We’ve got fiction coming your way from the writer (and contributing Issue 9 poet!) Jonathan Louis Duckworth.
Caleb Mooney is still happy with his choice to shrink. He has a good deal with St-Andrew’s—free room and board and all the communion wafers he can nibble on, and all he had to do was plumb the pipes of the church organ for blockages. Being two inches tall has its advantages. Caleb can’t remember a mattress as soft and comfortable as the strip of velvet that coats the priest’s lectern, a single crumb sustains him for a day, and thanks to the miracle of surface tension, a drop of Eucharist wine on the church floor becomes a perfect globe of party juice.
Caleb was once a law clerk, but then the economy turned to shit and his firm downsized. He spent a few months looking for another job, but nothing came up. He first got the idea to shrink when he read something about crayfish—how they were once lobsters who wandered into estuaries and rivers and had to shrink into what they are now to adjust to their new reality and food supply. That seemed a good idea to Caleb. He figured if arthropods could manage it, then so could people.
None of his friends supported his decision to shrink. Neither did his family.
“If you wanted my attention, you could have just become a Muslim,” his mother told him the last time she visited him when he was still a foot and a half tall.
His girlfriend tried to be supportive at first, but as he got smaller and smaller, they found it impossible to share a bed, as the risk of her rolling over and crushing him in her sleep became too great. The lack of physical intimacy, and all the complications of living with a tiny person (they had to keep the air conditioning off during the hot summer, lest he be swept up and tossed around by hurricane-like winds), mounted until the day she snapped and asked how much longer he was going to be in this “shrinking phase” of his. Caleb understood then that she didn’t appreciate his sensible decision, and that she likely never would. Caleb moved out before she could get the idea to evict him.
The first few nights on the big streets were horrible with the gangs of cockroaches, and the flash floods caused by even the lightest of drizzles. So traumatic was this initial experience that he even started to wonder if shrinking had been a mistake. And then he found the church and got his sweet little deal with the deacon.
Still, there are dangers even in the church. The silverfish are everywhere, constantly feeling around with their antennae. He doesn’t want to find out if they’re capable of harming him, so he kills them on sight, spearing them with a sharpened toothpick. Often he has nightmares of the morning he spotted a wolf spider navigating the organ keys. The sight of the hairy beast, with its fat body and the glossy set of black doll’s eyes, so terrified him that he climbed up to the top of the highest pipe and hid there for hours until the deacon trapped the spider in a glass. Worse than any spider is his fear that one day he’ll be cleaning a pipe and some mischievous kid will start wailing on the organ’s keys, and the pressurized air will turn Caleb’s internal organs to jelly.
Lately these perils, combined with the steadily improving job market, suggest it might be time to get big again. He ponders growing at least once a day.
But then Caleb also considers that a presidential election is coming, and the wrong guy might get into the oval office to drive the economy into another dumpster fire. What if the jobs start evaporating again? What if other unemployed people hit on Caleb’s idea and start shrinking to adjust to their new reality? If that happens, Caleb wants to have a head start on them. So for now, just to be safe, he’ll stay small. Just for a few more months. A year tops. Until the forecast is clear again. Until the world has room once more for Caleb Mooney.
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Jonathan Louis Duckworth is an MFA student at Florida International University, where he serves as a reader and copy-editor for the Gulf Stream Magazine. His fiction and poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in New Ohio Review, Fourteen Hills, Literary Orphans, Lunch Ticket, Cha, Off the Coast, and elsewhere. Find him online.
YOU! AN ARTIST! A TRUE CREATOR! WE SAW YOU IN THE SUBMISSION MANAGER LOOKING ALL FIERCE! AND DON’T EVEN GET US STARTED ON THAT SYNTAX, WOW! MAYBE YOU REMEMBER US? WHITE CUP WITH THE LETTERS ‘D” AND “C”– WE LOVE YOU. LET US PUBLISH YOU! LET US BRING YOUR WORK INTO THE WORLD!
*Image Credit: Recursive Steve by Eugenia Loli*
Dirty Chai 