Instantly, my field of vision was
filled with a giant man! He stared at me as if unsure what he was seeing. I tried
waving to let him know I was friendly.
"OHMYGOSH!" he screamed, terror flooding his face.
I screamed as well, running to hide
in the bathroom of my hotel room—very evidently not a hotel at all! I watched
as the wall pulled away, and the giant reached into my room and felt around. I
knew I had to get out of there fast. I dodged past the groping fingers and down
the narrow hall. Nothing looked as it had been. There were only rooms on the
front side now. I tumbled down the chunky staircase and reached the ground
floor in time to hear a female voice speak to him.
"Jerry, what's wrong?"
"Wrong?" the hand pulled
back and the wall slammed shut. The giant stood in front of the building as I
spilled out the front door and onto the countertop. His movement blocked it
from her view. "Nothing's wrong," the giant stammered nervously.
"Why would anything be wrong?"
"Jerry, why did you
scream?"
"Scream?" He hesitated,
and I seized the opportunity to carefully lower myself off the edge of the
counter and drop into his back pocket, alongside his wallet. "I—I have to
get to work." Jerry turned quickly, probably checking to see if I was
still in the house. When he turned around again, I saw that he had closed the
window.
"Bye, honey," he said,
striding out the door.
I had to slip out of his pocket as
he slid into his car. I climbed across the emergency brake shaft to the
passenger seat. He plopped his briefcase down almost on top of me.
"I'm seeing things," he
muttered to himself, "It was just a—well, just...nothing. There wasn't
really anything; I mean, what could fit in a dollhouse, really? It's
just..." he sighed and gripped the steering wheel. "Stress," he
finished, "office stress."
Creeping around to the handle of
the briefcase, I found that the latch was large enough for me to reach in and
release it. I climbed over the lip and landed amid piles of papers and folders.
I had only just settled when I heard Jerry mutter, "I thought I'd already
closed—" the briefcase snapped shut and I was both in darkness and complete
silence.
I could mostly keep myself in one
place while he was driving. I only wondered what I would do when he discovered
me again.
Presently, the briefcase tipped
upright, and I fell straight to the bottom. Jerry the giant was probably
juggling a few other things too, because the case and its contents (including
myself) slammed back and forth as well as up and down. I dodged as best I
could, but in desperation I wedged myself in a corner of the case and hoped
nothing would smash me. Yes, there were pretty exclusively papers and folders,
but each was about one hundred feet long and weighed about as much as a piece
of sheet metal.
Finally, the briefcase moved
straight up like a freight elevator, and slammed down flat. I ended up, wedged
as I was, head-down.
Just as I righted myself, the lid
of the case flew up, carrying me partway with it. I landed on my rear end right
in the middle of a paper. Jerry the giant was reading something on his computer
screen as he reached for a sheaf of papers underneath me.
"Hi!" I shouted.
Jerry jumped so hard he hit the
wall of his small cubicle and cowered on the floor.
"D-d-don't hurt me," he
whimpered.
I could see the poor guy shaking,
almost crying. I raised my hands to try to calm him, and he flinched like I was
flinging magic at him.
"Dude," I tried to
explain, "just relax, I'm not going to hurt you. My name is Laura," I
said, pointing to myself.
Jerry's breath still came in short
bursts. "I'm hallucinating," he muttered to himself. He fought to
pull himself off the floor with shaking hands. "This is all—it's a dream.
There is no such thing as a tiny, live, person; I'm going to wake up,
and—"
"MONTGOMERY!"
The infuriated shriek caught him
unawares and he yelled, "Yipes!" and slammed his briefcase shut,
plunging me into darkness once more. I heard the woman's voice continue for
several minutes, and then silence. The latch on the briefcase clicked, slowly;
very timidly, the lid inched upward. I saw his enormous eyes, the size of
satellite dishes, peeking through the slit, as if checking to see if I was
really there. Still he did not open the lid all the way. I heard him psyching
himself up for it.
"Okay, Jerry, you can do this.
This is real life, Jerry, not something out of your imagination. Come on,
Jerry; you're better than this. Okay..." He slowly lifted the lid.
I tried not to make any sudden
moves that might scare him. He frowned when he saw me, like the expression one
wears when trying to discern if a dustbunny is a spider.
"Hi," I said cautiously.
