A Short Life

It wasn't easy getting out of bed since the event happened, and not for the reasons you'd think.

Living life so far away in a small house from the rest of the world seemed like a wonderful idea at the time. My husband and I lived in rural areas surrounded by hills, trees, farms, and vineyards. In short, I could describe Efren as free spirited, stubborn, and optimistic. He always made this lopsided grin to showcase his confidence that we were going to make a happy life out here together. Our lives were in no way easy. It took a lot of patience and hard work to be able to afford the property we own now, especially since we were so used to living in apartments in the city life. I couldn't have been more grateful we hadn't decided about having kids yet at the time of the event. Otherwise surviving it would've been impossible.

On the day of the event, it was impossible for the two of us to get out of bed. The morning wouldn't even give us the benefit of a peaceful awakening, warm and happy next to the person I love. The two of us awoke confused. It was beyond dark, and we were suffocating under the quilt. Somehow the quilt gained a thousand pounds over night and stretched for miles around us. It was too dangerous to climb out of bed. What was once a foot and a half step to the floor looked to be a hundred foot drop off a cliff. We'd have to literally climb down the bed. We nearly fell over when we got too close to the edge and held onto each other looking over the edge as we realized the quilt wasn't the only thing that grew around us over night. The mundane green carpet of our bedroom floor was like looking at a vast valley from the top of a hill. The furniture, our computer desk, drawers, bedside tables, and lamp. None of it was furniture anymore, we were surrounded by mountains, skyscrapers, and towers in our own room. The light entering from the window looked like it stretched to the length of a football field across the floor. Efren and I stood on a hill amongst it all with little clue on how to climb down at first.

"What the hell?" Was the first thing he asked as we looked around. I couldn't voice my surprise or shock at all. I was still trying to process it all. Wind hitting my skin made me shiver, briefly snapping me out of it, but the window was closed.

"Was that a draft?" I asked aloud rubbing at my arms. It was a particularly strong draft. For the first time that morning he looked at me and the next thing he said was,

"I think we need to get dressed." I looked at him then down at myself and gasped as I realized he was right, but there was still one issue.

"You think we have anything that'll fit?" I asked now rubbing my arms growing more anxious than cold now. We then heard a strong buzzing sound clacking rapidly on a hard surface, it almost sounded like jack hammers. We looked around trying to find it and spotted our phones vibrating urgently.

We looked at one another and ran towards the direction of the nightstand. Running across the mattress was like running inside a bouncy castle made of marshmallows. As soon as we took off, we could feel the bed spring us up briefly helping us move quicker than we expected. We made it a third of away, only to be hindered by the mattress sinking our feet in and tripping us over every now and then. It would've been funny if we weren't so desperate to get help, and the trip from the middle of the mattress to the direction of the nightstand went from marshmallow bouncy castle to an exhausting hike through gelatin.

The phones stopped ringing by the time we made it to a pillow at the corner of the bed. We hadn't thought about the gap between the bed and the nightstand before we go there. However, at some point in the night when we were still normal sized one of us must have shifted the pillow over the edge making a likely unstable bridge across.

"I wonder if we're light enough to go across without falling." I thought aloud.

"I bet we weigh no less than a few quarters now.

"Maybe we weigh like a handful of marbles."

"Let's try not to jostle our fluffy bridge if that'll make you feel better." He told me. We climbed over our pillow which felt like climbing a small hill. We held onto each other is we slowly treaded across our unstable fluffy bridge. It was hard not to look down hoping the pillow wouldn't collapse to the floor beneath us. I looked towards the nightstand aand spotted a box of tissues I had left there when I got sick a couple weeks ago.

"Maybe we could make clothes out of those tissues." I told him.

"Yeah, but it'll rip easily."

"Better than nothing."

"I'm not complaining." He grinned. I blushed.

"Shut up! You're lucky we're married." I yelled feeling a bit embarrassed for the first time that morning. He chuckled at me like he was telling a good-natured joke.

"Pfft!" I couldn't help but laugh a little back. This whole situation was eerie yet ridiculous. As soon as we could get to our phones, we could call for help.

