Trapped ( my 3rd and last story )
I had been three inches tall for eleven days when I reached her apartment building.
The city looked different at that size.
Rainwater flooded cracks in the pavement deep enough to drown in. The vibration of distant traffic shook the ground under my feet. Every human voice echoed like thunder through steel and concrete.
But none of that scared me as much as the thought of losing her.
The accident happened inside a quantum compression chamber at the research company where I worked. We were trying to reduce physical mass for long-distance space transport. Something malfunctioned, the building collapsed around me.
To everyone else, I vanished, but I didn’t die, I shrank, still human and alive.
There was only one person outside the lab who knew the truth : Her mother.
I knew she would help me to explain the situation to my girlfriend
By the time I reached the apartment, I could barely walk anymore. Climbing the building had taken hours. Pipes became ladders. Elevator cables looked like suspension bridges.
I finally crawled through a maintenance vent into the laundry room , she was there, my girlfriend’s mother stood near the folding tables, perfectly dressed, calm, composed… gigantic.
At my size, she looked less like a person and more like architecture.
I remember staring up at her heels and realizing one careless step could kill me instantly.
“There you are,” she said quietly.
The fact that she wasn’t surprised terrified me.
I begged for help immediately. I told her I needed to contact her daughter.She listened patiently. Then she said the words that destroyed me as she crouched in front of me
“I told her you disappeared,”
“You lied to her.”
“I protected her.”
I’ll never forget how cold her expression became after that.
“You expect my daughter to waste her life with someone trapped in a body smaller than a toy?”
She saw the hesitation in my face and smiled.
That was when the glass came down over me.
One second I was standing free on the floor.The next I was trapped beneath smooth transparent walls while a heavy book sealed the top. I screamed. Hit the glass. Begged.
She simply stood and looked down at me.
“You’ll stay here for now,” she said.
That “for now” became my life.
At first she kept me inside containers.
A vase.
Storage boxes.
Plastic enclosures with tiny air holes.
Eventually she built something permanent behind a false wall inside her private study: a hidden miniature prison no larger than a dollhouse room.
Tiny furniture.
Tiny utensils.
Tiny blankets.
None of it was kindness.
A well-kept pet still lives in a cage.
She fed me. Spoke to me occasionally. Sometimes she acted almost gentle, but she never let me leave nor contact her daughter.
Meanwhile, downstairs, life continued without me. I could witness everything.
Sometimes I would hear them talking while I pounded helplessly against the hidden wall inches away, but my girlfriend never heard me.
No matter how hard I screamed.
Months later, another man started visiting the apartment. The first time I saw him, I watched through a narrow crack in the cabinet door.
He was tall, confident, successful. The kind of man mothers approve instantly.
Normal. That word started haunting me.
Normal height.
Normal life.
Normal future.
Everything I could no longer give her.
At first she resisted him.
I could tell.
Her smiles looked forced.
Her body language stiff.
But grief exhausts people eventually. Loneliness wears them down.
And her mother never stopped pushing.
Dinner invitations became regular visits.
Regular visits became late nights.
Late nights became intimacy.
I witnessed all of it from hiding.
That was the cruelest part of my imprisonment.
Not hunger.
Not fear.
Not the humiliation of being tiny.
It was watching the woman I loved slowly rebuild her life while believing I had willingly abandoned her.
Sometimes I hated her mother.
Sometimes I hated the man.
But eventually I began hating myself most of all.
Because part of me understood.
What kind of future could she possibly have with me now? A burden.
Still, I never stopped trying to escape.
When you’re small, survival becomes observation.I studied everything.
The timing of footsteps.
The vibrations of doors opening.
The paths of cleaning drones.
The locking mechanism on my enclosure.
I learned how to climb curtains. How to move silently through heating vents. How to survive unnoticed in the walls of a giant world.
And after nearly a year trapped inside that apartment, I finally found an opportunity.
Her mother left during a thunderstorm.
My girlfriend entered the study alone looking for old photographs.
And the cabinet door didn’t close completely.
Just a tiny gap.
For her, meaningless.For me, freedom.
I squeezed through immediately and ran across the desk.
The surface stretched around me like a wooden desert. Above me towered the silhouette of the woman I still loved.
I screamed her name over and over.
But my voice was microscopic compared to the storm outside.
So I climbed up a hanging cable onto the desk lamp.
Then I screamed again with everything I had left. This time she paused.
Slowly… she turned toward the sound.
Her eyes narrowed and finally, after almost a year of imprisonment, she saw me standing there.
Tiny.
Terrified.
Alive.