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MISSING


[i]Anna's story[/i]

I'm going crazy. I've been looking for him for most part of the morning, and no trace, no trace at all! I've ransacked the entire flat, and he's nowhere to be found. What can I do? What can I do? Where could he have gone? I'm beside myself with anxiety, now. What could have happened to him? He would never have gone without telling me, I'm sure of that. I know him too well. There's no way he would have gone, even in the most depressed state. He loves me, and he knows I love him . And I know he feels scared and angry for our marriage and the toll our situation has taken on me. But he would never go away like this. That does not make sense.

Sitting on the edge of the bed, feeling the tears coming back to my eyes, I allow at last the most dreadful thought to come clearly into my mind. I bend down and remove my sandals. I can hardly breathe as I grab my right foot , turn it slowly towards me, and inspect my sole for a splash of blood.

-----------------------

Steve had started to shrink about 18 months ago, shortly after our marriage. It started with him complaining about headaches, more and more often. I thought he had caught some virus or something. He went to the doctor, but nothing unusual showed and the doc just prescribed him with the usual anti-migraine stuff. His mood was still ok, but you could see he was in pain often during the day.

Then the headaches became more and more acute, and no aspirin, or pain killers or anything could really relieve them. The doctor decided to go for a scan, thinking maybe there was bad news around the brain area. I was so anxious in spite of Steve's bravado about it. I remember my tears, behind the glass door, as I saw him slowly introduced in the futuristic machine. His face was grim but composed. Nothing showed on the scan, nothing at all.

Steve had to stop working, and was admitted in a center studying pain and psychological disorders, as it was thought maybe the pain was indeed subliminal and created by his own brain. He spent most of his time in bed, under heavy medication. I went to see him every evening after work, staying long in to the night holding his hand. He had lost quite a lot of weight. His family visited him at times, but not that often I thought. Not often enough.

After three months the pain disappeared entirely. There was no warning , no sign, it just happened. He woke up one morning, and it was gone. He called me at the school and I gave my class to a colleague so I could go and see him. It was as if a heavy thunderstorm had suddenly departed. The air was clean, I felt so light. His beaming face greeted me at the hospital. He was up and playing with a ball against the wall, waiting , he told me, for the doctors to do the final check and let him go.
That night we went to my favorite Japanese restaurant and later we made love all night long.

Three days later he came into the kitchen, with a funny look on his face. He looked puzzled, that's it. As if he had found something incredible. I laughed at his funny face, and asked him what was the problem. He just came up to me. The problem was screaming in my face as I looked down into his blue eyes. Steve was nearly 7 inch shorter than me. I used to go on top of my toes to kiss him.


---------------

Steve was no longer there this morning when I woke up, and instinctively patted the pillow next to my head. I felt the emptiness and opened my eyes. Where his tiny form should have been, there was nothing. Just an empty pillow. I could still see the small indentation his body had made in the plush cushion. A small depression, about four inch long. I raised myself on my elbow and called him. I did not shout, as it would hurt his ears, but I whispered his name, knowing that to him it would be like a fog horn anyway.

I expected to see him come from the under the covers. He sometimes does that, get lost under. I told him many times not to do it, as I've always been scared of crushing under my body during my sleep. Once I found him nestled under my right breast, unconscious. I was so scared. He told me later he had wanted to touch it, and had gone down his pillow to come closer. But then I had turned or moved in my sleep, grabbing the pillow under my head, and drawing closer to him. He just had time to jump back, but got pinned under my breast nearly up to his neck. He told me he called me, and fought against my flesh, that was slowly engulfing and squashing him, but he gave in eventually to lack of air. If I had slept one hour longer, he would have died under me, smothered.

I moved out of the bed really slowly, still calling, still thinking maybe he had gone to the little loo we prepared for him, and maybe had got into difficulty trying to climb back to bed. I walked carefully around the bed, to see if he was there, patiently waiting for me to get up and pick him up. He was nowhere to be seen. I had this sudden cold chill. I looked around in the room , where shadows covered the floor. I walked carefully to the window, opening the curtains and when the light flooded the place, there was not a single movement, not the slightest scurrying around, or scratching noise on the wooden floor. Everything was so still, as I was holding my breath, for fear of not hearing his calls.





