I wake up.
It’s just another day.
Another boring normal day.
I go to work and do my boring job.
I come home and watch boring television.
I go to my boring bed and sleep, wishing for some excitment.
The next day I wake up and go to the fridge.
It seems larger somehow but that can’t be right.
I go to work and sit at my desk.
Did I get a bigger desk?
The keyboard and computer screen seem slightly bigger…
When I get home I cook a t.v. dinner and watch my Tuesday night shows.
Then it’s off to bed again.
I wake up and I know somethings not right.
My feet are supposed to reach all the way to end of my bed but they don’t.
Again it seems like the fridge has gotten bigger.
What the hell?
I put my finger over one of the microwave buttons.
It doesn’t cover it…
Thats impossible, my finger should cover the entire button.
But it doesn’t.
I get to work and someone says, “Hey Bob you should stop slouching man. It makes you look smaller.”
I’m not slouching though.
I decide to put it to the test, I measure myself.
6’3? But i’m 6’9.
I put that out of my mind for now, we’ll see if this is real or not tomorrow.
I sleep.
The next morning I wake and measure myself again, oh this isn’t good.
6’0 even. I somehow lost three inches in my sleep.
I call in sick for work and schedule a doctors appointment immediately.
The doctor sits me down and tells me this is crazy, that people don’t just start shrinking in their twenties.
I tell him to measure me and that i’ll be back tomorrow so he can see for himself.
When i get home I look all over the internet for possible reasons.
Nothing, absolutely nothing. It says it is impossible for a human being to shrink 6 inches in two days.
Impossible…
I sleep, but it is a sleep full of nightmares.
When I wake I return to the doctor and sure enough I now stand at 5’9, another three inches gone.
The doctor is baffled, he tells me not to worry and that it should stop soon.
I mean, who ever heard of a guy shrinking out of nowhere?
Nobody, because it doesn't happen. It’s impossible.
Four days pass, and i’ve lost another foot.
I stopped going to work all together and my boss granted me a paid vacation.
He didn’t know what else to do.
My doctor gets in touch with some professors who have spent the last few days running tests on me.
Blood tests, urine tests, stool tests, brain tests, every kind of test there is.
And they all came back saying the same thing.
There is nothing wrong with you, fit as a fiddle.
I lay in bed crying when i’m not with the doctors, praying that it will stop.
I can live life only four feet tall if I have too.
Just make it stop.
Eight more days pass, and i’m less than three feet tall now.
I’m the shortest adult on the planet, and the best scientific minds in the country are trying to figure out why.
Im starting to give up hope, what happens in a month?
What happens when i’m only three inches tall?
What happens when I can’t get any smaller?
I can’t stop thinking about it, so I drink myself to sleep.
Which has become very affordable as it only takes two shots for me to become sloshed.
Three more days, people are like giants to me now.
They tower over me and I cringe away from them in fear.
My sister is staying with me now, to help me around the house.
I can no longer reach the counter tops or door handles.
She can pick me up and hold me like a baby if she wanted to.
Sometimes she watches her friends kids, and they all say the same thing.
“Why is that man so small?”
Why am i so small? Why? Why?? WHY!?
What did I ever do? I lead a good life, never brake the law or hurt anyone.
God, I know I asked for some excitement but not this. Not this…
More thoughts like this come into my mind and I drink them away.
In another five days I now stand at a minuscule nine inches.
Doctors are dumbfounded, the media is obsessed, and I am indifferent.
Theres nothing anyone can do about it so now I just wait until I become so small I vanish.
My sister has been so understanding, bless her. She bought a cozy little toy house for me.
She put a miniature bed and sofa in it.
She filled up a plastic container with water for me so I can have a swim when I want.
She even bought a bunch of toy fire trucks so she could set up the ladders, letting me get to places I had taken for granted before.
I swim and keep my little body busy to try and take my mind off the absurd scenario I find myself in.
But when I sleep, thats when I feel it.
Fear. I’m scared, so scared. What happens in three more days?
Tomorrow is the day I write my will.
I sleep.
And when I wake I start on my last will and testament.
I leave my house and all of my monetary assets to my sister, who is my last remaining blood relative.
All of my clothes I leave to charity, they will find more use for them than I.
Everything and anything else, well i'm too scared to think straight about what to do with those things.
I say good bye to my sister, tell her I love her and so on.
Then I go into my room, my plastic toy room.
Even the damn miniature bed is too big for me now.
And I wait, wait for whatever is going to happen now.
Death I hope.
I have a feeling, however, that it wont be that easy.
In two more days time I am too small for the human eye to see.
I hear my sister yelling for me, like some monstrous god or beast.
I yell and scream back, telling her i’m right here.
She doesn't hear me.
Six days pass, and my toy room has become a continent unto itself.
I begin to see the plastic as it might look under a microscope.
Soon my marvel at this new world turns to horror.
The next day I see them, germs.
They start out as small as worms, squirming all over everything.
I squish them in fear. Not fear of them as they are but of them as they will be.
The next day they get bigger, much bigger.
Now they are as large as bananas. And I see something else.
They have teeth. Sharp, deadly, every growing teeth.
Never in my darkest nightmares had I imagined my death would play out this way.
Eaten by germs, killed by an organism I had never thought of as a threat.
The next day they are the size of dogs, and they start coming for me.
They are slow however, very slow.
I run like mad trying to find a safe haven from the microscopic killers.
I run all day and find a small crack in the plastic.
I hide in it like a child afraid of the dark, hoping they don't find me.
Five days pass and the crack that was once hardly small enough for me to fit in is now the size of the Grand Canyon.
And I can still see the germs, the are huge now.
The size of school buses but they are too stupid to come down and get me.
So now the waiting starts again, I wonder what else could possible happen.
What is left? I am smaller than a germ.
Eventually it has to stop.
But when?
Soon I get a glimpse of the next world I will visit.
And I know how it will end.
The very ground I stand on begins to crack, each day there are more and more holes in it.
I realize i am reaching the molecular level, and soon I will be in a world of protons and atoms.
And they are always moving, always spinning and changing.
And all too soon I see them, the building blocks of everything large and small.
Tiny little dots zooming around everywhere.
In another day they are the size of baseballs.
Then beach balls.
And they are going so fast, so incredibly fast.
I make my decision, one I should have made long ago.
I walk near the very essence of matter and throw myself into it.
It collides with my skull at breakneck speed, and things go black.
There is a moment, just a moment, when I am hanging between life and death.
And I think, if there is an afterlife…when i get there will I still be so damn small?
