Chapter 1: The reunion Shrinkism: Stature and transition chapter 1 by Anon_TitleNotation

STEP

 

Tuesday, 6 p.m. — Community Resource Center, West Side Chicago

 

Someone is talking about their mother.

 

Which I stopped tracking, which one around the third sentence, since they all start the same way: “Oh my mother said that out loud, my sister grabbed me, my father doesn’t understand how it is….” and they all arrive at the same place eventually, on the occasion where they don’t get crushed/eaten/worse, which is here, inside a plywood box with no ceiling, sitting in a folding chair the size of a matchbook, listening to someone else’s grief echo off walls that smell like primer and unfinished things.

 

The box is mine too, technically, during Tuesday nights usually belongs to STEP, which is short for: “Stature and Transition Evaluation Program”, that usually operates when we at least have the minimum of 10 people, which surprisingly, was not always, for the rest of the week, the whole room belongs to whoever else the city decided needed a corner to whimp together.

 

Gerald is crying, again, not loudly, Gerald never does anything loudly, I at least never heard him, which is either a symptom or a survival strategy that I’ve never figured out which. He sits two chairs to my left, soft and damp as bread left near a sink.

 

The smell comes off him in something close to waves, old food, fabric that hasn’t dried properly, something that was probably sweet a long time ago that I don’t want to identify, being worse when he is double the size of most people here, both horizontally and vertically. Well that’s a life of someone when the “handler”(which is a polite way the government named the people that “tutor” the shrunken just to not name them owners), decides to give uncontrollably all the leftover food, and all sweets it can to it and ta-daa you have a shrinkie soft stress ball.

 

I breathe through my mouth and watch across the circle the facilitator, Ray, with the white hair at the sides of his hair and beard. You could see that he’s been small for longer than most of us have had opinions about anything or more than anyone I knew that shrank. I watch Ray nod with the particular patience of someone who has already heard every version of this story.

 

And he has, that’s the thing about Ray. He heard all of them, from people with sisters, brothers, mothers, fathers, friends, and whatever else problems. He heard about it and still was capable of giving those people a heartfelt look and compassionate words. Which if I was in his place, I couldn’t even have the minimum patience to hear by the 100th time how this guy’s mom almost unawares crushed him when she arrived home.

 

Above us, just past the open lip of the box, his wife, a normal person, with the type of face of someone that teaches kids good manners or goes to distribute food at the homeless center, sits in a chair she dragged over from the AA corner. She’s on her phone, as the blue light of it sits over us like a second ceiling, softer than the fluorescents overhead.

 

Occasionally, Ray will say her name, Carol, as it would buzz at her earpiece, and she’ll lean forward, her face descending into our sky, enormous and unalarmed. And they’ll say something brief and domestic to each other, the kind of shorthand that only comes from years, saying that love is above all. It doesn’t see size, only intentions and everything else to show how their life is good. Then she’ll sit back and return to her scrolling, and Ray will return to whoever is crying.

 

I literally watched this every week. I could say that this is a live show drama that I can’t stop watching.

 

The person that is talking about their mother is Dani, eighteen, 2 inches tall, shrunk when she was fourteen. She talks the exact way people do when they’re not entirely sure they have anything to say but think the silence is worse than anything. Her hands move in   exaggerated expressions when someone tells a story that makes her feel outraged; she laughs at the wrong moments; she has not yet figured out that the story she’s telling: my mother worries, my mother hovers, my mother treats me like I’m going to break is not actually a complaint; she thinks it’s a problem; she doesn’t know it’s a lifeline. I know that probably half of the people here would literally kill to have an opportunity like hers, having someone that actually cares for her, that checks every moment if she’s safe or if she ate well.

 

I don’t tell her; that’s not what I’m here for, and nor am I paid to help her figure it out. What am I here for? I couldn’t say exactly.

 

I return every Tuesday and sit with my back against the wall, and I watch and I file things away and I breathe through my mouth when Gerald is downwind of me, and sometimes Ray looks at me with the specific expression of someone who is waiting, patiently, for a wall to develop a door.

 

I have not developed a door.

