Alex wasn’t certain time still existed in this subatomic negative zone of space and color. Obviously, he hadn’t eaten, drunk, or slept during his existence amongst the nuclear rings and spheres, yet he would’ve been ready to bet anything that he’d been here a long time. At least a day. Probably longer, even. A week? Maybe a month. There was no way to be certain.

            Then, as if he was hearing sound through an entire ocean’s depth, Alex perked up. The first signal to reach his ears in all this time.

            It was Thomas. Unmistakably so. His little brother, crying out, first without shape, then in words.

            “MOM!” the young boy cried. “PLEASE DON’T STEP ON ME! MOM, I’M DOWN HERE! I’M WITH YOU! HELP!”

            Shaking his head, Alex listened for further cries, but couldn’t make any out. Had he become delusional? Or had Thomas joined him in this impossible dimension of a microscopic galaxy? Alex could only hope with all his heart that his brother hadn’t befallen the same tragic fate.

            Then, where there had been only silence and drifting color before, there came energy. Life. Sound. Something tangible against Alex’s skin. Wind?

            He couldn’t help but laugh with rejoicing to be experiencing something beyond the unending cluster of revolving electrons and imaginary particles he couldn’t name. Hands outstretched, hope restored, if only in small measure, Alex felt himself falling yet again, no longer suspended in space. He traveled down, out of the spiraling storm of this shrunken nightmare, and toward a light brighter than any he could bear to witness.

***

            “GOT him!” Walter cheered. He yanked a lever hooked to his stacked machinery on the patio. His devices whizzed with the effort of his latest, and probably final, experiment, as the cadre of waiting police officers stood around him. They cheered as well. “See, I told you I could do it, right?”

            On the floor, naked as the day he was born, and caked in a thin sheen of plasma, laid Alex Robinson: fully regrown to his previous height of five-foot-nine. His eyes remained shut just a minute and then he coughed, air filling his lungs for the first time in a week, and sensation returning to his extremities.

            Too shocked to budge from where he stood by the wall, Greg’s mouth hung open.

            Michelle, meanwhile, was already crawling across the floor with renewed zeal and pure elation. Uncaring of her son’s bare body or coat of plasma from the rapid size change, the woman threw herself over Alex’s form. She wrapped both arms and legs around his narrower limbs, her hands held first over his chest to ensure a heartbeat, then up to his face, testing the movement of his lips and eyes, to convince herself he was real.

            “Oh God… oh, God, oh God…” she repeated. For at least a minute, it seemed all the woman would be capable of doing was repeating these words and stroking her fingers aggressively through her elder son’s hair. Next she planted a hard, wet kiss on the top of his head, and after this she became too ravenous with joy to be stopped. Alex was almost overcome as his mother pressed sloppy, crazed kisses upon his cheeks, forehead, and hands. “My baby is back, my baby is back, my baby…”

            “WAIT!” Alex cried, bolting up, only to almost slip on the slick floor, as well as beneath the strength of his mother’s embracing arms, which were still locked around him. “T-Thomas! He’s…”

            “We know,” Greg gasped. “We know the same thing happened to him as you.”

            “Yeah, but… but I know… I know he’s in the same place that I was, he’s…”

            “What did you hear?” Walter demanded, shoving his way past Greg to stand over the boy. “Just remember. You heard something, didn’t you, kid?”

            “He… he said…” Alex stuttered as he stared into the face of the stranger. “He said… please don’t step on me, M-Mom. He must… he must be down…”

            Michelle looked on the verge of losing consciousness from all the mad excitement of this roller coastering day. However, she still managed to keep her body wrapped mostly around her older son as her muscles shuddered her to the floor. Delicately, the woman’s leg was outstretched, her shoe removed, and her bare toes left to flex. There was no sign of a tiny naked human body anywhere inside the sweat-slicked shoe insole, between her own toejam-flecked digits, nor beneath her pink-flushed sole.

            “This won’t hurt a bit,” Walter promised, his hands in frenzy at the controls of the shrinking device. A second blinding flash of light flooded the kitchen, a splash of plasma, and just beneath Michelle’s feet laid Thomas, equally naked and weak, but alive and breathing.

            “Oh, my babies, my babies, I’m never letting you go again,” Michelle swore. She gathered both of her sons together, despite their mounting embarrassment as the shock wore off and the realization of their exposure took hold. Miraculous tears spread anew down the woman’s cheeks. She squeezed each boy to a breast, her fingers in their matted hair, reminded deep inside of the day each child first emerged into the world and the touch of divinity she’d experienced upon seeing each of their adorable faces for the first time.

            Alex and Thomas, too tired to resist this consistently warped state of reality, could only look to one another with dumbfounded smirks as their mother hugged her children closer.