Surviving Minimized: A Novel

by Andrea White

  Crushed red-and-green cans tiled the twig hut’s roof. The one round window was covered in blue cybratom with a W brand in the center.

  W for Weird—whatever BIG had discarded that water bottle in the park had no idea that it would one day end up as a window for a species of little people.

  Zert pushed on the purple cybratom door and stepped into an empty room. “Dad?” he called.

  A retro-magazine photo hung on the far wall, showing some men in an old-timey car pointing their rifles at lions. He’d been surprised by so many odd things in Paradise, like doodlebug golf, that he hadn’t stopped to think about all the things that he hadn’t seen. Here, there were no laser pain rifles, no trampos, no zappers, no people so scared of getting shot that they wore privacy hoods so no one could ID them.

  One wall was unpapered, exposing a wavy blue plastic that seemed vaguely familiar.

  A hole the size of a door gaped in the back wall. He passed through it into a deep cave with glowing walls. With its eerie green light, the cave resembled a haunted house. The space felt cool, as if the temperature were controlled by a weather system, but the air tasted funny, as if he were licking metal.

  He missed his couch, his I-ring, his holo-imagetube, his pet rat, Okar, but most of all, he missed Chub. If only he could hold Chub tight.

  The miniature wolf had probably been destroyed. All because his father had let Uncle Marin trick him. Trick them.

  “Zert.”

  Zert hurried out of the cave.

  In the front room, his father held a twig broom so primitive it looked as if he had borrowed it from the holomovie set for Cinderella.

  “Zert, isn’t this great?” his father said as he started sweeping. “Someone moved away, and we can stay here for a while.”

  “Probably Abbot,” Zert mumbled. “Before they murdered him.”

  “What did you say?” His father stopped working.

  “I’m hungry,” Zert said.

  20

  MANY HALLOWEENS BUT NONE SUIT

  Zert stepped up onto Pancake Rock, which was now bustling with people and activity. One kid wore a T-shirt with a stinger protruding from the front, and around his neck was a sign: Wasp-acula. Another had a red cap on her head, twigs behind her ears, and the word “Fire” written on her forehead. Someone else wore overalls layered in tree bark.

  The adults looked strange too. There was something about their patched- and pieced-together clothing that made them appear foreign. Or they could have been models for an old-fashioned sewing magazine that taught people how to make their own clothes. Or they could have been attendees at a convention of people who love pockets. He started counting all the pockets on people’s clothes but lost track. There were too many to count.

  A figure dressed in black and wearing a rat’s head ran up to him, interrupting his thoughts. Glittering eyes gleamed out of the mask’s eye holes, and its mouth, with its tiny teeth, was frozen open as if it were about to bite.

  It was creepy. Whoever this was—was dressed like his pet, Okar.

  The masked figure stepped closer, as did other Rosie kids in costumes.

  Zert stood his ground as they all crowded around him.

  The figure removed the mask.

  “Everyone, this is Zert Cage. He’s minimized,” Beth called out. The kids seemed to move in even closer.

  Beth began to tell Zert the names of the kids: Ivy Potts, who wore the fire costume, had acne. John Gibson, Beth’s brother, was Wasp-acula. He had buck teeth. Rudolpho Orlando, who was dressed as a fall day with leaves all over his T-shirt, wore glasses. Except in historical holomovies, Zert had never seen anyone with buck teeth, acne, or glasses before. Everything in the BIG world was correctable.

  The names and costumes began to blur together: Sylvester Martin, Dawn Nelson, Holly Cannon, and on and on. Just as Dr. Brown said, there weren’t any older kids.

  “Who did I forget?” Beth said. “Oh yeah.” She pointed at a girl who looked a few years younger than Zert. The girl had been standing behind him.

  A spider cap sat on top of black hair so straight it could have been used for a ruler. Lively green eyes peered out from underneath the girl’s black bangs.

  A few fly parts hung in the cobweb that spread across the front of her white T-shirt. On her chest, she had printed a sign that said

  “Spidergirl.”

  “Millicent Chang,” the girl broke in before Beth could introduce her.

