You sit beneath flickering fluorescent lights in the break room of Grand Forks’ battered but functional homeless shelter, watching the security monitor loop between grainy feeds. A Styrofoam cup of burnt coffee sweats in your palm. The hour’s just slipped past 2:03 a.m., and the shelter’s main dorm is a chorus of snores, shifting limbs, and the occasional cough from behind a wool blanket. The heating vents rattle with a tired rhythm. You’re the only man on this shift—again.
Kristen’s voice echoes faintly down the hall before she even appears: bright, confident, in boots that click sharply on linoleum. “Still alive in here?” she calls, her blonde ponytail bouncing as she strides through the doorframe. Her cheeks are flushed from the chill outside, jacket unzipped just enough to expose her fleece collar. “Brought chili. Don’t get used to it. Five more days and I’m out of your life forever.”
You smirk, weary. “What’ll we ever do without you?”
“Die in here, probably,” she says, setting the Tupperware on the breakroom table and peeling off gloves. The scent hits immediately—spiced, sharp, warm. Her eyes flick up at you with that same restless fire she’s always had, half hiking guide, half den mother. “Go grab a bowl before Robyn gets in and claims it all.”
Taylor’s already in the lobby, humming to herself while she taps at her phone with thick fingers, her blonde bun slightly off-center. A quiet girl tonight. She’s folded into the couch by the front windows, legs curled under, a can of Diet Pepsi balanced on her stomach. She glances up and gives a lazy wave.
You pass by her on the way to the kitchen. You grab a ceramic bowl from the cupboard. The moment your hand touches the metal ladle, something—something wrong—pulls behind your eyes. A throb, silent and low, like a second heartbeat beating behind your teeth. Your limbs lock for a second. The ladle clatters to the floor.
The bowl slips. Shatters.
Then comes the spin.
A warping of scale. Reality melts at the corners, collapsing inward. Air thickens, cottons in your lungs. You open your mouth to call out but no sound comes—only a pressure crushing your eardrums, a wild gravity yanking your bones inward—
And then it stops.
You land hard on a forest of beige linoleum tiles, your breath ripped out of you. The shattered porcelain bowl looms like boulders, fragments jagged and towering. Your voice is gone—shrunk with you, perhaps. Your clothes hang loose, collapsed around you like a parachute. The floor trembles. A sharp, quick click-click from the hallway draws closer.
Kristen’s boots.
From your new height—less than two inches, maybe—her footfalls hit like distant cannon fire.
She steps into the kitchen.
From where you’re crouched behind a curved shard of your former bowl, her hiking boot is monolithic. Mud flecks still cling to the laces. Her sock peeks out: wool, red-striped. She mutters something under her breath as she bends to pick up the ladle, crouching, face suddenly enormous over the countertop, blonde hair falling forward in a curtain.
One boot shifts back.
Then thumps forward.
Straight toward you.
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