Petri Dish World

When my sight had recovered from the blinding flash, I say that I was in the middle of a green field. Around me stretched a large park. Surrounding it was the jagged skyline of a big city. And further up, in the sky? There I saw my workshop's ceiling, its shining light bulb serving as a sun to this shrunken land that sat in a Petri dish on my desk, bringing light to the billions who inhabited it—myself now among them. I smiled. My invention had worked perfectly. Bringing my left hand up, I pressed some buttons on a device I was wearing that looked like a digital watch. With it I could send a message back to the machine I'd used to shrink myself, telling it to bring me back to its glass chamber at my normal size. Once I was satisfied that this device was working correctly, I set out to explore the tiny city I was in and study its culture. I spent hours going around, taking in every scrap of information I could. Thankfully, none of these people recognized me as the giant who watched over their world, or who knows what they would have done. I suppose such a different perspective must have made me unrecognizable to them.

As I walked through the streets, all of a sudden I heard a noise that sounded like it came from outside the Petri dish. I looked around, trying to find its source, but with all those skyscrapers around me, I couldn't make anything out. After a while, some TVs nearby lit up with footage of what was happening outside of the city, and what I saw on them made my heart skip a beat: There, on the screens, was my 12 years old brother Henrique, or Henry as we call him. What was he doing there? Wasn't he supposed to be at soccer practice? He was wearing his uniform, but it was as clean as it had been when he'd put it on an hour ago. Practice must have been canceled; that was the only explanation for him being back so early, in this pristine condition. I'd been so sure that he wouldn't be back for another couple hours that I hadn't even bothered to lock the door as usual.

I stood frozen in place, watching Henry along with other people who had gathered around this TV, waiting to see what he would do. The last thing I wanted was to be stuck here while this Petri dish was at his mercy, but I also didn't want to leave this place prematurely and be faced with prying questions about how I had suddenly appeared in the room with him and what all these devices were for. Best to wait and see if he left on his own, I thought. The camera followed him as he wandered around the workshop, thankfully keeping his hands to himself. Then his eyes turned towards us and he started coming closer. An uneasy murmur arose from the crowd, whose alarm grew with her every step. Finally, he stood before us, so close we could finally see him in the sky. His size was beyond comprehension; his head alone was probably the size of Jupiter relative to us microscopic people, and as he looked at us, it felt as if his were the eyes of God, here to pass judgement on us. Panicked, I reached for the band on my wrist and punched in the command to start warming up the resizing chamber. Trembling in fear, I looked at Henry, hoping that he wouldn't mess with the city before I could get back to normal.

Suddenly his hand appeared in the sky, with a finger outstretched and hanging right above us. At its descent, I instinctively ducked and curled up, covering my head, but of course it didn't crash into us; it only tapped on the Petri dish's lid. Still, the sound was deafening, a rumble as of a thousand tons of TNT going off at once, forcing us all to cover our ears, shaking both the earth and the air around us. Boom, boom, boom, it went. When the sound stopped, I ventured to look up and yelled as I saw him taking the lid off. He set it aside, leaving us without protection. When he brought his finger up again, it seemed this time we would really be snuffed out under it, but the finger stopped mid-fall. He turned around and left, disappearing from view. I let out a sigh, thankful that she would be leaving us alone for now.

My relief wouldn't last long, though, as a glance at the TV filled me with abject terror. Henry, I saw, was headed right for the resizing chamber. By then it was almost fully warmed up; the humming noise it was making must have alerted him to it. He stopped to examine it, then he looked down—at the power cables, I realized. I screamed internally as he walked to the power outlet, yelled “Stop!” as he reached for the plug, and almost fainted as he pulled it out, sealing my fate. I reached for the controller on my wrist, ignoring the curious glances from the people around me, and tried some of its buttons to make sure I'd seen it all correctly. The only response was a message saying that the resizing chamber was without power. Until someone plugged it in, which could well take minutes, hours, days, or even years, I would be stuck there with no hope of return. It could even be that it would never be plugged in again, in which case I would spend the rest of my life like this, a microscopic inhabitant of the Petri dish world. And so long as Henry remained in the room, “the rest of my life” could prove to be a very short time indeed.