  Millicent handed Zert a large bowl.

  The surface of the bowl was brown and bumpy, and a stem stuck out from its base. It was the cap of an acorn. “Thanks,” he said, looking at her green eyes.

  “I’ll take him through the line,” Millicent said to Beth.

  “OK,” Beth said. “We’re sitting over there.” She pointed at a spot near the edge of the rock where some acorn bowls were resting on their stems.

  The fur tail attached to Beth’s overalls slapped Zert’s legs as she turned away.

  “They say a rat once carried away a Rosie kid at Knot Hole,” Millicent whispered into his ear as she fell in beside him. “Her mother was doing laundry by the trickle. They say rats like to feast on Rosies’ eyes.”

  He forced himself to look unconcerned. Surely, this was a tale meant to scare him for Halloween.

  While he listened with one ear to Millicent’s chatter, he surveyed Paradise from the vantage point of Pancake Rock. He had explored the part of the village built on the slope facing the stream, but even now that he knew that it existed, he couldn’t pick out a single road, home, or store. Camotown, USA.

  These Rosies were clever.

  Millicent gave him a nudge, and suddenly, Zert stood at the head of the line. Soups bubbled in black pots on a series of grates over low fires.

  He hadn’t had hot food in … He couldn’t remember when. Their Food Machine had broken down months ago, and his dad hadn’t had the funds to get it fixed.

  A Rosie woman stirring the first pot looked up at him. “Hello, Zert Cage,” she said. “I’m Beth’s mom—Cleama Gibson.” She had a square jaw, but everything else about her was round, including her hair, which rose like a series of hills over her head and fell to her ears. Her stomach puffed out like a feather pillow, and her shoulders seemed padded. With a white apron tied around her waist, she resembled an old-fashioned cafeteria worker.

  “Hi,” Zert said.

  Cleama Gibson pointed at the pot. “The first pot is roach stew.”

  “Roach stew?” Zert said, his mouth going stale.

  Cleama Gibson frowned. “We boil the roaches to get rid of diseases.”

  In Low City DC, he had always hated those scuttling insects, with their hairy legs and dodgy antenna. And now in Rosieland he was supposed to eat them?

  Millicent giggled. “It’s really tasty.”

  The woman next to Cleama Gibson cleared her throat. She had parted her hair at her widow’s peak and pulled it back with a cloth bow. “I knew tenderfeet would have a hard time eating roaches, so I made you some cricket soup in sunflower broth.”

  “Thank you,” Zert said as he glanced over his shoulder. He looked around for his father—the exterminator—whose business had been to wipe out roaches. If his father was eating roach stew right now, he’d never let him forget it.

  Jack stood in the center of a group of men, talking.

  “It’s in that second pot,” the woman said, nodding to Zert.

  Even as hungry as he was, he could not help but hesitate as he looked in the pot. Sticks—possibly antennae or legs—floated in a brown liquid. Just a few moments ago, he would never have believed that cricket soup would become his new normal.

  “Go ahead. It’s very nutritious,” the woman said. “Dried crickets have a lot of protein.”

  Zert picked up the ladle and poured some of the cricket soup into his acorn bowl.

  “We have lots of great food,” Millicent was saying. “BeeLTs, snail sushi, cate-flowers, ant omelets, barbecue spider …”

 
“Th—Thank you,” Zert said, and turned away.

  “Wait for me, Zert,” Millicent called. “Thank you for another great meal,” she said to the women.

  Red light stenciled Zert’s hand as he waited for Millicent.

  An advertisement for FastGrow in red lettering covered the face of the artificial moon. One bottle, and you’ll step on your hair. The advertisers had written the text in six languages in order to reach the whole world.

  A Rosie kid wearing a minnow’s head bumped into him.

  “Sorry,” the minnow apologized.

  “No problem,” Zert answered. The kid stunk of rotten fish and sweat. No deodorant here.

