“You’re sure we can stand here?” Greg Robinson asked nervously. He stood against the wall of their household kitchen, holding his wife’s clammy hand. “Walt, or whatever the hell your name is? Is this absolutely safe?”

            “Yes, yes, I assure you,” the physicist said as gently as possible. He held up a mechanical wand, which looked to be a modified radiation detector, and held it over the cedar tabletop. “I’ve gathered enough information on the boy’s trail to know he didn’t go beyond this room or the living room, and he never stood over where you are.”

            “Don’t forget Thomas!” Michelle balked angrily.

            “I haven’t, Mrs. Robinson, honest,” the man said. “I’m still working on getting a read on his location. It took me longer to follow little Alex’s path, and frankly, that’s going to be the harder problem to solve, since it’s been a week. Our best chance is to follow the trail and hopefully find where he might’ve reduced down into the… well, let’s just say too small to see. Then maybe, maybe, I can pull him out of the subatomic realm. If that’s where he is.”

            “Just get to work, Mr. Andrews,” a cop said through the screen door, amongst several other officers gathered for support or whatever else was required of this bizarre happenstance.

            “Right away!” Walter promised. He stooped below the table, metal wand near the ground as he read off a digital tablet screen. “The reaction took place just after 6:12 PM on that night. Can either of you think of where you were then?”

            “Of course I can,” Michelle snapped defensively. After all, she’d picked over every detail of that night in her sleep, backwards and forwards, in the seven days since. “That’s when I was just getting home. I saw the cake he baked me.”

            “Well, that’s about when he shrunk, give or take,” Walter said. He moved the wand. “From what I’m seeing, he stuck around here a while, probably crawled out of his clothes… made his way to this table leg, and…”

            “Wait…” Michelle mumbled, shaking her head, unwilling to accept the possibilities now set before her. “You’re… you’re saying he was down there at 6:12?”

            “Well, by this point, it was 6:31… it takes a person of that size a while to get anywhere, you understand. Why?”

            “I… I was at the table. This table…” Michelle continued.

            “How can you remember that?” Greg asked.

            “Because I was finishing authorizing log sheets for work and had to make note of the times. I remember I authorized one at 6:28, another at 6:33…”

            “Keep moving, Walter,” a second cop instructed through the screen.

            “This is interesting. He starts to go up, slightly, here,” Walter noted. The tip of his wand rose a few inches above the ground. “He would’ve still been… maybe half an inch, right here. To be honest, I’m not positive of the physical effects, since he’s the first one to ever receive the… never mind. Point is, he must’ve climbed.”
            “Climbed,” Greg repeated. “Climbed what?”

            “Climbed me,” Michelle mouthed. Both hands went to her paled cheeks. Her eyes welled with tears at the very idea. “My… my baby boy was trying to climb onto me. To get my attention.”

            “Looks like a snag of some sort. Fluctuation in the reading here, he hit the floor again after a short climb.”

            “But he kept moving?” Michelle demanded desperately, her throat ragged. “He MOVED. Tell me he moved again!”

            “He did, he did,” Walter said. “Yep, moved around a bit here, more regular pattern. He got higher this time, must’ve made a leap judging by the arc I’m seeing here, and-”

            “Oh my God,” Michelle gasped. She almost buckled at the knees, cupping her palm over her mouth now. “Oh my GOD.”

            “What?”

            “The… the Legos. It wasn’t much, but… I assumed it was Thomas. That he built something. I would’ve sworn the pieces weren’t together when I saw it on the floor earlier, but then I…” she continued, swallowing with difficulty. “I picked them up and walked to the living room.”

            “Another correct one!” Walter congratulated, then toned down his cheery mood. “Yep, I see he stayed on a fairly even trajectory into the living room now. Resourceful, your kid. He must’ve hung onto you.”

            Michelle was devolving into tears again, her face buried in her husband’s shoulder. Her fists, whitened by fear, clenched around Greg’s hands. This information clearly wasn’t improving her outlook.

            Walter delicately made his way into the living room, stood where Michelle stood to replace the Legos in a storage box, then came back, nodding his head all the way.

            “He stayed with you the whole walk. Must be a strong one.”

            “He rock climbs,” Greg explained. “He’s very good for his age.”

            “Looks like it,” Walter said. He stooped again. “And I gather you stayed here for a little longer after that, Mrs. Robinson?”

