Saturday, March 25th, 2023
I wake up, feeling kinda sore since I was lying asleep on a napkin all night. I notice that Tony and Dave are still knocked out next to me. We’re all sleeping on a napkin on a counter in some sorta secluded holding cell, not exactly the most comfiest place to lay your head at but I guess when you’re tired like us three are from all the events of yesterday you can fall asleep anywhere. I sit up, and I see the analog clock on the wall not too far from us. Guessing by the hands, I woke up a little bit on the earlier side. It is roughly 6:27 in the morning if I really look at the hands on the clock hard enough. It almost being 6:30 now. I hear my own stomach gurgle, pretty loudly I admit. Even though I’m never hungry when shrunk, I find that kinda odd. Unless it’s just noisy for the sake of being noisy it seems, since it’s been awhile since I’ve eaten anything I’m digesting anything either.
I think a little bit about what today might entail, how Nicole might react to my height and all the what ifs that could come out of this situation, what if I do get tested on by the government, what if this is permanent this time, how would I explain this to Nicole and my daughter and Mom and I guess would I have to reveal everything that went on during that Europe trip all those years ago? It’s a little scary to think about, to be honest. I feel the same anxiety I had last night before I went to sleep last night, it creeps up on me again as I think more and more about the possibilities of the situation, since we’ve been caught now and there’s no getting out of this one. I wonder if I should alert a few of the officers that I’m awake, or should I enjoy a few minutes or a few hours of peace before we get this crazy ass day started. Because I know I as soon as someone realizes that we’re all awake is going to get this whole ball rolling.
I sit in silence, the only sound of the keys of the Officers in the distances jingling as they walk and the sound of a coffee pot brewing, looking out the cell doesn’t seem like there’s much around us. We’re in a pretty secluded area of the station anyways, away from a lot of the action from going on in here. The little that is going on in this tourist mountain town’s police station. The clock doesn’t tick at all as the time goes by, it’s a silent analog clock.
About 15 minutes pass by, judging by the different places the clock settles at. I just sit in silence, enjoying what time I have left before whatever happens once we all get up and we start calling our wives and telling them what’s up. I wish I had my phone, it makes moments like this much easier to get through. Waiting around without one makes me remember how boring it was waiting around before smartphones, even with flip phones and the like there was only so much you could do, playing Snake or Tetris or whatever you had available on there does get old at some point, I imagine. I think how I never expected this vacation, or at least a getaway to really think about my career and how I wanna move forward, would ever be like this.
I think a bit about how my life in Atlanta that I’ve made for myself and my wife and kid. How different things could be after today, with my job, my friends who never knew I was ever shrunk in the first place, family. Will we have some sorta government assistance, a nice check every month to keep us afloat. I guess I’ll have to start thinking about downsizing if that’s the case since I don’t think they’re going to give us that much if we did get government checks. My wife and kid will probably not like it, my wife getting used to our well into upper middle class life, us making a little bit over 200k although factor in taxes and everything with our combined incomes. My wife grew up comfortably middle class, her dad being some sort of electrician with the city, her mom being a stay at home mom so the lifestyle she lives with me is pretty different from what she had growing up. They weren’t exactly paycheck to paycheck and had room to splurge and eat out and take the occasional trip to Florida or Savannah or some nearby, but it’s not like how it was for me growing up either though. I guess me and Nate were spoiled rich kids growing up, getting whatever gadgets and toys we wanted every year for Christmas and living in big nice houses and the like. Although I will admit our parents did teach us constantly about how lucky we were and not everyone has the same opportunities that we had whenever it fit.
I think about all the things I may never be able to do anymore if I’m like this for the rest of my life, which could be the case this time. Having to get pretty much everything tailor made for me, clothes, toothbrushes, how would I eat regular food and have regular meals again? Stuff I didn’t think about all too much the first and I thought would be the only time I was shrunken. My anxiety gets even more heightened as I start to think more about this.