  He guessed that Rosies must use hatchets for razors because he could see that the men around him were mostly clean shaven. There was no ice in their drinks. There were no tasty bags of chips. There were no—

  “Let’s go, Zert,” Millicent said, interrupting his dreary list. She was holding her bowl. It looked like—yuck—a pair of antenna was sticking out of the brown soup. “Halloweens are so much fun. In a few weeks, we hold the rodeo, and then there’s Gulliver’s Day.”

  Zert followed her as she walked toward a group of kids. Beth and her younger brother, John, had the same bug eyes. Sweat plastered Beth’s hair to her head. The stinger in John’s costume bobbed up and down as he ate. To join them, he stepped around the rat mask lying on the ground.

  Beth took a sip of soup from the bowl. There was no silverware in Paradise.

  Millicent settled next to Zert. “We skate here in the moonlight, square dance …,” she said.

  Skate. Square dance. They probably made candles, too. This was stuff he’d read about in history books.

  Zert held the bowl up to his mouth and took a careful sip. When he swallowed, he was pleasantly surprised. Although the cricket legs weren’t hard-crunchy like chips, at least they were soft-crunchy like fried tofu. He wouldn’t call the soup good exactly, but it tasted better than some of the stuff he’d eaten at the Mystery Meat diner on Flade Street.

  “During the wet season, we eat frozen honey, we snowshoe, we …,” Millicent continued. She gazed up at the sky as she considered more things to tell him.

  Zert followed her gaze. He had already noticed the FastGrow ad on the artificial moon, but the natural moon surprised him now. The moon and stars shone more brightly here than they did in Low City DC.

  Millicent pointed at the real moon, not the artificial one. “Last night I dreamed I lived there.” She grinned. “At least I think that’s what I dreamed about. I’m not sure where I was.”

  “Someone just invented a camera that takes photos of your dreams,” Zert said. “So you can remember them.”

  Millicent’s eyes widened. “No way.”

  “Yeah,” Zert said as he slurped down another bite of soup. “It’s called Dream Hat. You can see your dreams in the morning. They’re just flat pictures now, but I bet for Dream Hat 2, the images will be”—he tried to think of another word for the process but gave up— “holographic.”

  Beth’s eyes bulged.

  John’s forced smile said, You’re a liar.

  Zert put down his bowl and balanced it on its stem. “I swear,” he said to John.

  John threw back his head and laughed.

  “OK,” Zert said. He could feel his face growing hot. “I’m here because twelve hours ago, I got minimized. If you can believe that, you should be able to believe anything.”

  “What’s holo—gra—phic?” Millicent asked.

  Zert tried to think of a way to explain it without using “If you.”

  John said to his sister. “He’s just like the other guy. Abbot.”

  Abbot, who might be dead or dying somewhere in the vast wilderness.

  Beth stood up. “Hey, Zert, you want to come trick-or-treating with me? You could say you’re dressed as a BIG.”

  Zert looked down at his outfit of a hundred pockets. “No BIG would dress like me,” he blurted out.

  When Beth’s brown eyes clouded, he realized how rude he’d sounded.

  “Forget it, then,” Beth said, turning her back on him. “Last one to Shack Fifth is a rat’s butt!” she yelled before running over to the waterfall on the side of the rock to wash her bowl.

  John followed his sister.

  “Since you’re new, I’ll wash your dish for you,” Millicent offered, taking Zert’s bowl. “Thank you,” he said as his stomach cramped. In the BIG world, people would sometimes say they had butterflies in their stomach. I have actual crickets in mine.

  “Zert?” Millicent asked as she stood up.

  “What?” Zert said.

  “Is there really a camera for your dreams?”

  “There really is,” he told her. Millicent’s parents had once been BIG. They should have kept her better informed. But to be fair, Dream Hat had just launched this month. The adults here wouldn’t know that it even existed. There were no newspapers in Rosieland. No holo-imagetubes. Paradise—and everybody in it—was cut off from the rest of the world.

  “You sure you don’t want to come trick-or-treating? It’s really fun,” Millicent said, smiling down at him.

  “I am so sure,” Zert said.

  Millicent waved. “Then I’ll see you tomorrow at school.”

  “All right, Spidergirl,” Zert said as she turned away.