 

As I walk a bit outside the box, eating some sweets from the coffee table, I look through the gap where our entrance ramp meets the floor. I can see the thin strip of the larger room, scuffed linoleum, a folding table with a coffee urn that isn’t for us, a flyer for the Thursday grief group, half-peeled from the corkboard, dangling.

 

The building hums its specific hum, old pipes, bad insulation, the weight of all the things people bring here and don’t take home.

 

Tuesday, six p.m., the city’s smallest support group, in a plywood box in the corner of a room that belongs to everyone and therefore no one, the coffee getting cold on a table we can’t reach, Carol’s phone light drifting down over us like something almost warm.

 

Dani is still talking.

 

Gerald is still crying.

 

Ray is still nodding.

 

I sit with my back against the wall and I breathe through my mouth and I think about nothing at all.

 

 

Someone new is talking now.

 

Jenny, as she shows herself, on her second meeting, maybe third, for me, most of the ones who make it to a second meeting blur together until they don’t, until suddenly they’ve been here six months and you know their coffee order and the specific way they hold their shoulders when they’re lying.

 

She hasn’t earned a name in my memory yet, she’s a face and a voice and a story that Ray is currently nodding her through with the patient expression of a man who knows that the only thing standing between someone and their worst memory is the sound of another person breathing nearby.

 

“It’s good to release it,” Ray says.

 

His voice remaining calm and warm, as it is the same every week, and with everyone, unhurried, no gravel in it, no performance, just a man who has been small long enough to know that the pressure of an unspoken thing is its own kind of weight.

 

She releases it.

 

I get up.

 

Not because I don’t want to hear it, or because I despise the same story that I already heard from 4 or 8 other people with just different characters, I get up because the drinks table is across the box and my cup is empty, I get up because I have learned, over many Tuesdays, that motion is a reasonable substitute for feeling, and because I’m not particularly drawn to hear about how going to the last prom at school being a shrinkie, extraordinary gone wrong.

 

The table is a low shelf Ray built himself, plywood sanded smooth, cups the size of thimbles, a thermos of coffee that Carol refills when she remembers. There’s juice, soda in a bottle with a modified pour spout that Dani uses exclusively and calls the spigot like she invented it, some sweet crumbs and snacks.

 

The girl is still talking behind me, the way she says it m, “we got drunk” carries the specific nostalgia of someone describing a country they’ve been deported from, as she still talked.

 

I pour coffee, sip it, well, not that cold, but far from actually hot.

 

“My fucking friend swallowed me!”

 

The box goes quiet in the way it only does when someone says the true thing, not the approaching-the-true-thing, the actual thing itself, with the only sound being a hum from the light and she sobbing, trying to hold back her tears.

 

I look back a bit, surprised by what happened and the outcome, seeing she fully intact and not with burnt skin os missing arms feels like almost a lie, with her replying that her friend didn’t know, like the not-knowing is either the only thing that makes it bearable or the thing that makes it worse, and she hasn’t decided which yet.

 

A shrinkie at a prom is practically invisible on a good day, some would call a celebration, like having tiny shots at your 21st birthday. She thought she was going to die, like that in the belly of her childhood friend and then: vomited, just the ordinary mechanics of too much alcohol and she came back up with it, gasping, and crawled out until she got the attention of someone else who called her parents and got her home, crying and thinking and she almost died in the stomach of her best friend who would have cried for weeks if she’d known.

 

She probably doesn’t know still.

 

I stand at the drinks table and turn back looking at what sets could have actual sweet face and not so crumb face.

 

“She okay,” a familiar voice says aside me.

 

As I turn and see her.

 

Safiya, she is small the way architecture is small, not diminished, just precise. Two inches, same as me, same as most of us who’ve been at this long enough to reach the floor. Her dark blue hijab, pinned at the side with what I once identified, after considerable squinting, as a sliver of a safety pin bent back on itself. It shouldn’t work, but it works perfectly.

 

She has that kind of stillness that reads as calm until you’ve been around her long enough to understand its concentration. For her, English is a second country she’s still learning the roads of, and she navigates it carefully, like someone who knows that the wrong turn costs more than time.