I think a little more about Nate, my younger brother. I haven’t really talked to him since Thanksgiving of last year and around the time dad died and all that shit. He’s still working at the car wash he was working at in high school, although he’s the manager now and he makes okay money I’d say for a single guy living in Charlotte. He still lives in Charlotte and has an apartment in Matthews still keeps in touch with a decent of his friends from high school in that little nu-metal posse that he used to hang with way back when and they hang out from time to time, at least those who are still in the city.
Most of them seemingly starting families and having kids and marriage and the like as they got older I seemed to notice whenever he’d talk about it. I’d argue that he’s not doing all that great compared to them, a lot of them making really good money and going up corporate ladders and the like, Nate never really went to college or expressed interest in it and my parents we’re okay with that, I guess. He had that issue Jon had after high school but never got out of that slump though. Never really leaving Charlotte or having many ambitions after all these years. He’s been single for awhile now, he’s had a few girlfriends over the years, Julia didn’t last too long, his first girlfriend back in high school that he met at through some sorta mutual nu-metal friend of his. They lasted about two months and they didn’t really think they were right for each other. He was single for roughly a year. Then there was this Brunette chick he was with that he met through some sorta dating website, Mary. This chick was a year older than he was and this wasn’t long after he graduated from high school. They were together for about 4 years and then he found out she was cheating on him with this other dude in Durham, and this had been going on for two years by that point. She went back to Durham on the weekends from where she was from and she worked in Charlotte for some sorta Veterinary internship thing that she was doing through college.
He found this out, accidentally seeing one of her messages on her phone pop up from the other dude as she was texting somebody else right beside him and then confronting her about it. It was a ugly breakup, and this was in 2010 or so and I found all of this out when I came back to Charlotte for one of the first times with Nicole, mom kinda filling me in on everything when noticing why Nate wasn’t in a great mood all the time whenever I’d talk to him if he wasn’t at work. He didn’t move out of the house we lived in with our parents in Matthews until the summer of 2011 or so when he was 23.
I’m debating if I should say something to the guards in the distance to maybe get this day started off even though now it’s only 6:51 as the time went by as I look at the clock again and we’re getting closer to seven, seemingly talking about how much of a pain in the ass it is in Los Angeles traffic compared to where some new recruit they’re talking about is from in Colorado. I don’t think they notice me too much, since we’re all pretty small and plus the fact that we’re in the distance from where they are. I get the brief thought to go back to sleep, but then I remember that they’d probably wake us pretty soon anyway since in a situation like this I don’t imagine they’re gonna let us sleep in. I notice that Dave and Tony are still fast asleep, I guess they are really tuckered out from the events of yesterday. I remember when I shrunk I think I would usually sleep pretty good, even though I slept in a suitcase or on Sarah’s stomach or Under Emily’s bed, even getting passed through Emily I was asleep, being swallowed and everything for the first time. It’s all so intense but vague all these years later thinking about these memories.
It’s a few more minutes of silence beside the noise of footsteps of the guards in the distance and the sound of Tony snoring a little bit, and Dave quietly breathing as he sleeps.
“Alright Boys, time to get up!” I hear the sound of an officer quickly walking towards us, and I see him getting quickly to us in the distance. He’s looking somewhat stern in his face, an older looking guy, the officers we were with yesterday were seemingly more in their 30s or 40s and this is for sure probably in his 50s to say the least. This guy seems like he’s been on the force for at least 20 years if I had to guess, maybe 25 or more. This Salt & Pepper haired older guy. He could be a captain or something.
“Aye, Aye Captain!” I yell, trying to joke with him. He doesn’t seem too amused by this judging by his unchanging stern facial expression.
Dave slowly starts to wake up, seeming to be woken by his voice and shifting around a little. Slowly started to get up, Tony still dead asleep in this all. He’s really in a heavy slumber.