As we got too close to the edge the pillow began to rock making us hold our breath. There was still a minor gap between the pillow and the nightstand we could make across on a single leap.

"On the count of three." He whispered gently. We jumped. he made it across, but the pillow falling beneath me reeled me back. I fell backwards and screamed. I briefly saw my husband turn back shocked as gravity pulled me down, I clung to the soft fabric as the pillow slid slowly to the floor at an angle.

"Addie, you alright?" Efren shouted from atop the nightstand.

"Yeah. Drop one of our phones and a tissue down here. Think you can climb down?" I asked. I could see Efren look over at the angled pillow without a word. He turned back to knock over the tissue box and drop a tissue that floated down irritatingly slow.

"I'm dropping the phones in front of the nightstand so look out. I wrapped the tissue around myself like I would a towel after a shower. I felt the loud thumps of the phones falling the ground sending a small tremor beneath my feet. I hopped off the pillow and ran towards them.

Looking at a phone that was nearly my size in height was like looking at a giant tv screen. I almost couldn't believe it fit in the palm of my hand just yesterday.

"Hey, babe! Watch this! I looked up and saw Efren with a tissue wrapped around his waist and preparing to jump off the side of the nightstand and towards the pillow that leaned half against the bed and the other half on the floor. He had several tissues in his hands and ran across the nightstand.

"What are you thinking!" I shouted. He leaped from the edge of the table with a holler and while I shrieked at him. He aimed towards the angled pillow while attempting to use the extra tissues in his hand as a parachute. When it obviously didn't work, he let them go to grip on the fabric of the pillowcase much like I did and maneuvered himself to slide downward. Efren laughed and cheered on his way down. I ran back towards him and shoved him as soon as he jumped off the pillow onto the floor.

"You scared me, you... ugh!" I was too shaken and furious to speak.

"Sorry." He wrapped his arms around me comfortingly while I held onto him tight. "Pretty fun though, you should've tried it."

"I did, I hated it." I muttered. I felt Efren wince and he apologized again.

We walked back to my phone on the floor and turned on the screen,

"This is so cool." Efren said as he looked at the oversized image on the lock screen. I reached a hand towards the screen my phone couldn't read a fingertip anymore and what would normally take a swipe of a finger to enter my password and click on the call app was done by my hand. We waited a while and looked at each other when the call took too long.

"What kind of police station doesn't answer the phone?" I asked. I decided to check my missed call and realized it was a friend of ours who lives in the city area, when hen we couldn't answer he had sent a message asking if we were okay.

"What does he know?" Efren asked staring incredulously at the message.

"M-maybe it's not just us." I moved to click on a social media app to check on everyone else we knew. We were met with so much shocking information. Granted it was a relief to know we weren't the only ones. There were a few live streams of news reporters reporting from their home on a personal device as they tried to make sense of the situation.

"Sources say, those who can get in contact with other countries say the situation is the same in all parts of the globe. One news reporter said. "Those who claim were awake when the event occurred say they felt the sensation of an earthquake only to be swiftly knocked unconscious and waking up hours later in a shrunken state." I covered my hands over my mouth as I took in the news.

"With the whole world like this, there's no one we can call for help. They'd never make it out here." Efren said. We lifted the phones on their sides, leaning them against the base of the nightstand to catch up on the news around the world, as well as looking for any resources for help while contacting our families and friends.

There was a small report indicating to ration food and make and gather supplies until people are found or rescued. We decided to look around the house for anything we might need as well as send out a message via social media platforms if we were in need of rescuing. Stepping on the part of the floor where the sun rays have been hitting was like walking on hot sand on the beach, not the usual cozy warmth for cold feet.

We were relieved we left the door to our room open last night otherwise we would've been trapped. Unfortunately, the trek towards the living room and kitchen took longer and felt far more arduous than it normally would've on a regular day.

"Almost makes me wish I was a kid again. I could be living the dream in my doll house and wearing my doll's cute clothes." I bemoaned as we were hardly halfway down the hall.