Jerry rolled his eyes. "Oh,
dangit, you're still there!" He sat back and studied me as I crawled out
onto his desk. Finally, he asked, "Are you, like my conscience or
something?" His eyes widened as he considered the ramifications of such a
thing. "This is about that one thing I did, and you're here to punish me
with magic, right? With the teacher and the erasers—"
I couldn't stand all the crazy
talk. "What? No! I don't have any idea what you're talking about, and I
don't think I want to know! I'm not here to punish you—"
Without warning, his hand descended
upon me. I could tell he had not calmed down much, if at all. He slammed me
flat on the ground. Taking small strips of tape, he fastened my arms, my legs,
and my waist to the desk. Then he pulled out a magnifying glass and examined me
closely.
"Hey!" he cried, poking
me roughly with his fingertip, "You don't have wings! You're not a fairy:
are you a leprechaun?"
His strange behavior was freaking
me out, but I couldn’t do a thing about it. Try as I might, I couldn’t pull my
arms out. "Ow! Hey!” I struggled against the tape, “What on earth are you
doing?"
He grinned childishly and set down
the magnifying glass. "Ha! I've caught you, leprechaun, and now you must
give me all your gold and I don't have to work at this stupid job any more!"
“Are you out of your mind?" I
yelled. "I'm not a leprechaun, I'm not a fairy, or a pixie, or an elf, I'm
not anything! I'm just a normal human being, and my name is Laura."
Jerry smiled condescendingly, as if
he didn’t believe me. “Okay, human,” he scoffed, “What planet are you from?”
Finally, I wriggled my left arm
free, and used that hand to free my right. With both hands I peeled the strip
of tape off my waist, wary of Jerry’s twitching hands on either side of me.
“I come from a place called Earth,”
I said.
Jerry snorted, “Whatever—this is Earth.”
I stopped in the middle of freeing
my ankles. “No—No, it can’t be!” I spluttered. “Where are we?”
“America; Phantopolis, New York, to
be precise.”
He said it with such certainty, but
by now I knew that this could not be real. I struggled to my feet. “No,” I
tried to correct him as my head spun, “see, that’s where you’re wrong. There is
no Phantopolis, New York!”
Jerry’s face did not change; he
only blinked. “Yes, there is; we are here.”
I shook my head, but everything was
still spinning. “You’ve gotta understand,” I tried to tell him, “This can’t be
Earth.”
Jerry cocked an eyebrow. “How so?”
I stood as tall as I could. “In the
real world, I’m five-foot-five,” I said. “That would make you about
seventy-five feet tall. That is not possible for a normal human being to be
that tall. So you see, you are a giant, and this is not Earth.”
Jerry laughed at this.
“Seventy-five feet?” he repeated, “Is that how tall you think I am?”
Something about his tone gave me
pause. “Well…” I found myself considerably less convinced, “yeah…I mean—“
“Laura,” Jerry sighed, "I hate
to be the one to tell you this." He opened his desk drawer and withdrew a
ruler. He placed it on the desk next to me. "You’re six inches high."
I glanced at the board next to me.
I knew that under normal circumstances, I was around five feet, five inches.
Yet as I stood there on the desk, there was the numeral 6, just above my line
of vision. It was as big as my face; I could barely speak.
"Oh—but how did...No, this is
impossible," my vision blurred, and I felt my legs turn to jelly. I
probably would have collapsed right there on the desk if Jerry had not offered
his hand. I sat heavily in his palm, and he lifted me carefully. In all my
adventures, I had never expected to be in a situation quite like this. I found
myself feeling Jerry's palm, just as Perissa had touched mine. Now I saw as she
did, the large crevices and ridges in the palm, the deep lines of the
fingerprint on his thumb.
Jerry fidgeted in the silence.
"So," he tried, "you don't know how you got shrunk? No, like, I
dunno," he shrugged and rolled his eyes, "mad scientists running
experiments or evil masterminds zapping people with shrink rays or anything
like that?"
I shook my head. "No, nothing:
I was normal size when I walked into a hotel and got a room and went to
sleep." I tucked my knees against my chest as Jerry watched me closely.
"How did you get into my
wife's dollhouse?"
I blinked and looked up at him.
"Oh, that lady was your wife?" I asked dimly.
Jerry frowned as if I had asked a
stupid question. "Yeah, she has been for almost five years now." He
paused, "Why do you ask?"
I couldn't help smirking,
"Well, the way you totally brushed her off and lied to her, I thought she
might have been your girlfriend or a mistress or something."
"Well she's—" Just then,
a woman's voice drew near the door. Jerry's eyes got wide, and he opened the
shallow drawer at the middle of his desk, right beneath me. "Shoot,
hide!" He did not wait for me to jump, but swept me in as a hulking form
entered his cubicle. He didn't quite manage to close the drawer all the way
before someone stopped in front of his desk. I could hear their whole
conversation clearly over the rim of the drawer.
"Yes, Miss Werehauser?"
