"A Small World" tries to capture that feeling that the world is the way it is... but you just don't fit today. I'm intrigued by the notion of getting smaller and smaller and seeing the magic world of subatomic particles and nuclear interaction, so the idea of growing too big - so that interpersonal relationships are as mysterious as atomic reactions are to us - seemed like a more alienating experience.
A Small World by Jen Frankel
He lay beside her, his long body curved into hers, knees pressing into the backs of her legs. His warmth was almost oppressive, a third presence in the bed, and although she struggled to enjoy this moment of closeness, her discomfort drove her to rise.
The morning sun came pale through the window in the eaves, printing long streaks of corn-coloured light over the dresser and wall. She touched the table beside the bed, thinking curiously that they seemed closer together than before. At least, her body seemed to fit more awkwardly between them as if she had grown clumsy in the night.
The chair, too, seemed to have moved itself closer to the centre of the room, which necessitated her holding her hand out as she passed it, a ship pressing itself away from the shoals. Maybe it was her balance, she thought, an off-kilter inner ear.
She washed and dressed in silence, not wanting to wake him. The tiny room pressed in on her, and she didn't need his help to make it seem too full.
Out in the street, the sidewalks were narrower than she remembered from the day before; she crossed each pavement crack with fewer steps. When the bus came, she had the odd impression that, instead of driving toward her, the blacktop had itself contracted, pulling the bus to her feet.
Her shoulder grazed the side of the door on the way up its stairs. When she saw the coins, tiny in her palm as she paid her fare, she was sure. The world was shrinking around her.
All day, it was the same, a progressive and always accelerating diminishment of everything around her. By the time she left work, she was no longer able to fit behind her desk. The elevator groaned as she boarded it. Walls pressed in on her; ceilings drooped to brush her hair. She stooped to exit the building, and found that even the sky was lower.
Out on the street, skyscrapers shrank visibly, their clean lines merging as distant city blocks sped toward her.
People on the sidewalk had merged, so that for every hundred, there were now fifty, now ten, now a few dots not even distinguishable as individual humans.
It wasn't worth taking the bus now, even if she could have squeezed herself aboard, when a single step took her home.
Another took her miles beyond, but even as she did, the ground shrank so that the entire city became as small as the bed she'd risen from that morning. In her estimation, her bed itself had become the size of a postage stamp, now as big as a grain of rice. And, as the lines of traffic became white and red threads on a darkening fabric of green, the head of a pin. The eye of a flea.
She towered unsteadily over the lake, watching with sick fascination as the curve of the Earth at the horizon became prominent. And still the world grew smaller.
The stars and the sky rushed toward her, crowding her and making her bend. The moon, no bigger than a tennis ball, sailed past her ear.
All the loneliness of the heavens, all the sadness of the celestial music of lost civilizations killed slowly by dying, swollen stars, or in an instant of brilliant supernova, all these swept past her and through her. She felt hollow and empty. There was not enough matter in the universe to fill up the empty spaces between her atoms, not now that the universe was so tiny. She cupped her hand around the Milky Way galaxy only to see it shrink in her fingers to the size of a postage stamp. And what size now her bed? Her table beside it? The space between his knees and hers?
And she found herself outside it all, a bystander to the continuity of creation. She had passed outside it, the moment she bridged the final divide already shrinking away into the past. The universe itself rested in the palm of her hand, a black sphere peppered with a sprinkling of minute stars.
She didn't know at what exact point the universe had separated itself from her, or her from it, or why she was outside creation now, a lonely being severed from both eternity and infinity.
She thought of the warmth of her tiny bed, the long body which rested beside her at night. The loneliness of a billion dead worlds was nothing now to the gaping hole in her own self. She cried out, a sound to make an angel weep, and look at last deep into the ball of universe shrinking smaller and smaller in her hand.
"No!" she screamed, knowing in that moment that her agony would rock the whole of creation to its foundations.
"No!" she said, softer this time, and with determination, and wondered if her bedmate could hear. Wondered if the Earth itself could have survived the percussive wail which had torn itself from her.
She knew she couldn't let the world go on without her, that even if it shrank to nothing, to the minutest synapse between the cells in her brain, to fit in the space inside an atom, she wanted to belong again to it.
Her fingers curled and reached in, breaking the starry surface of the tiny infinity in her palm. She spread her thumb from the fingers, digging in deep.
With both hands now, she wrenched the universe open like an orange. It distended in her grasp, as she tugged at it, willing it to let her back in.
Then, as it gave under her pressure, she was able to put a hand inside, then a foot, then her whole leg. It was dizzying, this feeling of re-entry. Her claustrophobia lifted, like a heavy curtain rising effortlessly on swift pulleys. Her melancholy receded, a fast ebb tide, and she felt suddenly stronger and ready to face the world on its own terms. In its own size.
This was somehow the last admission needed, the last piece of her plea for re-entry, required and accepted. Something deep in the universe gave, and she lost all sense of solid ground. With a strange whooshing noise, it opened itself to her, and she crossed into it, no longer a behemoth, no more an alien and uncomfortable beast. Just a woman, and small. Happily, comfortably, appropriately small.
And she fell, wind whistling past her, buffeting her ears. It tossed her at first, seemingly with random abandon. Then she opened the eyes she had clenched shut without conscious intent, and saw she was spiralling down instead, down through a night sky filled with stars. She fell like a maple key does, in tighter and tighter circles toward the starlike city lights below.
Soon she could see the familiar pattern of long-arcing Davenport, the wide and traffic-hungry artery of Yonge, the bright foamy streams of the Gardiner, 401, 427 and the DVP boxing downtown. The lake sparkled with diamonds stolen from both above and below.
Still she fell, losing her gods' perspective and spiralling ever more closely toward a single apartment rooftop – her own.
A solitary light stood in the eaves, an anchor point on which her descent was centred.
A shadow moved past the light as she neared, a shape she knew so well. It clenched her insides, unexpectedly, with joy.
And she slid through the roof with as little resistence as she had put her foot into the entire world.
He lay his long body down, wrapping her in his warmth, knees tucked behind hers, a perfect fit.
The world was a cosy place, just right for sleeping in or rushing to work.
She lay in the dark, hearing them both breathe, and contemplated the stars outside the window.