"I bet so many shrunken kids are having the time of their lives playing on toy trains and remote-controlled cars."

"I wonder what it's like for the rest of the world out there. What about animals? Do you think our neighbor's horses ran off as soon as they were small enough to run out of the stable?" I paused for a moment. "Come to think of it having small horses would definitely be useful, and the barn owls thst nest there...?" I trailed off when I realized Efren's mind was off somewhere else. "Efren?"

"I wonder what happened to us, and how long it'll be before we're found." We gently brought our hands together, i squeezed his hand gently, held onto his arm with my other hand and leaned my head on his shoulder. We said no more words until we made it towards the kitchen.

We continued walking in silence, I hardly registered the rest of the walk down the hall. Eventually we stopped abruptly as soon as we made it to the kitchen.

"I don't think we have to worry about rationing food." Said Efren. I looked up and saw the enormous sizes of the fruit sitting in a bowl on our table. I broke away as my eyes followed the size of the chair and height of the table.

"How would we even get up there?" I asked.

We began to come up with every idea we could think of to climb atop the table. We took note of the legs of the table and chairs to find ways to climb up.

"I have my tool bag in the hallway closet, we could use some small screws and pins to climb up to the seats using the carvings and holes on the legs and climb up the tablecloth." Efren suggested. That closet was always too cramped and never closed all the way. It wouldn't be hard to open.

"You know that sewing kit my mom got me that I never used. I left it right on top of your toolkit it should still be there. It has yarn and string we could use as rope."

"That's perfect babe!" Efren hugged me and we both made our way back towards the middle of the hall towards the slightly ajar closet door. The weight of the wooden door was still relatively light, but we still needed a little extra force to push it open enough to get us in. We were only barely illuminated by the sun light barely hitting the hallway. The closet was full of household items we don't keep in our room. Extra blankets, sacks of old clothes we planned to donate, a pair of shoes tossed in out of laziness, old decorations for the holidays.

"Addie, come here." Efren found our stuff and knocked my sewing kit to the ground to unzip the bag of tools. We gathered up the items we needed most, at the very least what we could lift together and laid it all out in the hall. There was string, yarn, needles, rubber bands, screws, pins, and we were fortunate enough to find a miniature pair of scissors for sewing, a miniature plastic flashlight in the shape of a ring, and tape. All of them still too big for one hand, but small enough to use both or two people now.

We made the unfortunate realization we needed our phones to come up with ways to use our supplies to our advantage and we decided to make a trek back to the bedroom to push our phones down to the middle of the hall we're we'd briefly set up camp until we're rescued.

Gathering the fruit from the table would have to wait. We were better off gathering supplies that are more easily accessible, like the food in our pantry. The wooden door was closed this time so we used some of our screws and beat the wooden door until we managed to form a small hole we could crawl through. That took nearly the rest of the day and we slept on the carpet bordering the tiles of the table with nothing but our tissue dress to keep us warm. We hoped today had just been a bad dream hoping the sounds of the barn owls that hoo in my neighbor's stables at night would soothe me like always, but they were much too loud for my liking this time.

The following morning, we explored the pantry using the flashlight we found.

"Until we can find a way to climb up the shelves and the table, we're stuck eating whatever we find on the bottom shelf." I breathed. In spite of the situation, it was kind of amazing to see all our stuff so big. We had an abundance of supplies we could eat and use to our advantage. We'd have more than enough to survive the rest of our lives even if we're never found.

"Looks like we're having oversized granola bars for a couple days." Efren muttered flashing a light at the box he found on the bottom shelf. Efren's always been good at knocking me back down to reality. We couldn't use the water from the dispenser just yet, fortunately we had a supply of water bottles sitting on the floor. Amazing how we'd be able to survive for a while using only one out of the seventeen, we had left. Until we could find a way to climb up the shelves and table, we're stuck eating oversized granola bars. Efren also found a box of matches. Hopefully they would be useful if we could ever cook again or run out of light energy.

