Little Brother in the Big City (Chapter 2) (Patreon)

Those ground-swelling shakes only gained strength the nearer Gabby came, walking right past the coffee table en route toward the kitchen, until Jacob could feel the tremors in his bones, and his body nearly bounced up past the shrubs of carpet fuzz from residual jolts. Naturally, having no clue what had happened to her brother in her absence, there was no reason for the girl to know that her standard footsteps felt like violent tectonic plate shifts to him, or that her cheerful voice rang in his skull like a blaring siren. Jacob hadn’t yet found the willpower to make himself move or even produce a sound once Gabby had re-entered her home, still too awash in the shellshock of seeing his beloved sibling instantly transformed into a planet-breaking destroyer just by his own downsizing to a paltry basically-invisible millimeter. It wasn’t like he could’ve gotten her attention from this distance, even if he jumped and screamed at the top of his lungs. But even as Jacob remained at a paralytic standstill, too intimidated to act, there was no longer any room for doubt that all this was real as he watched, heard, and felt Gabby’s larger-than-life presence unknowingly dominating his entire being just by walking past where he was marooned in front of the sofa. This was happening; no amount of cold water or shrieking himself hoarse could change that. And gradually, the bizarre surreality of his situation gave way instead to purer soul-depth distress inside him. It felt like Jacob had awakened into a living nightmare.

Because as he was forced to come to terms with his new reality, accepting that he really was this pathetically small and his sister really was a deific powerhouse nonchalantly stomping about on the horizon of her kitchen, he was also forced to comprehend how fragile his existence had become. How temporary his life might become, if only the simplest unfortunate circumstances fell into place while stranded here, starving him or suffocating him or crushing him to a microscopic pulp under the gentlest pressure. He was only a tiny breakable insignificant speck now, with less agency than a mosquito. And Gabby might not ever realize what had become of him. With escalating horror, Jacob also noticed that his now-overgrown clothes had fallen close to the duffel he’d brought for his visit, which meant his sister wasn’t likely to notice his strangely abandoned outfit. And if she tried to text him to ask where he was, he’d left his phone on silent in his bag. Jacob gulped hard, feeling an icy chill crawl up his spine and an uncontrollable terror-shiver infect his limbs. If he wasn’t careful, he gravely acknowledged, Gabby herself might even be the direct cause of his anonymous demise. If he didn’t get her attention somehow and receive badly-needed help from his loving but currently unwitting sibling, he might not even survive the rest of the day in her perilous orbit.

With that morbidly sobering truth in mind, Jacob snapped into action, as he commenced urgently foraging across the carpet fluff forest away from the couch. He stumbled frequently, dizzy from fear, which made it even trickier to scramble between the plush obstructions of the floor texture. His ground-bound surroundings themselves weren’t so ominous now, lacking any direct physical dangers, especially since Gabby had bought such a luxurious rug – having always enjoyed the feeling of rubbing her bare soles and toes across the softness after a long day. But the hulking dust and crumb particles lodged in the fibers, not to mention the imposing trunk-like bulk of each carpet tuft, all served as humbling reminders to Jacob of exactly how small he’d become, and how difficult it was for him now to perform even the most mindless task at barely a millimeter high. After several minutes of clambering, it hardly felt like he’d made progress forward, as he craned his neck back and saw that the alpine heights of the sofa and coffee table overhead hadn’t appreciably moved. How was he ever going to manage this?

For better or for worse, though, Jacob was soon spared having to expend any more pointless energy on traveling barely an inch across the floor, as Gabby abruptly emerged from the kitchen. As always, no matter where she was going, she strutted with self-assured purpose, as she power-marched in the direction of the living room. Ordinarily the sight of his sister would’ve brought comfort and relief, just knowing he was around one of the most important people in the world to him. But now, as Jacob witnessed her beautiful mountainous form traveling forth on a warpath seemingly right in his direction, with absolutely no idea that her only sibling was currently shrunken tinier than a bug and lost in her carpet, that dread already clutching his heart quintupled. He flinched like he’d been shocked by a spark plug and let out an impulsive shout, half in feeble hopes of alerting Gabby and half from unadulterated fright. Of course even his loudest yelp at this size was quieter than a gnat’s whine, and his naked dot of a body blended right in with the rug fibers.

Time slowed to a horrifying lurch in Jacob’s mind, as he watched those dark boots the size of cruise liners arcing through the air on their brutal trajectory, then clomping back into the floor for another step with such force that the aftershocks buoyed him like loose popcorn in a microwave. Barely able to stay standing on the ground, let alone try to run out of the way, he realized that even if he was free to bolt at a dead sprint, his dispiriting puniness would render that effort useless. There was no getting away; just one lazy step by her could cancel out whole minutes of panicked running for him. That hopeless realization overcome Jacob even worse than the raw fear, as Gabby took another mighty stride toward him without knowing. Her face was so high above now that the blurred distance required him to squint, and the encroaching bulwark of that shiny-rimmed Reign boot and its steep-troughed treads presented an ever-realer threat, slamming into the ground like a flying fortress and blocking out the little thing’s view to the rest of the apartment beyond. God, she was massive, and so was every part of her and every piece of adornment she wore. Jacob literally couldn’t wrap his mind around it.

But of course he’d have no choice but to do so anyway, as Gabby lifted her boot for another step, this time raising her enormous black-clad foot right over where he was stuck in the carpet desert. Then that jagged geometric rubber sole the size of a small island started to descend on him. Its shadow swallowed Jacob whole, casting darkness over this whole province of the carpet like a solar eclipse. Even the shade felt like it had its own weight, causing him to collapse on his back, or maybe that was just the existential horror of watching his own sister’s gigantic weaponized shoe plummeting toward him at glacial speed. Jacob’s jaw hung open and his eyes went bloodshot, only able to shiver like a madman now, as Gabby’s falling foot suddenly blotted out the rest of the world. This was it. He was done. In one unlucky blink, he’d made himself a target of his blissfully oblivious sibling’s fashionable boot. He didn’t even get a chance to howl and plead for aid. The breath left Jacob’s body and tears welled in his eyes as he realized that Gabby was about to execute him, trampling him flat into the ground like any other unimportant dirt mite, and that would be that. She’d never know.

He shut his eyes. The impact came, and Jacob was certain he was already on his way to the afterlife, probably squished too quickly to feel it, which was at least a small mercy. But even as he sensed the tarmac-hot climate of her dingy boot undersole right above, and had his cranium overloaded by the loudest THWOOOOOOOOOM yet, he remained painlessly intact. Daring to reopen his eyes, Jacob realized that his incredibly small scope – plus a healthy dose of pure luck – meant that the chunky divisions of Gabby’s shoe treads had only crashed into the floor around him, while leaving him safely alive in one of the gaps between rubber ramparts. This outcome hardly made him feel fortunate, though; by a coin-toss chance, he could’ve just as easily been micro-roadkill right now. Still shaking as though he really had been trodden upon so hard that he imploded, Jacob could only haplessly watch as his gargantuan sister (happily unaware of how close she’d just come to slaughtering him) kept right on walking on her short voyage to the sofa, pivoting around and finally taking a seat on the cushions with a contented exhale.