Henry made his way back to the work desk, but instead of playing with the Petri dish, he sat on my chair and kicked his bare feet up onto the desk, each of them thudding down to either side of the Petri dish, their impact bringing terrifying earthquakes. There they rested, the brown walls of skin dominating our little world's horizon. Far behind them, we saw Henry pull out his phone and start playing around on it, his feet rocking from side to side as he passed the time. I stared agog at his monolithic soles, each of which was big enough to snuff out this world and another like it with a single step. His toes were each somewhere between the Earth and the Moon in size, and it would have spelled doom for billions had they come into the dish. As it turned out, however, his feet didn't even need to touch the dish in order to wreak havoc in it. Already their smell wafted over it, suffusing our entire atmosphere. Dozens around me started gagging as the stench hit them in full force; I myself was about to join in, but I mastered myself and remained standing. Over time, the stench became more bearable, if not more pleasant, as we all grew accustomed to it, yet I, at least, continued feeling heady until it started to dissipate into the rest of my workshop.

But though this discomfort had dissipated, we were soon accosted by more material dangers. Above us, my little brother's feet came together, meeting each other with the back of one against the sole of the other. Rubbing against each other, they brushed off bits of sand and dust which came to rain down on us. Such a little thing, it might sound like, until you realize that each grain of sand was big enough on its own to wipe a city off the map. We looked on in dread, seeing these gigantic meteors fall towards us, always fearing that the next one would kill us all, yet despite the constant thundering and rumbling of distant impacts around that city, the city managed to avoid them all. After this destruction there was a peaceful period in which Henry only sat playing on his phone. Seeing he had settled down, some began to relax. I knew better than that, though. Whatever Henry was playing, wouldn't entertain him for long—no game ever did—but as to what he would do once he grew bored of it, I had no clue.

No more than five minutes after the rain of meteors on us, Henry put his phone aside and looked down at us thoughtfully, idly scrunching and stretching his feet above us. Then he pulled his feet off the table and leaned in, examining us more closely. He came so close that and his breath now reached us, blowing with all the might of a hurricane, knocking many of us to the ground. Holding on to a telephone pole to support myself, I gazed up at him. His face was unreadable. Did he have any clue what was sitting before him in that little dish? Could he know that he held the lives of billions before him? And what would he do if he did? Would he show us mercy, or want to play with us? Sitting up, Henry's monstrous hand reached for us, his titanic fingers pressing against opposite ends of the wall surrounding us. The world started shaking as he lifted us off the table. To his credit, he was very careful with it, but for those of us in his hands, even the slightest jerkiness to his movements was magnified a million-fold, making it impossible to stand without some supporting object. Then his face appeared above us with pupils as pitch black voids staring down at us—voids so black I felt they might consume us all at any moment. He exhibited not the slightest understanding that what he held was anything more than a strange object he'd found in his older brother's workshop. He could destroy us all right then and there and he would never have known that he was responsible for ending the lives of billions. We were nothing to him.

After a while, it seemed he'd satisfied his curiosity, and he was reaching to put us back on the table when disaster struck. The dish slipped from his fingers, and the next thing I knew we were tumbling through the air with everything around me turned to chaos. A second later it smashed against the floor, and all the little world was left scattered around, likely looking to my little brother as nothing more than a pile of sand. When I recovered from my fall, I saw I was in the middle of a vast wasteland where nothing living could be seen. Nothing moved save for me; it seemed I was the only survivor of the cataclysm. As I would discover, this was thanks to a side effect of my shrinking that made me hardier against physical trauma than the other microscopic people. My contemplation of the ruined world was interrupted by the rumble of my little brother's footsteps. Above, his gargantuan figure towered over all creation, looking down on his handiwork with the same face he'd worn after spilling soda on our mother's dress—not at all the face you'd expect to see on someone who'd just snuffed out more people than he could ever count.

He picked up the Petri dish and set it back on the table, then leaned over to look at the remains of the little world. I saw his foot rise above me, its sole becoming my whole sky before crashing down. I survived the impact, much to my disbelief, but anyone else who might have survived the fall could not have survived his sole. Using his foot, Henry swept all the incriminating evidence away, leaving it tucked away in a corner of the workshop where he thought it wouldn't be found. I would have been left in the corner with it too, had not a thin layer of sweat on his foot left me stuck to his sole like a speck of dust. Once he had finished sweeping the debris away, he wiped the sole of that foot against the back of the other, and I was brushed off onto it. There I remained, tucked away in a minuscule wrinkle on his skin, with his foot as my entire world. As he left my workshop, I saw myself forced to cling to him for protection against the dangers of this new microscopic world. At night, I wandered across the plain of his foot, drinking from the vast lakes that sprang from his sweat pores and feasting on bits of dead skin cells, doing my best to stay alive.

THE END