When we gathered enough satisfactory supplies, by rolling the water bottle back to the hall/kitchen border, a can of sliced peaches, yes, we were happy about that, and small bags of pretzels, and peanuts. We decided to set up camp in our living room right next to the kitchen. We went back to the hall to move our stuff and eat a decent meal before we started doing some extra research on our phones.

Efren began to look up some basic construction information, to build ladders and pulley systems using whatever we could find to help, I could've sworn I saw him looking up rock climbing material too. I started to make use of my sewing kit and began cutting through the extra blankets from the closet to make some decent sleeping matts and blankets. I tore through the bag carrying our old clothes to collect scraps of fabric to make us something to wear that'll fit better than tissue dresses by watching video tutorials and following online instructions. We worked as hard as we could to understand and learn our new materials, we even looked up basic survival information, it was a shame neither of us knew CPR. We had to memorize what we could find out, because who knew how long we'd have electricity and internet for before everything shut down.

Our feet were beginning to chafe by walking on the carpet floor barefoot. There was no way I could build shoes using the material I had on hand, so I had to get creative using some stuffing I gathered from inside a quilt in the closet and wrapping it along with cloth around our feet, tying it around our ankles with string. There was no way Efren was comfortable working on his projects in a tissue skirt. I needed to start with his first. I stitched up a pair of pants and shorts for him, as well as made a plain dress for myself and one pair of pants. I also used some rubber bands to help hold the clothes to our waists. We had to go back and forth to the closet in the hall to gather any extra material, we eventually found a ruler the two of us carried out of the tool bag and measured ourselves. We shrunk down to about 4 inches in total height. Not exactly Thumbelina sized, but probably very close. With so much distance around our house increased by our height I don't think we'll ever walk back to our bedroom again.

Our new projects were taking days to accomplish, we wouldn't have known how much time had passed if it weren't for the calendars and clocks on our phones. It was dumb luck one of us left a charger plugged into the wall in our living room.

Efren eventually wanted to test his new climbing equipment and ladders to climb his way up our coffee table.

"Up there is where our remote is. If we get that, we could watch a movie on the biggest screen in the house."

"I think our phones work just fine for movie nights." I told him.

"Come on we need to test our stuff anyway so we could climb the shelves and the table." He argued. I relented and prepared to start climbing.

Fortunately, Efren found one edge of the coffee table was moved close to the seat of one of our couches one day and has been this way prior before we shrunk. We cut a massive piece out of the closet's quilt and set to the floor under the couch in case we fell. He mentioned something about using, pins to climb the fabric of the couch. We had several to spare and stuck them in as we climbed to for our feet to step on and for our hands to grab onto. We didn't have the luxury of anchors or belayers, in spite of having yarn for rope, we needed to improvise. Efren had only gone rock climbing a few times and he remembers most of the techniques and safety precautions, not much of which could really help other than sticking a screw to the seat of the couch and tying the yarn around it for the climb back down.

We jumped from the seat of the couch onto the coffee table and looked around. The view of our surroundings shifted again, like when we had first opened our eyes in our bedroom again. I looked around as Efren found some extra supplies on the coffee table. Some discarded pencils and paper, as well as the remote. I got a better view of the table from this height and the sight I saw made my stomach drop.

"Hon..."

"What is it?" Efren asked.

I pointed to the table where the fruit laid rotten. We should've known the food wouldn't have lasted no matter how much there was. It would all eventually spoil.

That evening we watched a digital movie on the tv to get our mind off the rotten fruit. As Efren dozed off beside me in our little quilt-mattress I heard a loud smack at our window. I jumped. The noise startled Efren awake too and we looked up at the window where a large barn owl n as five to the area stood perched on our windowsill glaring at us in the moonlight. Elephants were large creatures, but this owl stood as tall as a house or building in our presence. I gasped and pulled Efren to hide under the table with me. I think that owl stood watching the whole night until it flew away in the morning.

When we first moved here, we asked our neighbor about her pet owls she kept in her horse's stables. She told us owls didn't interact with humans and certainly aren't owned by them, they were untamable wild predatory animals with killer instincts towards small creatures. It's especially bad if they imprint on a human.