“I see your oldest buddy there is still sleeping…” The officer says, getting pretty close to us now, start to slow down with his walk, beginning to open the cell, taking his keys and entering it into a slot and slowly pulling the door back.
“Yeah (Dave yawns and covers his mouth) he’s probably still tired” Dave says, sounding like he’s half asleep in his voice, still just waking up.
“WELL HE BETTER WAKE THE HELL UP!” The officer screams out at us, scaring and shocking me and Dave right to our system and seemingly waking Tony right up out of his slumber, his shifting around and then getting up, seemingly awoken by the officer’s yell.
“Alright, Alright. I’m up” Tony says, starting to scratch his beard, it looks a little more on the bushy side due to how it’s not really groomed like usual.
“Alright, well walk onto my hand for we can get to the phone and call up your wives” he says, seemingly unfazed by the fact he was screaming at the top of his lungs only a few minutes earlier. He reaches his hand out to the napkin on the counter, and I take the first steps to his, everyone else just lagging behind me.
Everyone gets onto his hand, seemingly pretty rugged when I can kinda feel it. It’s like walking onto a huge baseball mitt with how big his hand is to us at our size compared to the other hands we've been in by this point.
He takes a few steps more into the station, and I notice a few officers stare at us as the officer who’s hand we’re in to get to the phone. The officer who’s hand we’re in says sternly that they better not catch anyone taking videos and pictures, even more so if this gets uploaded to Twitter or Youtube or Tik-Tok anything like that (he says TikTok unsurely as if he doesn't know what it is and as if he's just heard of it, which I find kinda funny), giving us wide publicity. Hearing him say all of this as we get taken near the phone makes me somewhat relieved that we could have some sorta lack of wide recognition or something worldwide, at least for the time being.
We get up next to the phone, and the officer lets us start making our calls and we tell them their numbers and they push the buttons for us and they talk to them and tell them that we’re at the station, not saying anything about our current condition. Saying that our wives will respond pretty quick before they start calling, me and Dave having missing person reports filed for us anyways by now, as told to us by some passing officer when our names are found out by them. They call Dave’s wife first, she sounding frantic and somewhat relieved, and you can hear her practically jump out of bed as soon as they say they’ve got Dave at the station, and that she’ll make her way down pretty soon. Then they call Tony’s wife, and they have to call about two times, she not picking up the first time, going straight to voicemail after a few dial tones. They dial her number a second time and it rings for a bit and then she answers, and she asks who it is and they say this is the local police department and that Anthony’s at the station. She is more responsive when this is said, she sounded pretty groggy over the phone but it clears up when she hears that Anthony is at the station, and she quickly wakes up when she learns of this. The police then turn to me after the two other guys have already made their calls, and then we call Nicole.
I tell them her number, although I admit I’m a little bit hesitant before saying some digits, since due to Smartphones having everything saved these days remembering numbers off the top of my head isn’t my strong suit like it used to be. I see her number on the screen every time she calls me and every time I go to my recents my contacts to call her, but yet I struggle a little bit when it comes to actually remembering her number. I still remember the number she had when we were dating though pretty clearly, punching it into my little keypad in my little Motorola phone to call her back then. I finish off giving them the numbers to punch in into the phone and I hear the dial tone and the ringing. And it doesn’t last long, because it’s almost as if she picks up immediately. I imagine she can see the name of the police precinct and everything on the screen, before she picks up, at least that being one of the biggest reasons why when regarding her picking up so fast. Besides me being gone and missing without a word to her about it, of course. She frantically answers hello, and the Office says that I’m at the station and that I’ve been found alive and (he hesitates before saying well). I hear her quickly get out of bed as soon as she finds this out, she says she’s getting dressed and will be up here shortly.
“Sounds like you boys are truly lucky to have wives that jump into action when things like this go down, but again who wouldn’t” The officer says, and then I get a good glimpse of his nametag, his last name being Morris. He hangs up the phone as he says this.