 

She’s looking past me at the girl. There’s something in her face that isn’t pity, nor ignorance or contempt. It’s something that I don’t have a word for yet.

 

“Is she okay? Is that what you meant?” I say, because I’m not sure if that’s what she meant.

 

“Yes. Dis.” She touches her own sternum, lightly. “Dis is how it comes out. You say it, it comes out.”

 

“Does it?” *as I smile at her*. “Or Dis it?”

 

She considers this with the seriousness she applies to most things and looks at the table to see what was in it. “For some people. Yes.”  “Your training for a comedy career is noteworthy.”

 

I pour a second cup and hold it toward her. She takes it with both hands, which I’ve noticed she always does, like the cup is worth the care.

 

“Long day at school today?” she asks.

 

“Kind of. Two of my class went ‘missing’ today. Their parents were quite noisy and angry. Can’t say that I wouldn’t be, like, having a shrinkie son. It’s hard.”

 

As I grab some snacks from the table that seemed to be tastier and eat them, savoring, as I notice she’s looking and pointing at them and my mouth.

 

“It helps you?”

 

I look at the coffee and at the sweets. “Well, I keep coming back.”

 

She makes a small sound that might be a laugh, or agreement, or both. “Yes,” she says. “Dis is also an answer.”

 

We stand there for a moment, the two of us at the drinks table. The girl’s voice still moves through the box behind us, Ray’s quiet affirmations landing between her sentences like hands steadying a ladder.

 

Safiya moves back toward the circle before I do. She settles into her chair with the same unhurried care she does everything, and then, after a moment, the way you check something without meaning to, she looks at Ray.

 

She raises her hand.

 

“Safiya,” he says.

 

She stands. She doesn’t look at the group, not at first. She looks at the middle distance the way people do when they’re translating not just language but the entire architecture of an experience into something that will survive the crossing.

 

“I am not good at telling,” she begins. “So I tell slowly.”

 

No one there moves, but I notice above that Carol pulls away her phone and leans in, as if eager to hear what’s going to be told.

 

“I was a biomedical student on a scholarship.” She says the word carefully, like it still means something, like it hasn’t been buried under everything that came after.

 

“I was, I am, a good student. I came here very far from home to be a good student.”

 

Then she pauses, looking down at her hands.

 

“It started during a… field research, I was getting samples at a week in ze woods.”

 

“I started noticing things, getting smaller, clothes shorter. I knew it was Taqala, Shrinkism was there, so I rushed back ze best I could, but I was far, so far from the city.”

 

The box is very quiet.

 

“By ze time I got to anything of help, I was half my size. I rushed to a hotel to think, and by ze next day I was , small, small so not even to reach the door handle.”

 

“So I stayed there, for two days, till the owner came back, and saw me. I was at her knee, so she just tossed me out, as trash, just for another client to occupy the room.”

 

“I walked for a while, looking for help, then… “someone came,” Ray says. Not a question.

 

“A cleaning person walking down the street.” She nods, breathing a bit, as if to wash away her heavy accent. “She saw me, but she took me, she took me to people who help.”

 

She finds Carol then, above the lip of the box, looking down at them. As if she sensed it, and maybe she did, maybe this is also something practiced between them.

 

“Carol found me this work. I clean, I clean inside computers. The servers.” She seems to find something almost funny in this, a small private joke with herself. “I am very small. Very useful inside a machine.”

 

Quiet laughter moves through the circle, the good kind, the kind that isn’t at anyone.

 

“It is not what I study for,” Safiya says, and the laughter settles. “But I have money. I have support, I have people.” She glances at me. Just for a moment. Just long enough.

 

“I keep going. This is what I do. I keep going.”

 

She sits.

 

The applause in a box this size sounds like a brief rain on a small roof. Ray is smiling, not the professional smile, the other one, the one that costs him something. Carol is looking down at him with the easy warmth of someone watching a person they know very well do a thing they’re very good at.

 

I put my hands together, as I keep them together longer than necessary.

 

 

After Safiya, there are others.

 

There always are.