These past couple months, or maybe years? felt like some eerie paradise. Efren and I had time to ourselves, we were learning all kinds of new skills to survive, and we had more than enough food to eat, but no functional way to get to it other than strapping tape to ourselves to climb the walls, but that was too risky, especially to climb too high. So far, no rescue searches that we've heard about arrived in our area. We were left with only one other option. Leave our home to seek help. We came out here to live a life surrounded by nature. Little did we know Efren's first reaction to our circumstances rang far truer than we ever could've anticipated.

"Imagine if we did get a dog? We'd be riding him out of here." Efren grunted as he climbed the wall using tape wrapped around his knees and hands. We had a sealed doggy door because we never got around to adopting a dog. Efren decided to climb up

We also didn't want to risk vermin sneaking in. Now we needed to unlock the cover to get ourselves out.

All of our supplies were packed away using fabric and yarn as makeshift packs. We scraped off the leather off old boots we found and turned them into water-skins, at least something resembling them and packed extra pretzels and peanuts we had left over. We took some needles and precision screw drivers just in case.

When we made it outside the world exploded around us with its size. The leaves looked like umbrellas; the grass looked like forests. I turned to get one last look at our home and followed Efren towards familiar uncertainty.

"Our best bet is to stay away from the grass and walk along the roads. Let's avoid as many bugs as we can." Said Efren recently we heard a story of a man attacked by a giant spider in his home. His daughter narrowly rescued him using a needle as a sword.

Being out here when it grew dark shot my nerves up in the air. I hated to think we could be spotted by owls, who knew if they still reacted to humans the same way anymore. Spiders certainly didn't.

As we walked along the road, we camped a few nights keeping a wary eye out for anything dangerous or helpful. We eventually ran out of food one night while we walked near our neighbor's vineyard.

"I wonder if we should sneak in to grab some grapes that might've fallen the ground." We weren't starving yet but having something a little extra couldn't hurt. Efren looked at me and grinned.

"Let's just go in for a bit See what we find close to the road?" I agreed we held hands and entered. The Vineyard looked like a jungle just from the top where the leaves and grapes grew.

"If we cross the whole vineyard, it'll be a short cut towards the nearest town." I suggested.

"Yeah, but with no one around maintaining this area it could still be dangerous." Efren said. We walked around further into the vineyard until we spotted some grapes lying on the ground. We went up to them to check how fresh they were. While we were distracted, we didn't realize a praying mantis lurked around the corner. As soon as we took a bite out of a fresh one, we heard its approach and turned to it in shock and ran.

"That thing was bigger than us!" Efren screamed. I turned to look back at us it began follow. We ran through the vineyard instead of back to the road hoping we'd lose it easier that way. We hoped it would just give up and walk away but as we hid. It continued its search for us. That thing was relentless. We couldn't rest until we were sure we lost it.

We rested uneasily before dawn broke. While I slept, I heard Efren scream. The praying mantis attacked him. He swung his precision screwdriver at it uncoordinatedly. I got up and grabbed my needle and ran at its side with nothing but adrenaline dictating my actions. I stuck the needle through the mantis just barely only to have it swing at me with its claws. Efren pushed me out of the way before it got me, but it slashed his back. We rolled onto the ground and the mantis continued to approach us with the needle still stuck to its side.

"Efren!" I shouted. He could barely get up with the injury to his back. The mantis was getting closer next thing we knew something sped through the air and snatched the mantis.

A wild bat took the bug and devoured it. I watched the scene in sickening shock. The bat had its meal and began sniffing around I looked at the slash across Efren's back and worried. The bat made a move to fly down again only to immediately become someone else's meal. A familiar barn owl swooped in from the sky and snatched the bat. I screamed as it flew above us. I think it gave us a look, but it ignored us.

I screamed for help for Efren towards the direction of the road I can still see until sunlight arrived.

Eventually a dog leading a wagon appeared on the road and twitched its ear.