Someone was knocking at the door.

Jennifer went to see who it was.

Meanwhile, I was testing the remote to open the fridge electronically. Now I could get it to open and close with the push of a button. With Stuart gone, this was necessary for me when Jennifer was out of the house for long periods of time, such as for work. We were also working on getting something similar for the front and back door of the house, although Jennifer was digging her feet in a little more on that one. I was running ahead of myself with visions of piloting the car with some kind of electronic interface, but she was resolutely against that.

I returned to the living room as Jennifer reappeared from down the hallway. And she had someone with her. My eyes nearly shot out of my skull.

Remy stepped into the room. He was carrying the machine in his arms.

And he was normal sized again.

“HI, JERRY,” he said. “I THINK I FIXED HER!”

My mouth opened but, for a moment, no sound came out.

“Remy, you – you – ” I finally stuttered. “You’re big again!”

He laughed.

“NOT JUST ME, PAL. YOUR FRIEND STUART? HE’S BACK IN GIANT LAND, TOO. NOW IT’S YOUR TURN.”

“You can get me back to normal size – right now?”

“WAIT,” Jennifer cut in, “ARE YOU SURE THIS IS SAFE?”

She had a wary frown on her face as she surveyed the big gizmo in Remy's arms.

“Jen, please!” I cried, “It worked for them. I’m going to be big again! Can you imagine?”

She took this in but her expression didn’t change.

“I DON’T LIKE THIS,” she murmured, shaking her head.

Remy ignored her, looking back down at me with a toothy grin.

“LET ME TELL YOU, FRIEND: AT THIS SIZE, LIFE FEELS PRETTY NICE.”

He slapped the side of the machine.

“WHY DON’T I SHOW YOU?”

“Let’s go!”

“MADAM,” Remy said to Jennifer, flourishing an arm, “IF YOU WOULD KINDLY STEP AWAY FROM THE JOLT ZONE…”

With her lips still pursed in displeasure, Jennifer went over to the other side of the room.

I got down onto the living room carpet and stood a little away from Remy, who was now fiddling with switches and dials on the side of the machine, until it started emitting a static hum that I could feel crackling in my bones.

He began to instruct me in a solemn voice:

“YOU REMEMBER WHAT YOU DID WHEN YOU JOLTED THE SECOND TIME. NOW YOU MUST DO THE EXACT OPPOSITE, AND MY MACHINE WILL TAKE CARE OF EVERYTHING ELSE.”

I stared at him, wracking my brains.

“I-I don’t think I remember exactly what I did, Remy. It was a long time ago, and I was drug—” I avoided meeting Jennifer’s eyes, “—and I was drunk. I tripped and went through a tunnel that twisted right around.”

“SURE,” he carried on blithely. “YOU WENT THROUGH A TWISTY HOLE. SO NOW YOU GO THROUGH A STRAIGHT HOLE.”

“But I went through a straight hole the first time and that didn’t make me grow

“WE ARE NOT TRYING TO MAKE YOU ENLARGE, JERRY. WE ARE TRYING TO MAKE YOU UN-SHRINK.”

The back of my neck was cool with sweat; I was starting to feel like Remy’s obsessive fealty to his machine mathematics was bordering mad professor levels.

“NOT BIG. NORMAL. UNDERSTOOD?”

“No, not really. Look, just do whatever you guys did.”

Remy looked away, his brow vexed.

“THERE IS, UH, A MINOR COMPLICATION THERE. I KNOW WHAT WENT WRONG WHEN I USED THE MACHINE WITH STUART. SO I JUST DID THE OPPOSITE. BUT I DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU DID WHEN IT WENT WRONG FOR YOU.”

I bit my lip, thinking for a moment.

“I’ll figure it out. Straight hole, right?”

“JERRY, LISTEN,” Jennifer said from the side of the room, “YOU DON’T HAVE TO DO THIS FOR ME.”

“I want this!” I exclaimed. “For both of us!”

She was running her hands through her hair nervously.

“LOOK…YOU’RE GOING TO THINK I’M CRAZY, BUT YOUR HEIGHT; I ACTUALLY—”

“I’M SORRY TO INTERRUPT,” Remy said, and then looked across at me, “JERRY, IF YOU ARE READY WE MUST PROCEED NOW,” he hefted the machine up like a gun, “SHE IS CHARGED UP AND ALL SET TO FIRE!”

“I’m ready, Remy! Fire away!”

He pulled the trigger.

As if Moses had parted the red sea, reality parted down the middle, giving me access to a tall tunnel through spacetime where all the surrounding color of reality was blurred and streaked, like street lights through rainy glass. This main tunnel branched into other tunnels; straight, curving, cornering at a right angle, wiggling back and forth, and one corkscrewing right around in a loop.