  Someday, he’d be sitting on this dusty rock, and a minimized kid, a tenderfoot, would arrive. The kid would tell him that five-headed aliens with dragon tails had invaded the earth. He wouldn’t know whether that stranger was lying or telling the truth.

  This was his future.

  21

  SECOND CHANCES

  His father was still talking with a group of men. But when Zert started to stand, he groaned and fell back on the ground. His legs, his feet, and his ankles were so sore.

  Besides, if he walked over, he’d have to meet all those adults.

  He picked up a stick and began doodling in the dust. He drew his mom’s purple couch. He sketched out a zoink ball. Then, he worked on a drawing of Chub, but the miniature wolf’s ears came out lopsided. He looked at her funny ears and wished he could scratch them again.

  As he doodled, he sang under his breath the new ad for Dream Hat he’d heard,

  “Dreaming is one thing that all people do.

  Photographing your dreams is fun too.

  Dream on and on and on.

  Cuz that’s what dreamers do.”

  When Zert tried to correct Chub’s ears, he made them too long, like rabbit’s ears. He decided to work on Chub’s nose, but his hand slipped and he wound up giving his pet a trunk. She looked like a wolf/rabbit/elephant blend. He’d like to see that. Too bad tri-species mergers were illegal under the anti-Frankenstein law passed by the World Council.

  In the background, he could hear the fire sizzling, the adults’ low voices, and something crackling. When he was a Boy Scout, they’d watched some nature shows, and he recognized the noise as the chirp of crickets. The crickets in his dinner hadn’t been quite as chirpy.

  He decided to lie down to rest—just for a second. The ground felt hard, like the bench at Teen Jail. “My mother won’t speak to me,” the holobum called out. “My father died while I was in jail for the sixth time. Teens, you need to change. Change your lives before it’s too late. This is your last chance.”

  The next thing Zert knew, someone was shaking his shoulder. When he opened his eyes, he half-expected to see the holobum squatting in the corner of his cell. But it was a man wearing a gray fur hat. In another moment, he realized it was his father who was standing over him.

  “You ready for bed, Zert?” he asked.

  Zert rubbed his eyes and nodded.

  “Let’s go then.”

  As Zert worked to stand, his muscles felt like pulled licorice.

  His father reached for Zert’s hand and helped him up. “I brought you a piece of candy,” he said.

  Zert stood up, his legs still wobbly.

  His
father held out his hand. A green, unwrapped bar lay sideways on his palm.

  Zert popped the candy in his mouth. “What’s the flavor?”

  His father’s eyes narrowed, as they always did before he told a joke. “Grass,” he said.

  “Grass?” The candy was barely sweet, and it did taste like … grass. Zert sucked on it. “Ever see a cow grazing and wished that you could become one? Grass candy. You’ll dine like your favorite cow,” he said.

  His father laughed. “That’s my Zert.”

  Zert laughed with him, even though his stomach and chest muscles were sore. “I wondered what kind of candy people here gave out for trick-or-treat.”

  “Well, you just found out,” his father said, smiling. “Let’s get going. Tomorrow’s your first day at your new school.” He added, “I know you’re going to really like it there.”

  School.

  The laughter died in Zert’s throat.

  The eerie green light on the walls didn’t reach the middle of the cave, where it was beyond dark, as if someone had colored a black painting with a black pen.

  Don G. had warned them to sleep in the cave and not in the hut built in front. “In case of a sudden wind,” he’d said.

  Various community members had stuffed pillows and blankets into their hands as Zert and his father left Pancake Rock. One man with a fuzzy, uneven mustache had even told his father that he’d lend them a desk tomorrow. But now, all the hubbub had died down, and Zert was alone in the cave with his dad.

  More light, Zert wanted to say to the faint green light on the walls. But firefly light wasn’t interactive.

  He rolled over. He was lying on a fur blanket, but a blanket could only do so much on a rock floor to make it comfy.

  He imagined Uncle Marin sleeping in a soft bed with his head on stacks of pillows right now. Was his uncle sleeping with a clear conscience, or was he tossing and turning, worrying about them?