[i]Steve's story[/i]


The motions in the room have stopped for the moment apparently. Steve is still unnerved by the sheer size of the mountainous form that went about the bedroom for the past two hours. Looking back at Anna he watches helplessly as he sees her inspecting the underside of her naked feet, reading the horror and fear in her eyes. She starts sobbing loudly, and tears are coming to his own eyes. He decides at last to start his progression again. In front of him the impossibly tall door of the kitchen is closed, a mile high slab of wood embedded in an inconceivably large vertical surface. Its' as if a pan of sky had fallen and planted itself in the ground. The few hours walking towards it hardly changes the perspective at all. His progression is so slow. The fibers of the floor carpet are like bushes to him, that he needs to duck under, to escalate, to dodge around. At this pace he won't reach his goal before tonight.

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He had woken up flying. But it was no dream, his brains told him so immediately. So he had woken up screaming too. It was like falling from a sky scraper. It had taken a long time before he landed on the not so soft reddish carpet . It was dark all over. His fall had winded him, but there was no broken bones. Where the hell was he? The landscape was nothing but ominously large shapes looming over him. As he sat down in the strange growth that had soften his landing, he started to realize an important fact. He was no longer 4 inch tall. To be so surrounded by the fibers of the carpet, he must have be to no taller than 2 , maybe three millimeters. A cold shiver shook his entire frame, as the realization sunk in, that he had indeed suffered another shrinkage during his sleep.

He had fallen asleep as usual, lying on his pillow, next to Anna's. She had come to him, and landed an enormous kiss on his body, then had turned her head the other direction, so as not to bother him with her breathing and they both had gone to dreamland pretty fast. (he knew well when Anna was asleep, as the gentle roar of her breathing acquired this slow and deep rhythm that sometimes gave him the feeling he was falling asleep next to some large factory, whose great machinery was running overnight). It was dark when he found himself flying down to floor below. At some stage shortly after they went to bed, he must have shrunk again. And in her sleep, Anna must have moved so, or sneezed or whatever, and had expelled his tiny form from the pillow. At his current size, the slightest movement could lift him off his feet, he was sure.

He had tried calling, but it was useless and he knew it. He was now reduced to the size of a speck, and his voice was never going to be heard, even if she was awake. Horrified by the situation, Steve decided to wait it out. He started to walk/ crawl among the fibers to the relative safety of the darker regions closer to the bed. Somehow the vast dark space above his head and around him was terribly unsettling and threatening.

As he was walking, he had realized that he was not so shocked as he thought. His thoughts had returned quickly to his rational train. He always knew this would come one day. The shrinking had occurred in steps before, taking huge chunks out of him, at regular interval. Both he and Anna had indeed assumed that this was it. That his 4 inch size was the worst the shrinking could do, and this had seemed corroborated by the fact that Steve had spent the last 9 months without feeling any change. And then...

Steve had felt a terrible rage waking up inside him. He'd felt he had been wronged somehow, he had been cheated, as the shrinking had taken place without its usual warning horn, the horrible headaches that foretold each episodes. He was taken by surprise, and in his sleep to top it all. He clenched his fists in anger. This was not fair. He wasn't supposed to vanish like this. They had no right to do this! Suddenly, as fast as it had come, his anger had subsided. Who the hell is “ They” anyway? He was beginning to add paranoia to his stupid predicament. It had taken him thirty minutes to get to the underside of the bed...


All hell broke loose when the morning came. Steve had not dared venture into the room. The darkness, the vast empty plain in front of him had cared him away. He was more than aware that he had reached the near bottom of the food chain. Any living thing in that room (including Anna) was now a very real threat to him. He had spent the night listening. A very disturbing cacophony of scratching, creaking and scurrying noises had kept him to the verge of terror, as he had curled in a his spot on at the edge of the bed. His relationship to spiders for instance had never been amicable when he was a real man, had certainly not improved at his stabilized size of 4 inches. Now he had to fight every second to keep his mind away from very very ugly thoughts.

But nothing had prepared him for the morning madness.

When Anna woke up, the giant boom of her voice startled him. Then somewhere above him a huge movement started to take place. The massive ceiling of the bed began to undulate, and loud creaking noises came from the frame. He quickly left his position to start moving out of the shadows, into the carpeted plain. His name was pronounced a few time above him, as per the voice of God, it was so loud. Then two huge feet landed on the floor, the vibration shaking the ground around him. Thankfully, they landed on the other side of the bed. He watched in amazement as the building size objects started to move and go in the direction of the little box that he used for his private business, on the other side of the room. (He had insisted it be placed far from the bed, but had regretted it, as a visit there was a whole trip to him, and he had often reached the place in a desperate state.). Steve could not see her body yet, but the sheer size of her feet told him more than he needed to know. She was now a mountain to him.