 

A boy, seventeen, maybe, the kind of face that still carries its former height in the jaw, talks about his father’s truck, how he used to ride in the cup holder because it was the only place his father could keep eyes on him during driving, and how one Tuesday the truck made a sharp turn and the cup holder wasn’t built for this specific kind of cargo, and he didn’t finish the story, just stopped and shrugged and said “but I’m here” like that was the ending, and maybe it was.

 

A woman in her twenties whose name I keep almost catching, Marcia something, talks about the medication she can’t get anymore because the pharmacy switched suppliers, and the new capsules are the size of a small car to her, and splitting the dosage requires tools she doesn’t have and precision she can’t always manage on bad days.

 

Dani talks again because Dani always talks again. This time about a teacher at her school who keeps forgetting she’s there and once almost sat on her folder, she tells it like it’s funny, laughs in all the right places.

 

I watch her hands and think about the ticking clock and keep my mouth shut.

 

Gerald doesn’t talk. Gerald is here, which is what Gerald can offer tonight, and Ray accepts it like it’s plenty.

 

Eventually, Ray stands.

 

He doesn’t clear his throat. He doesn’t raise his voice. He just, stands, and the box orients toward him the way small things orient toward the steadiest available point.

 

“I’m going to say what I say every week,” he begins, “because it needs saying every week.”

 

He looks around the circle. Not quickly. He takes his time, which is the whole point, which is the thing about Ray that I cannot name and cannot dismiss, he looks at you like you’re a thing worth the time it takes to look at.

 

“You came here,” he says. “Whatever it took to get here, the bus, the arrangements, the particular kind of courage it takes to sit in a room and say the true thing out loud you did that. You do it every week.”

 

He pauses. Above us, Carol has set her phone face-down on her knee.

 

“The world outside this box is not built for you, and neither me. That’s not an opinion. That’s a fact, and pretending otherwise is a waste of the energy you need for actual living.” He says this without bitterness, which is the hardest possible way to say it.

 

“But you’re living anyway. That’s not nothing. That’s actually the whole thing.”

 

He looks at Safiya for a moment. Then at the boy who talked about the cup holder. Then, briefly, at me.

 

“Same time next Tuesday,” he says. “Go home safe.”

 

The circle finally start to break, People move toward the ramp, toward the thin strip of linoleum and the larger world beyond it, toward whatever arrangement of safety or precarity they’re returning to.

 

As others stay I see their parents/friends come a pick them, as I specially see Dani’s mom getting her and then Gerald.

 

I stay by the drinks table and pour the last of the coffee even though it’s gone cold.

 

Above the box, Ray and Carol are talking.

 

She’s put her phone in her bag while describing something with his hands, some small gesture, some detail from the session and she’s listening with her chin resting on her folded arms, her enormous face close, careful, looking at him the way I have spent considerable effort not analyzing.

 

I drink the cold coffee, as I look at the door, seeing Safiya waiting for me there.

 

 

The bus stop is a pole with a button the size of an aspirin and a sign that says DIMINISHED SIGNAL in letters I could read if I stood on my tiptoes and squinted. The paint is chipped, since city budget for dignity ran out of the inclusive program in 2019.

 

The bus arrives, aside the fact of it having a tiny entrance for likes of us, it’s not a special bus. Just a normal bus that smells like diesel and depression and fifty people who stopped believing in deodorant when they stopped believing in the future. No one looks down, and probably if they did they don’t cared about us.

 

We board through the gap in the floor panel, technically against ADA regulations, but shrinkies aren't technically people, so the math works out, the air inside is hot and close and tastes like rubber.

 

The shrinkie seats were under Chair 4B, Unmarked on any sign, You learn it the way you learn which alleys have rats and which have crushers: by surviving long enough to pass it on. Adapted plastic seats bolted to the underside, padded with foam that's absorbed twelve years of commuter sweat and fear.

 

Safiya seats in first. The space is tight, dark, smells like the inside of a shoe, which is fitting, because directly in front of us usually there is a foot, but none by now.

 

As she then turns her head to me as if to say something.

 

"New word," she says. "Pun gent."

 

"Pungent. Means smells like death but fancy."

 

"Pungent," she repeats, tasting it. "Like Gerald."

