him was the same friend he spent the yesterday’s evening with. And now, one wrong move from her part risked snuffing the life out of him, burying him under hundreds of tons of flesh if she only moved her foot a little bit. He noticed he was now as tall as her big toe, from which he estimated his size to be a little less than half an inch in height. Compared to her he was an insect. I should get her attention, Jake thought. I should scream and shout and do everything I can to make her notice me. But he didn’t. He stood down there, looking at Martha in awe and fear. He heard the giantess sigh up above, a sound almost like a slowed thunder. And then he watched her move her foot, lifting it, if only slightly. He watched her enormous sole loom above him and noticed pieces of dust and dirt the size of his head stuck around its surface. He knew he would be the next addition to it, he knew she would crush him without even a shade of an effort and that he would die a humiliating death of being stepped on like a bug he now was. And then the instincts kicked in. It wasn’t his body that sprung into action nor his legs that moved and carried him under the couch, where he hid in the dusty darkness, shaking from primal fear.
She entered the kitchen and immediately headed towards the fridge, opening it and grabbing a two litre bottle of orange juice. She took a glass from the cupboard overhead, poured the juice in and drank it whole in one swift motion. And then she did it two times more. Feeling her thirst quenched, at least for now, she opened the fridge once more to put the juice bottle in. As she did, she noticed the bottle with the chemical compound she was tasked with keeping in the fridge for the weekend. It was empty. She blinked, not believing her eyes, yet it remained empty, the compound inside gone. Martha sighed again, this time in anger at Jake and his abuse of her hospitality. The idiot drank it, she thought. There was no other explanation. Now she would have to face trouble at work because the drunk fool couldn’t be bothered to look what he was getting his hands on. She slammed the fridge door and left the kitchen, keen on finding Jake and giving him a piece of her mind. And then she stopped and thought about all that she saw in the past few minutes. His shoes in place, his clothes strewn around, the compound missing, the ant. The weird, pale, bipedal ant.
“Oh God” she whispered.