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It did start out innocent. A friend brought me with him on some errands. He said the whole work from home, living alone thing was making me into a total shut-in. I said that me and my two thousand roommates were maybe the furthest from “living alone” that anyone has ever been, and don’t start about how they don’t count because they are still fully human beings and deserve all the same respect. He rolled his eyes. But then we went to the pet store, and I looked into a big cage of mice, all scurrying about and socializing with each other, and realized that my muted interest was the exact same sensation I experienced looking over the table-height neighborhood that had taken over my guest room.
They are people. They are. Even at two inches tall. They’re my employers, or my customers, maybe, or at least the hundred or so tiny people that pay me for the privilege of living in the largest tiny houses are. They’re the few who retained jobs after they shrunk, or whose relatives allowed them to keep their savings, who largely chose to live in the scaled-down city to retain some sense of normalcy. Barely anyone else had a choice. Without anyone to trust as caretaker, they were stripped of careers, all their possessions, forced into the neighborhood, forced to take jobs doing all the little necessary tasks that I couldn’t. There isn’t much qualification or background check for my role, basically just a government license. In plenty of other neighborhoods, those little non-payers vanished all the damn time.
When I thought about their awful predicament, they seemed like full people. But when I glanced over the artificial miniature landscape at the people populating the streets and the park on the table edge, I saw… something less. Like bugs, or little robots, like they were high-tech figurines meant to breathe real life in a railroad set. A year ago, they hid and watched me nervously during all of my daily visits, when I was delivering supplies, checking everything over, fixing any issues where my size was a benefit. Now that they had learned to ignore me, it was even worse. Like I was looking over a projection of a real city.
I knew they were people. But I just couldn’t see it. So I found one of their Twitter accounts and started stalking it relentlessly. I slowly found others by scrolling through the accounts that replied to her. They had arguments, retweeted memes, complained about hookups in the perceived privacy of the replies. They were having hookups! It seems obvious in retrospect, but the thought left me smiling all day. Finally, it seemed like there were actual lives happening over there.
The first post I saw from Niall caught my attention immediately. Most of the pictures I saw of the accounts’ owners were indoors, against walls, anywhere that, at first glance, made them seem normal. In a selfie, he was standing right on the guest room’s window ledge, back of his head pressed against the glass, wrinkling his nose and sticking his tongue out while a bird was trying to eat him on the other side.
He flaunted it. Pictures with the baby-blue wall and closed guest room door looming in the background, shots of the carpet, seemingly hundreds of feet below him, selfies with an oversized violet stuck in his hair. He was charismatic (clearly), but also hilarious. Had more followers than I had roommates, mostly from the gags. And he pissed people off all the time and they spouted something cruel about him being a germ under their feet and he ratio’d them to early graves. I did think about him, when I looked over the houses and pedestrian streets. Tried to see if I could spot him without staring at people too hard. Didn’t want to make everyone nervous. But it wasn’t a crush until he posted a picture of me. With my face censored.
He always censored faces that wound up in the backgrounds of his pictures. It reinforced my impression that despite all the ego and arguing, he was a nice guy. Cared about others. But me… well, I didn’t feel like he needed to care about me. I had this obscene power over him. He didn’t pay to live there, so he knew he could get snatched up any second, but he was still using the tiny amount of power that he did have to protect me.
I was, of course, overthinking this. And I kept overthinking it. I found him in the neighborhood registry. He was a delivery worker. I figured out which one of the little apartment windows was his. I identified his favorite hangout spots from his selfies. The first time I spotted him on my daily rounds, my heart skipped a beat. He was standing in front of the faux lake, alone, just watching the water. I recognized the sweater from his pictures, such a particular shade of teal… jumped out immediately. It was hard to keep myself from staring. If I wasn’t big enough for everyone in town to notice immediately, I probably would’ve.
I stalked his following, his replies, his likes. Every time I heard a noise outside, I thought about him reacting to that same noise. He was in the same building as me. He saw me. Every day. I must be incomprehensible, he was shorter than my pinkie. Was I something to be tolerated? Was he curious about me? During a blizzard one night, he tweeted that he missed snow. I fantasized about shutting off the heat and icing the park. Or, God, did I blush, taking him in my hands and bringing him outside myself. He was so, so tiny. Would he be terrified? No. No goddamn way, with how he mocked people threatening to swallow him and called himself a pocket hottie. Fuck, would he be into it? Would he press himself against my fingertip, all hot and eager? Would he let me kiss him?