 

"Exactly, like Gerald."

 

As we were there for some time, the bust stopped as some passangers moved in, then we saw someone coming, a woman headed to the 4B, wearing Nike Air Monarchs, white with gray swoosh, size 9, the official footwear of people who have given up on being interesting. Her socks are ankle-length, gray, slightly damp. As she sits, we could tell that she was recently at the gym, because her both shoes where at least, from our perspective, 3 meters away from us, so I could quite literally see each stain on her shoe sides.

 

That close, if I wanted, I could get up and reach out and touch the tread. I could count the grooves where Chicago street grime has compressed into black paste.

 

"Pungent," Safiya whispers, covers her nose with her hijab, probably due her faint sweat odor.

 

I don't cover mine. I've learned to breathe through my mouth, a skill you acquire around the same time you learn to sleep through car alarms and crying neighbors.

 

The smell is a living thing: ammonia and cotton decay and the sweet fungal undertone of feet that have walked somewhere they didn't want to go. Of a body carrying resentment in its pores.

 

"New word," I say. "Olfactory assault."

 

"Olfactory. Assault."

 

"You're a quick study."

 

She smiles, small and private, and I feel something in my chest that I file under DO NOT EXAMINE. The bus lurches. The shoe rocks, a pendulum of rubber and sweat. I watch the gray sock shift, bunching and smoothing like the breathing of a small diseased animal.

 

Then the woman moves.

 

Not much. A stretch. Her right foot slides half-out of the sneaker, heel popping free, arch exposed, as if the sneaker was too tight, we hear a slight low moan as she pull it out halfway. The smell intensifies, a wave of concentrated foot-odor that hits like a physical blow. Safiya makes a sound in her throat, presses her face into her hijab until only her eyes show.

 

I do not move. I am cataloging. I catalog the smell: vinegar, cheese, despair. I catalog the sock: pilled, thinning at the heel, a small hole near the pinky toe visible from here. I catalog the calf muscle: toned, slightly flushed, a surgical scar above the ankle. I catalog because feeling is expensive and I am running out of currency.

 

"Pungent," Safiya says again, muffled, and I almost laugh.

 

Then I see it, a hand.

 

The hand emerges from the shoe's opening like birth in reverse. Small. Dirty. Four fingers and a thumb, nails black with grime, skin grayish-pink from prolonged darkness and worse company. It grips the sneaker's rim and pulls, and a head follows.

 

Male. Maybe nineteen, maybe thirty, hard to tell when someone's been reduced to a survival object. Hair matted into dreadlocks of dirt and oil. Eyes red-rimmed, swollen, whites yellowed. Naked except for a fabric strip around his waist that might once have been a something.

 

He sees us.

 

His mouth opens. Cracked lips, a dry tongue. He tries to speak but the bus engine is loud and the wind from the open window is louder and his voice is a thread, a whisper, a nothing.

 

"Help..." The word shapes his lips more than it reaches our ears. "...me..."

 

I do not move. Safiya does not move. We are frozen in the way of small things when the hawk passes overhead, when the shadow falls, when the world reminds you that your entire existence is a courtesy extended by larger forces that can revoke it at any moment.

 

The woman feels the motion. Not sees, feels. The subtle shift of weight as her cargo tries to escape. As we hear she speaking,  her tone is not cruel, It is annoyed, the tone of someone who dropped their keys and has to bend to pick them up.

 

"Nah-ah," she says, her voice a bass rumble that vibrates in my teeth. "Back inside, itty-bitty."

 

Her foot descends back, not fast, not violent, just… inevitable, the way gravity is inevitable, the way the tide is inevitable. The sole of the Nike Air Monarch fills the shoe's opening, and the shrinkie, “itty-bitty”, asshe called him, like a pet hamster or phone charm, disappears beneath it, as I could hear the sound: a soft wet thump, a muffled cry that dying instantly, the slide of fabric as she adjusts her foot, settling him back into place.

 

After that she stands, the bus stops, the doors open with their pneumatic wheeze.

 

"Have a good one," the driver says, automatic, meaningless.

