You squint your eyes, recovering from the momentary white flash of light, taking in the sight of the vast, open expanse surrounding you. A second ago, you were standing in your fenced-in backyard surrounded by green grass and bushes and getting ready to mow the lawn. That’s all disappeared, though, and now you find yourself in unfamiliar surroundings.
As you move to turn to the side, you shift your footing. Stepping down, the ground softly crumbles and before you can react, you hear and feel a very real *crunch* under your sneaker, signaling that you obviously destroyed something. Cursing quietly to yourself, you look downward. Unfamiliar plumes of dust emerge from all sides of your rubber treads and over a striated and very gravelly-looking surface. Without thinking, you instinctively recoil and take a couple steps backwards, resulting in two additional brittle crunches beneath your feet. After freezing in place and cursing to yourself again, you regain your composure and scan the ground. What the hell are you standing on?! You look down to your feet.
Inch-high layers of dust again emanate from your feet. Squinting, you see something tiny and obscured slowly zipping away from the dirtied, white rubber wall of one sneaker and assume it be an insect. Being the type of guy who in general steps on bugs instead of around them, you reflexively raise just the front half of your foot and hover the toe of your sneaker over it curiously for a moment, then lower. A barely audible crunch is felt as the soft earth is pushed downward. Removing your foot from the now indented ground, you see that whatever you just obliterated doesn’t quite resemble any insect. You bend your knees and crouch down to the earth. A dirtied, black rectangular crumpled object, less than a centimeter in length, lays still within your dusty, grooved tread-print, amid other barely perceptible debris pressed into the earth. You reach your finger down and gently peel the flattened object from the ground with your nail. Pinching the crumpled object with your two fingers and holding it up to your face, you can feel it is metal. Tiny pieces fall off in response to the pressure of your fingertips and your eyes widen in shock as you make out the all too familiar details of what is a tiny car, crushed flat under the weight of your shoe. “What the hell?” you mutter, still crouching down.
You place the remains of the toy-sized vehicle into your other palm and again look back down at your footprint. Your heart almost skips a beat. Studying the details of the other flattened debris you dismissed as pieces of gravel and moss, you realize that below is an entire landscape in miniature. With your free hand, you reach into the pocket of your shorts and pull out your phone and turn on the camera to full zoom, in order better appreciate the details. Awestruck, you realize that the tiny patches of what seemed like moss are actually tiny trees, splintered and flattened. What you thought were tiny rocks are the remains of tiny buildings, flattened with their roofs pressing into the earth. The setting seems to be miniature farmland. You wonder if you’ve stumbled upon an intricate and detailed model someone built, and now have accidentally destroyed. As you ponder this, you see movement on the screen of your phone. You bring your phone closer and to your amazement, see a human-like figure looking up at your phone as he sprints through a field of crops. Your eyes widen further as you take in the stunning realization: there are *people* down there.
Pocketing your phone, you look down at your two feet and realize they are everywhere. The many faint specks that have been present but, without you specifically trying to discern them, you have been overlooking this entire time. An entire race of people, smaller even than ants, to whom you are an absolute giant. This is going to be one hell of a day, you realize.
View Portfolio
Visit Notebook
Send Gift Points
Awards
Badges
Send Email
Community Newsfeed
General Discussion
Sponsored Items
Book of Trinkets
Static Items
Books
Groups
Interactive Stories
Audio
Campfire Creatives
Community Notes
Crossword Puzzles
Documents
Folders
Images
In & Outs
Madlibs
Photo Albums
Polls
Product Reviews
Quizzes
Survey Forms
Web Pages
Word Searches
More by this author