Officer Morris takes us back to our cell again, and tells us to hold tight until our wives get here. Saying that he and a few other officers are going to talk to them first before they see us, so we might be waiting here for a little bit before they get to see us.
As he places us back on the napkin and closes the cell door, I do think to myself that we are technically small and at least me and Dave, somewhat slim enough to slip through the cracks under the door and make a escape, but then I figure that would make no sense now, since the jig is up and it’s been up since yesterday. Besides, we’re in pretty deep now with our wives being called and coming up to the station and of course, the police being involved and probably the government will be involved pretty soon.
We wait around, it being silent between all of us, I notice Tony sits on the napkin that we all slept on and me and Dave just stand. I notice that we all smell, now that I really think about it. A mix of our own personal BO plus the smell of stomach acid really seeped into our clothes. I guess with everything going on the stench of ourselves have been the last things on our minds. To be completely honest. Ain’t really much we can do about it in our situation, considering everything that we went through.
“I hope they aren’t too freaked out” I say, turning towards Dave.
“I think “freaked out” is gonna be an understatement” Dave says, scratching his nose.
“Yeah, through sickness and in health was in our vows, I don’t think through shrinkness and in health was in there” Tony says, and Dave gives a weak smile at his attempt at a joke and I just playfully roll my eyes at him.
“Shrinkness isn’t a word, dude” I say, giving him an antagonistic smile, and he doesn’t seem like he gives it much thought.
“Whatever, I did it to make the joke work anyways. You know what I meant” he says, giving himself a pat on the back jokingly.
It’s quiet between us for about 20 minutes us sitting or standing in silence to ourselves waiting for the an officer to come bring us to our wives whenever they do explain the situation to them before seeing us, and then I see a officer in the distance walking towards us, I can’t tell what he’s saying at first since I wasn’t paying full attention, but I do perk up at him and I notice that Tony and Dave also do the same.
“You guys are in the clear to be brought to the front” He says loud and clear one more time for us to hear, the officer being a shorter Hispanic man if I had to guess in his mid 30s. Around the same age as me.
I feel anxious as soon as he says this, wondering how Nicole is going to react to me at the size I am, and I don’t know if it’s going to be good or bad.
The office, who’s last name is Ortiz, opens up the cell and walks towards our counter where our napkin is on and reaches his hand out for us to walk out to it.
“I’d say your wives are taking this a little bit better than we anticipated, if that calms everyone’s nerves” Officer Ortiz says to us as we walk on his hand and get to where our wives are.
As he says this I feel a little bit more calmer as we get toward where we meet up to meet our wives. Every step he makes as his shoes click along the hard marble substance like floor.
We got through the station, getting farther and farther from our cell and more into where most people are at the station. Officer Ortiz says the same thing the previous officer says about people not taking pictures or videos of us at this time and if he does see something online about there’s gonna be hell to pay. This seemingly deterred a few people from looking at us. We get closer into what seems to be an integration room where our wives seemingly are at, and an officer on the inside opens the door, a female officer, and we enter.
As we walk in as the door opens on us and we see our wives at the table and a male officer standing in the corner. It feels like things have been cemented at this point that we’ve been caught and there’s no way out of this, even more so with our wives seeing us.
I look at my wife’s reaction, she doesn’t seem like she’s too bothered or shocked by how I am although she gasps a little bit when she sees me, I’m guessing the fact that I’m alive and well to her is all that matters. She seemingly handling this the best out of the other two wives. I notice that Tony’s wife is hyper focused on him, seemingly a little shocked and has a worried look on her face. And Dave’s wife who I’ve never seen before but heard a little bit about when we first met Dave at the beach, a sandy blonde looking chick with a diamond ring stud in her nose and wearing a parka and some jet black leggings and bright red lipstick, a typical looking chick for this day and age, I’d say Dave’s punching a little bit above his weight class with this girl. Dave isn’t a ugly dude by any means but this girl totally looks like one of those types that you’d see in the luxury shops on Rodeo Drive, your classic Beverly Hills bombshell beauty that’s not filled with Botox and has natural beauty. I wonder how they met, they seem like they’d run in different circles you’d imagine.
