She had no choice. She didn’t want to do it. Looking back at it now she never would have let herself. But back then her poor kid brain didn’t know any better. They were hurling the rocks! Each time she thought for sure she had dodged the last one, another came whizzing past her head. All she could think to do was make herself a smaller target.
So she shrunk. Shrinking is kind of like the opposite of bearing down with all your might. You have to suck in so hard that your lungs are about to burst and then just when they’re about to, you have to suck them in too. But it worked. Not one thing first, but all at once- keeping her in perfect proportions all the way down. Her legs, her arms, her torso, neck, head, eyes, nose, even her toes. Everything shrunk down to a nearly microscopic size. She was so small they couldn’t even see her- so they ditched the rocks and walked away. Perfect!
Not.
Well now here she was at 23 the size of an ant. Wishing she had made herself bigger instead so that the rocks wouldn’t hurt her in the first place. Because now even though she was small, her brain was big and she could see from way down there that if she were bigger, there would be a lot more she would be able to do. She would be able to get places faster and she would be able to see a lot more clearly. At a centimeter tall she couldn’t even see over the curve of her driveway, out into the world. But she was just a kid back then when she shrunk. And no one had told her how great it was to be bigger, much less how to make yourself bigger.
Getting bigger is exactly like bearing down. In fact it takes even more energy than sucking in to shrink. And it hurts a whole bunch. But if she had done it earlier it would’ve saved her all of that shrinking trouble in the first place.
Well then she was the size of a giant you read about in a fictional fairytale for kids. She walked away shaking the boulders like pebbles on a driveway, thinking she would tell the next little girl she saw that getting bigger saves a whole lot of trouble.
Leave a comment