 

"Thanks, you too," she says, automatic, meaningless.

 

I see in the distance as she steps off, the bus pulls away, through the gap in the floor panel, I watch her walk down the sidewalk, the Nike Air Monarchs making their steady thump-thump-thump against concrete, and I wonder if he's still alive in there, If he's conscious, If he's counting her steps, measuring his life in blocks and intersections, waiting for the moment she sits down and the pressure redistributes and he can breathe again.

 

Or if he's already dead, already a smear of organic matter between her insole and her sock, and she won't discover him until tonight when she kicks off her shoes in front of the TV and finds a red stain she could just wash rubbing a soap or product at it.

 

"L-Lu…," Safiya says.

 

Her grip is on my arm, Her fingers tremble, a fine vibration I feel through my shirt, she's gripping me the way she grips her bus pass, her coffee cups, but now, sting the Maximus strength she had, as if I was her only hope: with both hands, with everything she has, because the alternative is letting go.

 

"He..." She stops. "He was..."

 

"He was in her shoe," I say. My voice is flat. Correct. The voice of someone reading a weather report or stock ticker. "He was her…  Whatever word makes it easier."

 

"We could not... we did not..."

 

"We couldn't have done anything." I say this the way I've said it a hundred times before, the way I'll say it a hundred times again. The way you say I'm fine or it doesn't matter or I don't need anything, the lie that keeps the machine running. "She was normal-sized, we are two inches tall, it’s not our fault."

 

Safiya looks at me. Her eyes are very dark, very large in her small face, and there is something in them I cannot name, not accusation, not acceptance, something worse, something that looks like a cruel and soul crushing, understanding.

 

The bus stops again, the shrinkie seats sway. Above us, a new passenger sits in 4B, a man in dress shoes that smell of leather polish and the dry clean scent of an office job, the contrast could be called as almost offensive.

 

We ride in silence.

 

At our stop, we disembark through the gap in the floor panel, the sidewalk is cracked, weeds growing in the fissures like green fractures. The streetlight flickers, a strobe that turns the world into still images: Safiya stepping onto concrete. Safiya turning to look at me, her hand, still on my arm, finally letting go.

 

"I am..." she begins, then stops. She looks down at her feet, at the tiny shadow she casts under the streetlight, at the vast expanse of sidewalk that separates her from her building's entrance. "I am..."

 

"You're home," I say, pointing to the apartment complex two doors down. Shrinkie-adapted. Tiny entrance in the foundation, a ladder leading up to a unit the size of a storage closet. She has a window facing an air shaft. She has a prayer rug the size of a washcloth. She has a life, which is more than that poor guy in the Nike Air Monarch can say.

 

"Yes," she says, but she doesn't move, I then, out of pity, walk her to her door. The ladder is metal, cold, rungs spaced for normal-sized feet and therefore a challenge for ours, but we have adapted ladders for us at the side, she climbs with the careful precision she applies to everything.

 

At the top, she turns.

 

"Luke," she says.

 

"Safiya."

 

"Zis world..." She pauses, finding the words, or finding the courage to say them. "Zis world is not... pungent. Zis world is..."

 

She stops, shakes her head, offers a small exhausted smile that doesn't reach her eyes.

 

"Goodnight, Luke."

 

"Goodnight, Safiya."

 

The door closes, the lock clicks, a sound like a bone snapping.

 

I stand on the sidewalk for a long moment, looking up at her window. The light comes on, a small yellow square in the dark, and I imagine her inside: removing her hijab, pinning it carefully, facing a direction she can only guess is east, murmuring words I don't understand in a language that must feel like another country now, another life, another version of herself that didn't end up two inches tall in a city that doesn't know her name.

 

I turn and walk home.

 

My building is identical to hers in every way that matters: small, forgotten, an afterthought in the architecture of indifference, I climb my own ladder, enter my own door, lock my own lock, not that a lot of people could get in, but who knows?

 

In a normal scale, adapted for me, you could say that the apartment is four feet by six feet. A bed that is a folded blanket on a wooden pallet. A sink the size of a cereal bowl. A hot plate that runs on a battery I replace every two weeks. On the wall, a calendar from three years ago, the month of March, days crossed off with red pen until the day I shrank, which is circled, which is the last day I was real.