In a rare moment of vulnerability, Niall typed up a thread about shrinking. About his mistreatment at the hands of authority figures in the weeks afterwards. How old close friends refused to make contact with him. But he was grateful for his new place. He had community and safety. He was lucky to live somewhere with a caretaker like the one he had.
He felt lucky to have me.
He closed it with a tweet expressing support for a bill that required regular check-ins on set-ups like mine, to minimize mistreatment. I knew about it already. God bless him, it was DOA. But I kept thinking about that thread. He’d been through so much shit, I hadn’t even thought about it before. He easily could’ve died before he made it to me. It happened all the time. And he felt lucky to have me. I kept him safe. I was all butterflies for the rest of the week.
It kind of came to the inevitable conclusion one day, when I was sitting in my living room and decided to look at his replies. His most recent tweet was a reply to another resident, this snarky dude named Rich: “Basic human kindness is not “cocksucking”. I don’t believe anyone ever forfeits their right to respect, and just about everyone who disagrees and clocks in over a foot tall thinks all of us should be in pet stores.”
I clicked through and quickly scrolled to the first tweet.
Rich: hilarious hearing people talk about their futures as if mount lardass won’t just get too lazy to get groceries one day and down all of us
I wanted to vomit.
Niall: Do you have an actual complaint or did you just wake up and decide to be evil? Obviously this is disgusting in itself but seriously? About the guy who’s spent the past year 24/7 caring for us?
Niall: We’re entitled to safety and dignity, but most shrunken people don’t get either. The system actively incentivizes abuse and we lucked out on a guy who rejects that culture.
Rich: lol keep cocksucking and maybe he’ll stuff you down that instead of his mouth. he does not fucking care what his glorified goldfish think about him
Obviously I do.
Like, I’ve never been thin. Ever. Fat baby, fat toddler, fat teen. I’ve heard meaner. But it hurt a lot more. Everyone in that room had to look at me every day. They heard my footsteps throughout the house, heard me bringing in my groceries, making food, probably noticed that I didn’t… leave the house much. And I wondered, was that what they were thinking? All the time? On some level I had thought that, well, all of us were getting shit for our sizes, one way or another, maybe there was some solidarity there. But maybe it wasn’t comparable. There wasn’t exactly an underground slave market for fat dudes.
Niall defended me. Publicly. From one of his friends. As a fellow human. He could’ve ignored it, fuck, I would’ve. And I thought about that, for hours, but later, rereading the exchange (again) I realized something else: he didn’t disagree that he was a “glorified goldfish.”
He wasn’t! None of them were! At least not anymore! Thinking about the whole community that lived on that table became completely overwhelming. But mainly, increasingly, thinking about him. Did he think of himself as my pet? As decoration? I desperately didn’t want him to. I didn’t want to be his owner, I wanted to…
Well, at the very least I wanted to say thanks.
And as I finished up my daily rounds that afternoon, like a sign from God, I noticed Niall leaning on the fence at the very very edge of the park, totally alone, looking wistful. About the Twitter argument? Probably not, but my mind still raced. He didn’t know that when I did this every day, I was just thinking about him. That he occupied more of my mind than anyone my own height. When he looked out at the door that led to the rest of my place, did he… wonder what was beyond it?
He was wearing that nature tone colorblock hoodie. I really liked that hoodie.
Then he looked at me.
I froze. He tensed, barely perceptible when he was down at belly height. His mouth started to open. I barely needed to move to snatch him up, completely hidden within my grasp. No one seemed to notice. Just a flinch, and he vanished.
I could feel him trapped in my coiled fingers, wriggling, kicking, his miniscule hands trying to squeeze between my fingers to pry them apart. He couldn’t do shit. If he had been assigned to a malicious caretaker, this probably would’ve been what went down before he wound up on some shrinkee market…
How could he know that wasn’t what I planned to do to him?
Fuck.
I abandoned the last few things I wanted to check and rushed back to my own bedroom, closing both doors between me and the guest room. I tried my best to let him free gently, but he stumbled and fell onto my desk, crawling backwards, looking up at me in horror. Betrayal. It was such a different sensation from looking at his selfies or glimpsing him in the park. Everything dwarfed him. Every piece of my computer set-up, an empty mug, even the wires were as wide as his arms. I got down to my knees and tried to get eye level with him. His little chest, moving up and down… he bumped into an ear of my headphones and scrambled to the other side.
