Small grunts of laughter started escaping from Sarah’s throat as she watched Tuesday unknowingly eat her earwax, licking away at it like an obedient puppy. "Tha- hm!" She tried to speak, but once she started using her voice, She couldn't keep a laugh out. The Q-tip lifted away and up into her hard, mirthful gaze, the end tiny in her fingertips as she studied it. All at once, an idea swam up to Sarah’s head, an idea so brilliant, so hilarious she’d wished she had an audience to marvel at how brilliant this idea was. Reaching over to the bedside table, her fingertips alighted on the smooth plastic of the device, and without even looking, her thumb sought out and depressed the triangular ‘shrink’ button.

One inch. One centimeter. Five millimeters. Three millimeters. One...

“Look up, speck!” My eyelids flicker open, Goddesses’ voice seeming louder and more imminent than before, as if the wind itself were her voice filling a great void. “I said look up, you fucking dust particle!” Laying on my front, I turn my head slowly around, strands of hair clinging to my cheek, and look over my shoulder to behold perhaps the most terrible, the most horrifying sight I would ever behold in my entire lifetime. The bud of a Q-tip, no longer a little white orb of fuzz but a monstrous, entangled mess of pearly white cables, the minute surface layer of fuzz transformed into a deep undergrowth of cotton girders. One half of the bud is caked- no, entombed- in a wet, smooth, grainy slick of what can only be earwax. Her earwax. The earwax of the greatest power I have ever encountered.

The truly terrifying thing about this earbud though, the thing that would haunt dreams, loosen bowels, turn sweat to ice - was it’s immensity. It was a great, imperceptible globe, the span of it like an office block, the great, thick blue plastic shaft completely obscured behind it as if it were a single sphere hovering in the heavens, meters from my face, the wax coating the wirey surface facing down at me. Crowning it on either side are the tips of Her thumb and forefinger, ten times the size of the immense cotton globe, bristling impossibly with pure power in their very presence. The sky is a hazy wash of bedroom and your body, a body I daren’t conceive how gigantic and beautiful it is. The final effect, of the bud’s scale and detail and proximity, is like looking down the nosecone of a jumbo jet which has plummeted from the sky and stopped to hover an inch from your face: a gut-wrenching, mindblowing parallax of infinitesimal smallness.

“I can’t really see if you’re looking up from here” the wind says, matter-of-factly. “Wave your arm if you can hear me.” I don’t wave my arm. I push myself up onto my legs in an attempt to fly for my life across the expansive, mountainous sheet.

“Oh, that will do!”

I never got further than a step. Like the blade of a guillotine, or the moon crashing into the earth, the tiny q-tip dipped a fraction of a centimeter and grazed the bed where I had been standing. There was a tiny, thunderous ‘splip’ noise, which roared in my ears and wouldn’t register in those of a mouse.

Sarah lightly brushed the waxy part of the Q-tip against the bedsheets with the utmost gentleness, then lifted it back up to inspect her work. No little pink speck on the bedsheet. No red, either. “Oh good!” She said, bright. “I didn’t crush you.” She brought the tip up to her eye and frowned, then rotated it with a twiddle of her finger. The bark of laughter than followed was so powerful she almost dropped the tip altogether. A magnifying glass for reading was on the cabinet, and Sarah picked it up, held it to the Q-tip, and laughed again.

Tuesday’s nigh-invisible body was starfished out, like she was doing a jumping jack, in a nigh-invisible Tuesday-shaped depression in the tiny little smear of earwax the cotton bud head. Her little mouth was wrenched open in a scream, but  the sound was impossible to detect. “Shit, Tuesday, you’ve really gone down in the world” Sarah laughed. Her eyes flashed brightly with power and righteousness, and then without a second glance stuck the cotton bud back in her ear and dug around idly, listening to the now (barely) audible screaming of the tiny speck inside her ear with a grin.