            “Y-Yes…” she sniffed. “I got through the rest of the paperwork for the night. I remember the last one I signed… 7:16, I think.”

            “Well, the boy had another go of it, and he did much better this time. I’m seeing an almost straight line upward.”

            “I wore a skirt. He could’ve climbed that,” Michelle whimpered. Her muscles locked, her entire body in a state of near-shutdown as she imagined the very concept of her poor, helpless little boy, small as anything she could imagine, trying to clamber his way up her clothing for help. She closed her hand gently, longing to picture how things might’ve gone differently if she’d only seen him, if she’d only been able to collect him tenderly into her fingertips and protect him in the center of her palm.

            What he must’ve gone through, hoping and praying for his mother’s attention?

            “Little fall here, front of the seat…” Walter continued, missing the horrified expressions on the faces of both parents.  “…and back up he went, but not on your shirt. Irregular pattern. Could’ve been anything… probably hard to remember, but he did make it up here, and it wasn’t alone.”

            “M-My hand…” Michelle sputtered. She was sinking toward the floor now, unable to remain standing as she was forced to now live through all of this horror as an outsider with her stranded, thoughtful little son. The woman clutched both palms over her eyes to dam the tide of tears. “He got to my hand. My… my baby, he made it that far… if only I’d… if only I’d seen…”

            “You couldn’t have known, Michelle,” Greg said, following his wife to the floor. “Please. Just listen.”

            “To the table, he moved around a little, let’s see… time passed… and, up he goes again! Now, this is intriguing,” Walter said. “Must’ve been a solid, climbable object here before, something he could’ve scaled, even as he probably continued shrinking. Know of a-”

            “THE CAKE!” Michelle’s scream rattled the walls of the house and startled the cops outside. “He… b-baked… he baked me a… a… it was there… I h-had a… a piece.”

            “That makes sense. Stopped off right about…. here, then rose again… much higher than I bet your cake stood, back to the table, stuck around for a minute, and…”

            “What?” Greg roared now. It took all his self-control not to jump forward and tackle this man to the floor. “TELL US.”

            “It’s… it’s just… umm…” Walter continued, his face drained of color as he put the pieces together. “Based on what you’re telling me about this cake, and where I can guess Mrs. Robinson’s head might’ve been relative to her seat, the last readable energy trail I can follow leads right up to… her, um…”

            Michelle froze completely this time, her hands uncovered from her tear-streaked cheeks, fingers wrenching through her messy black locks of hair. The quivering stopped, from the tips of her toes up to her scalp. A final, lasting breath inflated her lungs, and then emptied again.

            “Oh, God…” Greg said. He sounded out of words now, and possibly forever.

            “Yes,” Walter confirmed with a defeated shrug. “I don’t take any pleasure in telling you both this. But it… it looks an awful lot to me like… he may have gone… inside. Inside her mouth.”

            At this last word, Michelle rose again. An inhuman steeliness took hold behind her gorgeous emerald eyes. She launched herself up on her heels, hands clawed like those of a rabid jungle cat, onto Walter, pile-driving him into the side of the table. Both of them tumbled to the floor. The cops flinched, unsure whether it was safe to set foot inside.

            “NO! You’re a goddamned LIAR! None of this is fucking REAL!” Michelle’s unleashed screams of mismatched hysteria and loss sounded as though they were pulled from someone else’s mouth, the din spreading through the house with a mother’s love like an ignited flame. “You’re JUST a DISGUSTING little WORM of a man who came here to… to screw with our heads, and make us… make ME believe… that I ate my s-”

            Michelle couldn’t finish the sentence, nor say the word “son.” She rolled herself off of Walter, scrambled to her feet, and over the kitchen sink just in time to throw up into the drain. Her entire body quaked again with the sickness of it and her own lingering screams. The shattered woman slammed both palms against the side of the sink in succession, livid at all of existence, and then clutched her shoulders and crumpled to the ground in a heap. On her side, she writhed, nails digging into her skin, producing fresh tears from strained eyes. Her next words came in a low, private, desperate song to herself.

            “Oh, no, no, no, no. No, my baby, my baby. Alex, I’m so sorry, Mommy is so sorry. She’d never hurt you, honey. Oh, please, come back, come back to Mommy. Let me save you. Let me save you, my poor little baby. Let me hold you again. Just let me hold you in my hands. Oh, God. Oh God. No, no, no. NO.”