Still he wanted to be rescued, he needed her to see him. He tried to get himself in a wide open spot half between the wall and the bed. He knew she would be searching for him. The big feet came back to the bed. Looking up he saw the greenish sheet moving , as Anna started to inspect the bed, her voice conveying the stress she was beginning to feel. To him it was as if many football pitches of synthetic grass were being pulled together and crumpled. The woman above him did this with her own hands, he realized. He was drenched in sweat.

Suddenly a huge face appeared above. He screamed and nearly fell backward, as the massive promontory appeared and started to project from the side of the cliff. A river of blond hair dropped towards him. Anna's face was incredible. He had difficulty to focus on its entirety, so large it was. He could have strolled on her lower lip. He waved his hands and called her has loud as could, screaming himself raw. She never noticed him. He watched in astonishment as the face slowly rised away from above him. How could she not? She had looked directly at him? He ran in the direction of the retreating face, waving, and shouting. The long flowing hair dragged its way back up. The face disappeared totally far above above, hidden by the edge of the bed.

“Steve, where are you? Don't do that, please, if you're hiding, it's not funny. You're scaring me.” came her voice. He suddenly realized that she was looking for him as she last knew him. 4 inch and all. She was never looking for a speck on the carpet . It would have taken a serious focus to spot him there in the first place. She just was not doing that.

More motions occurred above, the sheet started slowly to rise away, beyond the edge, as Anna was no doubt trying to find him inside the bed and was removing the covers. Steve's mind began racing for a solution. If his wife did not know he was that small she was not going to look on the floor for a while. He had to make himself more visible. He started to walk toward the end of the bed, to find a spot in the room that would be exposed enough to be noticed.

He was half way there, fighting his way among the fibers of fabric when a shadow covered the entire region. Anna appeared, on his side of the bed. Her body was moving toward him. He hardly had time to see the unbelievably high legs, the massive naked body of his wife, covering the sky, before he noticed the real danger : the two huge feet coming in his direction. He saw the first one crashing ahead of him, and twisting slightly,as Anna negotiated the turn around the bed. The enormous thing rotated on the ground, huge toes now directed at him. Then the second foot appeared from behind the bed and came crashing a few hundred of his meters, supporting a mass of flesh he could not grasp in his vision. The foot covered and crushed the plain ahead. He knew there was no time to do anything. The foot behind lifted, the toes bending and then rising. The humongous foot came rushing towards him, like a flying building. In a split second he could the soft sole of his wife as a canopy of flesh, speckled with various stains of [i]his[/i] size, the car size toes looming closer above him. He did not even had time to scream, in the darkness under the falling flesh when his wife landed her foot on top of him.

What happened next totally baffled him.
He was compressed under the zillions tons of his wife body, as she stepped on, pushed deep into the carpet, but not that deep that it broke his body. The flesh on his face and body was sinking him into the pliant surface of the carpet. It was pitch dark, and he hardly had any air for a a second, but oddly enough the pressure he expected was not there. Compressed he was, but alive. He hardly registered that fact though, his mind in total panic. Then light again. And motion. He felt lifted off the ground, stuck to the smelly flesh. And the next second darkness and the huge pressure again. And the light, the motion, and the dark, the crushing weight. Then darkness again. Beyond the flow of terror he became aware he was somehow stuck, not under under her sole but probably under her toe. Kept in place by the suction of her sweat, and preserved by the slight curve he lay under. He tried to scream in the darkness, but air was lacking, the side of face pressed hard into the flesh. His body felt the tremendous heat of his living prison. The foot did not move for a few seconds, as Anna was probably still looking for him on the bed. Steve could feel the tremors of her movements as her weight shifted here and there on her foot. The image of her huge naked body towering above him and pressing on him like a living mountain planted itself in his confused mind.

When light came up again, and the nauseating upward motion, he felt his arms and legs detaching from the sticky fleshy ceiling and in a second his body followed, hurled into space and down to the carpet below. His wife's heel landed just ahead of him. He had time to see the under side of her shin, the high long back of her thigh, the protruding rounded mound of her buttock moving high above and further away, before he blacked out.


tbc

nostromo
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