"Who are you talking to,
Jerry?" The voice was the same woman who screamed at him earlier.
"Um," Jerry stammered.
"No one; I mean... myself?"
The woman's voice went from
sticky-sweet to harsh in a moment. "Then why are you talking at all?"
She pounded on the desk as she railed at him. "Why aren't you working? Did
you get those, ah, reports done last night like I told you?" Her voice
weighed heavily on the word, in obvious hint.
I heard Jerry shuffling around in
his briefcase. "Yes, here they are..."
As I waited, I made my way to the
back of the drawer, where the rim did not quite extend to the top. The drawer
was only three inches deep, so I could easily peek over the side. Two bulging
feet stuffed into a pair of severe pumps met my eye. One foot tapped as Miss Werehauser
clucked her tongue. "Oh,
Jerry, you idiot! You entered these amounts wrong! All right, you can just stay
late and enter them again."
"Yes, Miss Werehauser."
The shoes departed, and I scrambled
for the front of the drawer as Jerry opened it. He lifted me onto the desk
again, where a stack of papers lay, filled with columns of numbers and words.
"What was that all
about?" I asked.
In just the few short minutes of
the conversation, Jerry had lost all the excitement in his face. Now he just
looked drained. "Galina Werehauser is my supervisor, the manager of this
firm." He explained, "I'm one of the analysts."
I recalled the way she seemed to
want his compliance with a secret project of some sort. "What does she
want you to do?"
"This." Jerry pointed to
the papers beneath me. I walked up and down the columns. Some numbers, I saw,
were in dollar amounts, while others were in increments of a thousand.
"What do these numbers
mean?"
Jerry sighed and slumped in his
chair. "They're production reports, for the executive board. This is our
expenses and profits, and these are our production records."
I noticed a singular feature of the
records. "How come there are two columns of everything?"
Jerry was becoming more hesitant by
the minute. I wondered what he had to hide. "Galina is one of two senior
managers, but my department handles the business of both branches."
I shrugged, "These numbers
look accurate to me." Not that I could really tell, but none of the
amounts were particularly outlandish. I did see that the other branch seemed to
consistently outperform Galina's office, both in lower expenses, and greater
production and profits.
Jerry nodded, "They are.
Galina wants me to tamper with them, because as long as I do it how she wants
me to, no one will question them. She wants to make herself look better than
Angelica Lindstrom, because the directors are discussing putting this whole
company under sole management."
The whole plan became remarkably
clear to me. "So," I guessed, "tweaking the numbers just
slightly in her favor is not enough to put her beyond Angelica, she wants you
to make Angelica look worse at the same time, so that separately, no one can
notice the difference, but put them together like they are in this
report—"
"Right." Jerry looked as
miserable as a misbehaving dog due for a beating. I was puzzled by his
submissiveness.
"Why can't you let the
directors know?"
The man looked grim. "Because
I am the only one who knows about this; even anonymous hints would let her know
that I spilled." He sat back and ran a hand through his hair in agitation.
"Let me explain this way: people like Galina, we call them
kite-flyers."
By now the reasoning behind this
term was easy for me to grasp. "They pull strings to get what they
want?"
"Exactly, and Galina, well, she
has a lot of strings, so if one is not pulling for her, the way she wants it to
go—"
"She has no problem cutting it
loose." Now I knew the source of his agitation.
Jerry nodded. "Worse than
that," he added, "this particular little project means so much to her
that she would gladly burn me if I so much as failed to swap the numbers to her
satisfaction. I'd be ruined for the rest of my days!" He leaned forward
and dropped his head into his palms.
The poor man was clearly at his
wits' end. I watched him sitting there, completely under the thumb of someone
who did not care the least about him; meanwhile, I could see how Galina’s
domination was probably what kept Jerry at work late, and made him stressed,
which did nothing for his relationship with Cherry. I knew I had to do
something to help him; why else would I be here?
“Jerry,” I whispered, “I can help
you.”
He peeked at me from between his
fingers. “You really think so?” he asked through his palms.
I was growing more confident by the
minute. “Yes, I’m pretty sure I can.”
This brought Jerry up short; he sat
up and stared at me. “But what can you do?” he cried, “you’re only six inches
high!”
I shrugged, “So? Show me what you
have to do, and I can help you with your workload!” At the very least I could
take care of the more menial stuff that he had to do.
Jerry stared at me; I calculated
the likelihood of the fact that, as much as he would rationally like to dismiss
me, he could not ignore the fact that my sudden appearance was nothing short of
miraculous. Besides, what could it hurt? He threw his hands up in surrender.
No comments:
Post a Comment