“Yep, here we are” Tony says, seemingly judging by the tone in his voice it seems like he’s trying to comfort his wife a little bit, her pupils really focusing in on Tony.
“We’re going to give you guys a bit of time to talk, but we’ve gotta take you guys down to Los Angeles to check in with the Government Agency down there around 7:45 or so, this is something I think they’re more qualified to handle than we are. Chief said so. They’ll be arriving pretty soon to pick you guys up and drive you down to LA” Officer Ortiz says, leaning his hand out to the table with our wives sitting in their chairs, we slowly walk off of his hand and onto the tables. Our wives collectively watch us with their eyes as we walk.
Officer Ortiz leaves, but the female officer stays in the corner, seemingly there to watch over us before we get set up to leave.
“So yeah, what did they tell you guys about what happened?” Dave says, looking at his wife, I can kinda see a few smaller crusty boogers in her nose from where we are, her hollow looking nose holes from our distance. Even pretty women have imperfections like that going on if you were to really notice them.
“They said somehow someway you guys were shrunken, and then accidentally swallowed by some lady and shitted out and discovered by her at a nearby hotel” Dave’s Wife, I think her name is Jenny if I really think back to our past conversation on the beach.
“But if you guys were at the beach the last time we knew where you guys were and they didn’t tell us that the woman was at the beach, then how did you guys end up where she could swallow you, at Vons or whatever like they told us” My wife, Nicole says. With a little bit of sass in her voice with the delivery, making me smile a bit because hearing her voice again and with her signature sass that I would get from time to time from her here brings a sense of normalcy in this situation that I thought I’d ever have to go through ever again.
“Well, there was these college kids that we had to run from not too long as they ran towards us, and then they started playing volleyball and ended up in some girl’s drink with all the commotion going on, and long story short we got defecated out by that same girl at a Vons restroom not too long after the ordeal” I say, and I can hear Tony’s wife mumble “ew” under her breath when he talks about the defecation part, and I can hear the female officer in the back make a audible yuck when he says this too.
“And then luckily we managed to avoid getting flushed and we ran through the supermarket and with all the commotion going on there too we ended up in the air by landing on the stomach of this Hispanic woman that swallowed up, and we didn’t wanna get discovered or nothing so we kinda stayed their as she checked out and got to her car and stuff. Fell off, ended up in her water bottle, got swallowed and you know the rest” Tony says, completing what I’m about to say.
“That’s disgusting,” Nicole says.
“You’re tellin’ me” I say, and Nicole and the two other wives slightly laugh at this, and Tony and Dave crack a smile. I guess by me saying that by relieving this situation’s tension.
The next couple of minutes is pretty much small talk between us and our wives, us introducing each other and the like, apparently Dave and Jennifer met in a In N Out parking lot in Dave’s stint in San Diego, Dave accidentally bumping into her in the parking lot when pulling out of parking space at the same time she was about 5 years ago. They seemingly literally hit it off then. Apparently Jenny's from Ohio, the Cincinnati area to be exact. I feel like I'm running into a lot of Midwesterners during this trip, Tony and his Wife and Jennifer.
“But yeah, there’s a lot more I’m going to explain to you later about Kate and her Family and stuff on the drive. Because it’s shocking that I lived a good chunk of my life like this” Tony says pretty casually to his wife/everyone in the room, and after he says this the room goes silent because besides us three, none of our wives knew. I think Erica's audible silence is the most noticeable. I notice the Female officer in the back doesn’t seem to react at all to this, though.
“Alright, they’re here, get ready” Says Officer Ortiz opening the door to the room and telling all of this this as soon as Tony finishes his sentence.
As the officer says this, I wonder if this is when shit really starts to get real, my anxiety pops up again.
I guess becoming another Jack Cooper is our best case scenario.