“I just─” I quietly started, then paused. No, that sounded psychotic. No, that one would also sound insane. Fuck. Okay, start simple. “Listen, nothing─nothing bad is about to happen to you, okay?” He stayed hidden. “You’ll be home within the hour. Please look at me.”
Niall’s eyes poked out from behind, looking me over. I forced myself to not grab him, even if that same urge was overwhelming me again. I wondered what was wrong with me, that someone was going out of his way to be nice and my instinctive response was to kidnap him.
He seemed to accept that I was staying right where I was and slowly crawled out, sitting on his feet. Still so hesitant. He shouted something.
Maybe if he was a little closer… But on the far end of my desk, I wasn’t gonna understand him. “Well, I can’t really-“
Niall threw up his hands. He stood and pulled his phone out of his pocket, then looked to me expectantly.
“Right,” I mumbled. I recited my number while I pulled out my own and felt it buzz almost immediately. I picked up and looked back to him.
“What do you want?” he demanded, firm, but unable to hide the slightest of quivers in his voice.
“I just, um… Well, I never get to say hi to anyone, really, even though you’re all right there-”
“Why me?” he snapped, stepping forward. I was silently impressed at his bravado, interrupting me like that.
“I, um.” I gulped hard. “I like your Twitter.”
Silence from him, and no movement either, at least that I could make out. His face seemed confused, probably… if I could just get a little closer…
“My Twitter?” he finally asked.
“Yeah, um. Like, I follow you.” I shrugged and averted my eyes. I heard him breathe in through the phone, and words were flowing out of my mouth before I could stop myself. “And, like, I saw what you said about me on there and I’m just not used to people defending me, really, and you totally didn’t have to because, like, it is a ridiculous power dynamic, but you did anyways and that was really nice.”
“Oh.”
“So I, um-” I could feel myself getting redder. “I’m really sorry I grabbed you. I just─ it was really compulsive, I─I couldn’t stop thinking about you, or thinking about talking to you, I mean, at least to say thanks, because you’ve been through so much shit and I know I’m not perfect at this and it’s really nice to know someone appreciates it.”
I heard shaky breath through the line and shot my head up in a panic. He was beaming, laughing through his teeth, his shoulders shaking gently. “And this was your plan?”
“I guess,” I mumbled. “Not like I can run into you on the street.”
“You couldn’t have DMed me?”
My face heated up and contorted into horror. I hadn’t even considered that. He cackled. Oh, God, my embarrassment was blown up to billboard proportions to him. Any impression of benevolent protection was unrecoverable. I sunk down, under the desk, putting my face in my hands. He lost his shit.
After he recovered, he cleared his throat. “Hey,” he said. “Henry, right? C’mon, look up.”
I obeyed. Aw man, I was obeying him and everything. He was on his hand and knees looking down at me over the edge of my desk, smiling wide.
“So you got me. Now what?”
“Still miss the snow?” I meekly offered.
“Hell yeah!”
He wasn’t scared of my hands, even a little, or of my face when I pulled him in towards my eyes for a better look. “Can you hear me now?” he asked, and I nodded. He gestured me closer, and closer, and when he was finally close enough he reached out and slapped the bridge of my nose. “You scared me half to death! I thought I was gonna be a red paste by now!”
I smiled. “Sorry.”
We went outside, and I pulled on a single waterproof glove and scooped up a handful of snow. He took a running leap and dived in.
Fuck, he was cute. It was like those videos of huskies playing in snow for the first time, rolling around and burying his head and shit. He made a tiny snowball and threw it at my forehead, and I flicked snow into his face.
“Niall, I think you’re the bravest guy I’ve ever met,” I admitted.
“Aw, it’s not too impressive. I survived shrinking. I figure the rest of my life’s just a bonus.”
Poor guy was soaked through and shaking within minutes. He fell back into my bare palm with a splat . “You gotta warm me back up now,” he teased. “Only fair.”