I identified the straightest path and began to follow it, thinking to myself: anhedral…dihedral…

I had looked these terms up since last time I’d seen Remy. They referred to the slight angle created by plane wings as against the fuselage.

But if I was like the fuselage, and the branching paths were like the wings…

Oh fuck! Not the straight path! The diagonal path! The diagonal pa—!

There was a brief sensation of falling, a small jolt in my stomach, like when you almost trip but manage to catch yourself. Then the walls of the warp tunnel collapsed in on me. I shut my eyes instinctively. When I opened them, I found myself standing on the carpet. But that nauseating feeling was still there.

Something had gone horribly wrong.

I didn’t know how I knew this immediately, but I did.

“OH…THAT IS…UH…NOT SUPPOSED TO HAVE HAPPENED…”

The staccato voice was like cracks of thunder right overhead.

I flinched and began to tremble.

“I TOLD YOU! I FUCKING TOLD YOU!”

The ground then quaked, over and over, like bolts of lightning were striking close by, and each one whipping up the air in cool powerful draughts. My legs shuddered out from under me and I fell over onto my front, my face pressed against carpet fibers like a sea of thick ropes. There were clumps of dirt and lint buried amidst the strands that were bigger than my head.

“YOU BRING HIM BACK RIGHT NOW!”

Four massive titanic skyscrapers were moving down on me. I screamed, convinced I was about to be crushed. But they miraculously stopped short. The closest skyscrapers ended in a pair of sneakers; each as big as a multi-storey house.

Remy’s shoes.

Another couple of objects were a similar sized pair of feminine sandals. Jennifer’s shoes.

“PLEASE, MADAM, LET ME THINK. HE CAN’T HAVE DISAPPEARED, HE WAS RIGHT…OH…”

The nausea in my stomach came to a head and I violently threw up on the ground. I was smaller…

Much smaller.

I couldn’t be more than half a centimeter. I was the size of a grain of rice. Another way of putting it; if I was standing side by side with me at my previous size, I could’ve held my current size in the palm of my hand. And I had been the size of a mouse previously. This was really bad – positively insane. I could not live at this size. I could not exist at this size.

All of these thoughts were swirling around my head when I heard a huge voice rumble overhead:

“OH MY GOD…”

I craned my neck up to see Jennifer looking down right where I was. She was an Everest of human flesh and clothing, and a mountainous waterfall of ropeish hair. Her freakishly big form collapsed down onto her knees – like huge upside down hills in their own right – positively dwarfing my negligible form. I couldn’t imagine what I looked like to her. I must have been so small my face would have been a dot.

Her gargantuan face peered down at me with an expression of astonishment; how I imagined someone would look if an ant suddenly began talking to them.

“JERRY…?”

The hair on the back of my neck stood up. A thrill of fear lashed through me. Rationality melted out of my brain until there was just pure animal panic left. Suddenly I was sprinting like I’d gotten an electric shock.

“HE’S TRYING TO RUN!” exclaimed Remy’s booming voice. “QUICK! BEFORE WE LOSE HIM!”

He’d only just finished speaking when a deep, dark shadow began spreading over the ground where I was. No matter how fast I ran, or where I headed, it was expanding out around me even faster, like an inkblot growing on a napkin. I flicked my gaze up to see what looked like a padded roof falling down on my head, but a roof comprising of a leathery expanse of wrinkles and creases. The shape divided into five long objects like heads of hydra, the flat faces of which were distinguished by swirling or concentric ridges, each capped on the opposite side with a huge plate of shiny armor. But it was not a foreign monster. It was flesh that I knew almost like my own body, except now it was leagues bigger than my body. I was so small that a single one of those fingerprints was over twice my height.

Those long pale hydra bowed their necks around me. Then the world went dark. I felt myself pressed between two padded, ridged surfaces and tried to scream, but there was no air in my lungs. I was completely entombed between the surfaces, with no part of me sticking out. I had an impression of rising a dizzying number of floors – more floors than accommodated by the tallest building in the world.

Then the surfaces peeled away, just enough to allow some light through. Now my face stuck out, while much of my body was still contained within.

Heat blasted in my face as if a furnace door had been opened in front of me. I blinked, my eyes burning, but I couldn’t even rub them because my arms were still trapped at my sides.

A pair of enormous green eyes were fixed on me; each close to the size of a car. I could see myself reflected in their gleaming convex surfaces, my terrified face hopelessly dwarfed, a mere speck – almost completely lost – between the humungous thumb and finger pad pressed in on either side of my face. Each time those gleaming orbs blinked, two fans of black spikes swatted the air rapidly.

There was another blast of heat like a powerful desert wind which caused a defensive sheen of sweat to instantly break out on my body. I winced. 

The vast empty space surrounding me echoed with the thunderous parody of Jennifer’s voice, in a mixture of triumph and relief:

“GOT HIM.”