 

I sit on my bed.

 

I then take out my phone, a adapted-sized smartphone, by buying one adapted for my I spend 3 months of my salary on it. The screen is cracked in the corner where I dropped it last month, when I jumped to avoid getting crushed by an unaware person at the street.

 

The wallpaper is a photo of me at twenty, standing in front of Harvard Yard, holding an acceptance letter that could be considered as larger than my entire body.

 

I open the app.

 

It doesn't have a clever name. The developers called it Scale, which is the kind of pun that makes you want to drink bleach. The interface is clean, minimalist, the kind of design that says we're not judging you while absolutely judging you.

 

I scroll.

 

The profiles are a taxonomy of damage. Normal-sized women looking for pets. Normal-sized men looking for toys. Shrinkies offering companionship in exchange for protection, housing, the basic dignity of not being stepped on, some profiles have photos, some don't. The ones that do show faces trying to look brave, or seductive, or simply human, despite the scale.

 

I don't have a photo on my profile. Just text: 2 inches. Former academic. Discreet. The word discreet is the lie that covers all the other lies.

 

I scroll past the offers, past the pleas, past the photos of giantesses in lingerie, faces cropped out, bodies looming like architecture, like mountains, like gods.

 

I stop on a video.

 

She is blonde, she is smiling, she is holding a shrinkie in her palm, stroking his back with a thumb larger than his torso, the guy is hard, I can see it, the tiny erection, the way he arches into her touch like a cat, like a thing, she brings him to her mouth, not to eat, to kiss.

 

Her lips close around his entire upper body, and he moans, a sound barely audible but perfectly clear, the sound of someone who has found the exact shape of their surrender.

 

I watch it twice.

 

Then I close the app and lie on my bed and stare at the ceiling, which is water-stained plaster that looks like a map of a country that no longer exists.

 

I think about Safiya's hand on my arm, I think about the trembling, I think about the understanding in her eyes, and I wonder what she understood that I don't.

 

I think about the shrinkie in the shoe, Itty-bitty, I wonder if he's still alive, I wonder if he's counting steps, I wonder if he's praying, or if he stopped praying the moment he realized no one was listening.

 

I think about Gerald, soft and damp, smelling of old food and worse hope, I think about Dani, laughing at the wrong moments, her mother's love a lifeline she mistakes for a leash, I think about Ray, nodding through stories he's heard a hundred times, waiting for walls to develop doors.

 

I think about Harvard Yard, the acceptance letter, the future that was going to be mine, that was going to be real, that was going to be normal.

 

I touch myself.

 

It doesn't take long, the shame is a familiar weight, a second gravity that pulls me down into the mattress, into the dark, into the place where I am not Luke the teacher or Luke the survivor or Luke the friend of Safiya.

 

I am itty-bitty.

 

I am the thing in the shoe.

 

I am the moan swallowed by lips larger than my body, the arch into a touch that could crush me without trying, the surrender that is not chosen but craved, not forced but wanted, the dark warm place where I do not have to be brave or smart or real, where I only have to be held.

 

After, I clean myself with a tissue and I lie back down.

 

The ceiling stares back.

 

Somewhere above me, Safiya is praying, still, I hear the murmur through the floor, the rhythm of a language I don't speak, addressed to a god I don't believe in, in a direction she can only guess is right.

 

I close my eyes.

 

The first rule of being a shrinkie: if someone sits down, you move. If someone steps, you pray. If someone swallows, you hope they had a light lunch.

 

The second rule, the one they don't print in the manual, the one you learn in the dark with your hand on yourself and your heart in your throat, is this:

 

You do not think about the third rule.

 

The third rule is: someday, someone will sit down, and you will not move. Someday, someone will step, and you will not have time to pray. Someday, someone will swallow, and you will not hope.

 

I stare at the ceiling until the water stains become constellations, until the dark becomes a kind of answer, until sleep comes like a bus I can't outrun.

 

I do not dream.

 

I do not dream because dreaming is for people who still believe in waking up.