By: Khoi Pham

I didn’t know exactly how The Shrink started, but people had been talking about it for a while. I didn’t really care, until it reached me.

I noticed the first symptoms while getting ready for work. When changing clothes, I saw that the sleeves of my shirt were a bit too long; I had to roll them up about three centimeters past my wrists. At work, Max’s voice sounded slightly louder than usual. I thought he was yelling at me when he greeted me or when he mentioned my performance.

By the seventh day, the desk at my office felt a bit taller, and I had to adjust my chair higher just to sit comfortably.

Laura noticed it first. In bed, obviously. Probably also because she saw me struggle to put on my clothes. As a businesswoman, she’d always had a sharp eye for details. I remember how she used to curl up in my lap on cold winter nights. Now she feels heavier with each passing day.

Laura told me to see a doctor. He said I had a rare condition; something called The Shrink. For some reason, my cells, all of them, were slowly shrinking. The degree of shrinkage varied for each person. Most would stop shrinking once they were about the size of a small child.

My first reaction was to tell him: You must be joking, right?

—

By the ninth month, I couldn’t drive anymore because my feet couldn’t reach the gas pedal. Laura started waking up earlier to drive me to work before returning to run her own business from home. One month later, I had to quit my job because I’d gotten so small that my coworkers looked overwhelmingly large compared to me. When we had lunch together, they barely noticed I was there. My voice had become too quiet for them to hear. My neck started to hurt like hell as I often had to tilt my head all the way up just to talk to someone.

Laura was the same as always. Beautiful, sharp, but I could see dark circles had begun to appear under her eyes. She had also grown understandably quieter. When we lay next to each other, she no longer felt like a little cat. Maybe I should just call her a lion, a very badass one.

I had an old bicycle stored in the shed. A turquoise bike my mom bought me when I was ten. I used to ride it with her along a narrow path behind our house, all the way to a hill and back. When I turned thirteen, I had a growth spurt, and the bike was put away. When my mom passed away, it was still there in the shed. And now, for the first time in thirty years, I rode that bike again. I was surprised it was still working. The wind hit my face like something I hadn’t felt in years. I think I heard my mother’s voice telling me to slow down.

—

By the third year, though, I was so small I couldn’t reach the door handle anymore. I didn’t go out much, because it felt a little dangerous. I built myself a tiny ladder so I could make coffee and fry eggs each morning while Laura was working. My only connection to the world was through a computer screen. Our bedroom now felt enormous, even though Laura used to complain it was too cramped. I honestly wonder now how the hell she ever thought it was small. I used to lift her like picking up a small kitten. Now it’s her turn to cradle me like one.

Two years later, I knew what the doctor said was wrong. Because I kept shrinking, smaller and smaller. We visited a professor. He said my case was unusual: my cells seemed to have wanted to shrink. What a load of bullshit that was.

Another two years passed, I’d shrunk to the size of a fingertip. I lived inside a mosquito net–I think one mosquito could suck me dry now.

Laura gave me a cardboard box. I cut a small square for a window, a larger one for a door, and spent most of my time working to cut more pieces of cardboard to build a bed, a tiny table, and some chairs. We communicated with crayon letters, since we could no longer hear each other. In turn, she would type me some very small letters on Word and print them for me on another piece of tiny paper.

With this little invention, we could still speak, but I’ve grown to miss real closeness dearly. I won’t lie–it felt strange thinking about making love with someone who, from where I stood, was as big as a small mountain.

Laura’s business still ran well. I could even say she has an easier life now than when I was still with her–I mean truly with her. I didn’t eat or drink much, so it was like she was living alone again. Through the tiny paper, she told me she was planning to move to a smaller place. I wrote back: it was a good idea.

—

When the tenth year came, we’d been living in a small two-room suite downtown for almost two years. I had shrunk to the point that an average person could barely see me. I still lived in my cardboard house, but even that was now far too big for me. Laura and I couldn’t hear each other anymore. I had grown too small for even writing to be practical: it took me too long to form letters large enough for her to read.

I thought Laura was sick. I could no longer see or understand her. She had grown far too large for me. For the first time, I felt alone, completely alone. But at least I could still hear her coughing. The cough had grown harsher with each passing night.

Her visit to my small home began to dwindle. She used to stay with me for hours while we exchanged tiny notes. Then twice a day, once a day, and finally once every few days to bring me food. I hated how much I had come to depend on her.

—

Now it was the twelfth year since the beginning of my shrinking. Laura had been nowhere to be seen for a couple of days. I still survived on the food she left me a few days ago, but I hadn’t heard her coughing for a while. She had been coughing so often in the past few months that the house felt eerily empty without it. I realized it was the last thing connecting us. I didn’t want her to be sick, of course, but I couldn’t deny it reassured me, somehow.

Days later, some people came to the house. Then suddenly, I felt myself being picked up along with the box. Naturally, they couldn’t see me.

After a few moments, I sensed they had placed the box somewhere. I came out of the box for the first time in years. It was our living room. The carpet fibers were now, for me, like a forest of multicolored trees: green, gray, red.

Someone suddenly lifted the box, my home for the last five years, and started leaving the house. From my position, the front door looked miles away. I ran through the forest, shouting out names, my name, her name, any random names I could think of, over and over, hoping that someone would notice.

But I knew no one on earth could hear me anymore.

###

Khoi Pham is a Vietnam-born and now Germany-based computer forensics analyst. Though he does not work in the field of literature, he enjoys reading and writing as ways to reflect on memories, losses, and the struggles of modern life. Having previously written only on his personal blog, this is one of his first attempts to have his work published in English.