I took him back in and settled on the couch, holding him at a comfortable distance from my face. He started to tug off his soaked sweater, then paused and looked up to me. “Hey, is it alright if I strip?” I must’ve looked beyond flustered, because he laughed. “Alright, I’ll take that as a yes.” He tugged off his hoodie, shoes, and jeans, flinging them about my palm, and collapsed back, reveling in the warmth of my flesh, hands clasped behind his head.
I gulped. “Niall… what do people… think of me?”
He glanced up. “Oh. Um, they try not to, I guess. There’s a lot of─ like, someone mentions an abuse case they heard about, and people go, oh, glad that doesn’t happen here.” He snorted. “So imagine my surprise.”
“Again, I’m really sorry─”
“Hey, hey, all good. If that’s what it took to get me here.” He winked and clicked his tongue. I fought down a smile. “Can’t say I ignore you as much as everyone else does. I’m, uh, I think the size difference is kinda sexy, if I’m honest.” Couldn’t say I was surprised. He sat up and sheepishly rubbed his face. “I got guys in my DMs telling me what they’d do if they got their hands on me… But I never know if I can trust them, really.” He met my eyes. “I don’t think you’d hurt me.”
I blinked. “I─ I mean, would you want to?”
His sultry expression vanished and he scoffed. “C’mon, man, that’s a second date question.”
“You’re a fucking tease.”
“Aw, little old me?”
We watched a movie. Well, talked, mostly, and kept talking long after the credits wrapped up. He laid on my belly and was very not shy about enjoying it. That felt good.
Niall was very clearly smart and funny and thoughtful. Not a shock, but good to get confirmation. Every so often he slipped into vulnerability; mentioned an old friend and then said they didn’t talk anymore, said he missed some habit from his previous life, made casual jabs at the bigotry online. But he tried not to dwell.
“I just hate that all these things suck for you,” I admitted. “I wish I could do more. I wish it didn’t have to suck.”
He laughed. “That’s really sweet of you. But it’s gonna suck.”
I had to really work up the courage to go back into the guest room. I only ever went in once a day, barring emergencies, and I had this awful anxiety that everyone was already dreading that daily visit, and the second I opened the door back up the place would be overtaken by a chorus of exasperated groans. But I just wasn’t willing to keep Niall against his will for a full day. He told me he had already gotten texts asking where he was at.
“Tellin’ ‘em I was feeling a longer walk tonight,” he said. He looked at me seriously. “I’m not ashamed of this, Henry. But I think we would both benefit from some privacy, at least for now.”
And Jesus, who else would’ve thought to say that? Smaller than my pinkie and taking the initiative to reassure me? But, hell, that had been my first thought. What if people did judge him for it, though? Would there be anything I could do to defend him without inadvertently terrorizing people into submission?
I steeled myself, and opened the guest room door.
The lights were set on timers with dimming to simulate evening and dawn. I knew this, I set them up. But I’d only ever seen it during night a few times, early in set-up, when barely anyone was moved in. Now, the tabletop twinkled in the darkness with windows and streetlights and a single roaming flashlight beam. I’d turned off the hallway lights and had tried to enter as quietly as possible, and I couldn’t sense any disturbance below.
As I approached and knelt down by the side of the table where I kidnapped him from, I realized something: for the first time, I could see everyone else better than they could see me. In the windows, I saw people reading, laughing with friends, watching TV, generally winding down. A few glanced out their windows to me and seemed to lose interest quickly when they couldn’t make me out. Someone waved at me. I smiled.
I knelt down and helped Niall back over the fence. As I started to pull away, he grabbed my fingertip and tugged me back in. “Lil’ closer,” he whispered. I moved further in, and further, and his palms met my nose again, gentler this time. He stroked along my bridge. “This is a little unfair, since you can’t respond. Well, you got my number. Just… it’s kind of nice, knowing that you felt like you already knew me. I’ve felt that way about you for a while.” He chuckled. “If you had just put your hand down for me to get into… I think that I would’ve.” He kissed me. Of course he heard my breath hitch. “But we can start date two that way. See ya round.”
He whistled as he left. For a moment, I sat there. His whistles faded. A few streets away, there was a screaming match. Closer, a peal of laughter from an open apartment window. There were no cars here to drown out these little noises of human life. But no birds either.
I pushed myself to my feet and returned to the couch. Fifteen steps to drop him off at home, and fifteen steps back to my regular life. Somehow, he seemed closer. I shot him a quick goodnight text and turned in myself, just a hallway away.