When It Rains, It Pours

Chapter 3
Part III (The Kid)

About a week ago, I woke up to what I thought would be another day. I sat up on my futon, throwing the sheets to the side. I rubbed my face in an attempt to wake myself. Looking over at the clock, I saw that it was 9:20. Still forty minutes to get to work. I fell asleep again.

I woke up twenty minutes later and lied still for another five minutes. Finally I stood up, got dressed, and went to the bathroom. I took off my clothes and stepped into the shower, then felt that horrible tingle as I set my foot down on the shower’s floor. I stepped back out rubbed my face again. I do this almost every morning. I looked in the mirror. My face was getting pretty scratchy; I considered shaving. But then I remembered how long I had to get to work and I just took a piss instead.

I quickly put on my black dress pants, my white button-up shirt, and my tie. I was working as a clerk in a department store then, so I had to dress somewhat professionally. I picked up my umbrella and ran out the door, pausing to grab a roll in the kitchen. I don’t have much of an appetite these days, so that’s all the breakfast I need. I gnawed on the roll as I walked down my apartment building’s halls, and down the stairs.

The place where I worked was only a few blocks away, so I thought I was going to make good time. Just as I thought that, though, I saw my most hated enemy: water. A great puddle of it on the sidewalk, spilling onto the street and into the drain. In the center of it was a little boy, about eight years old or so, wearing a pair of blue swimming trunks. He held in his hands a garden hose from the house next to my apartment building. A steady stream of water was gurgling forth from the hose, and the kid seemed to be having a grand time getting the sidewalk wet with it. If I was thinking prudently, I would have just taken a different route to work. But I didn’t.

As I approached the kid on the sidewalk, I looked down the street. It’s a fairly quiet, small street, so I didn’t see anybody coming for a long time. I stepped off the sidewalk and hoped I could just walk around the kid and his damned pool. Then he saw me.

“Hey mister,” he piped up, causing my blood to go cold. “Where ya goin’?”

I noticed then that the kid was wearing a folded-up paper hat, like in Calvin & Hobbes. “Work,” I replied simply.

“You should play pirates with me,” the kid said.

“?Fraid not, matey. I have to get to work.”

“I’ll squirt you,” he said. He said it innocently enough, but the mere threat of it scared the hell out of me.

“You better not squirt me with that thing, kid,” I said, walking around the edge of his puddle. I kept a close eye on that hose he had. He raised it at me, the hose dripping water to splash in the puddle at his feet. I didn’t actually think he was going to spray it at me; most kids don’t know how to get those things to shoot straight anyway. “I’m warning you,” I said, putting some edge into my voice.

But he wasn’t intimidated. He pointed the spout of the hose at me, and pressed a finger down on the stream, causing it to spray me liberally. Seems someone had taught him the secrets of the hose.

“Dammit,” I grunted, wading through his assault and swiping the hose away from him. I looked down at the boy and gave him an angry look. What was I going to do? He only splashed me with enough water to take about ten years off, but I couldn’t go to work like that. I felt it was a good idea to give the kid a mild scolding, and I felt I should do that before I became too young to be properly intimidating.

Already I could feel that my chin had lost the scratchiness I was mulling over earlier. “Listen, kid,” I said, trying to sound as frightening as I could. “You don’t do stuff like that to people. Understand? Are your parents home?” I didn’t have any intention of contacting his parents, I just said that to scare him.

“Uh, they’re not here right now.”

Just as I expected. They wouldn’t let their kid play on the sidewalk like that if they were home. I started to think up some mean stuff to say to the kid, but I noticed my current status. I had handily reentered teenagerhood; my face was smooth, and I was starting to lose weight. I decided to keep it short. “Okay, fine. You get off easy this time. But don’t ever spray me with that hose again. If you do, I’ll tell your parents.”

My pants were starting to feel a little loose, so I elected to end the lecture there. I made to walk away to my apartment, but the kid spoke up again. “Wait, mister.”

“What?” I snarled back at him. I was just under sixteen by then, and quite eager to leave before somebody I knew noticed me like that.

“You’re shrinking,” he said, in all of his childlike conviction. He was right, though. I must have lost an inch or two, and I was quickly becoming shorter. My clothes suited for my older body contrasting with my thinned frame also added to the “shrinking” illustration.

“That’s ridiculous,” I bluffed, as I stepped away. “I-,” I started to say something, but I stopped. My voice cracked conspicuously, and I was afraid to continue speaking. I hiked up my falling pants, then looked down at myself. My pant legs were bunched up at my feet, while my shirt and tie hung down past my groin. I was barely thirteen, and only debatably pubescent. I was still getting younger, even though I didn’t think I’d regress past fourteen. Maybe I had miscalculated slightly.

“No,” the kid said in awe. “You’re turning into a kid!”

And again he was right. With puberty stripped from me, I was starting to gain a more childlike appearance. I was losing height fast; that kid started to look a little more my size. I desperately tried to think up a way to explain what was happening. But nothing came. So I told the truth, which turned out to be a mistake.

I cleared my throat, hoping I could simulate my usual deep voice. But, of course, everything came out in a child’s squeaky voice. “Yeah, I get younger when I get wet,” I said indignantly. “You see what you’ve done?” I held up my gigantic pants for effect. I was about eleven then, so I still had some leverage in the size department.

I was hoping to make the kid think he’d done something terribly wrong, but he just smiled. “Wow, cool! That means you can play with me!”

“What? What makes you think that?” I said. I had regressed to ten years old, but the speed of the reversal seemed to have drastically slowed. I had to drop my umbrella to have both hands free to hold up my pants. I was intent on keeping them there to preserve some dignity in front of this little brat.

“Because if you don’t,” he said, bending over to pick up the spewing hose, “I’ll squirt you again. Then you’ll get even littler.”

“Okay, okay,” I said hastily. I still felt the curse’s tingling, but I was shrinking at a very slow rate. I wondered what could be making me regress, then I looked down: the still-growing puddle at my feet was soaking into the bunched-up legs of my pants, in turn moistening my legs and feet. “I’ll play with you, sure. But first let me get out of this puddle,” I said, lifting up my massive slacks, stepping out of my roomy shoes and quickly darting across the puddle and onto the kid’s parents’ lawn. As I felt my bare feet splash into the water, I knew I would pay for it I a moment.

The kid dropped the hose back into the puddle, and walked over to the lawn. He came and stood in front of me, and began looking me over. He must have found my floppy clothing amusing, because he chuckled a little bit. “Hey, you’re shrinking again!” he said with mirth, pointing at me.

I was still a good few inches taller than the kid, but I was losing that bragging right fast. The familiar tingling and sinking feeling overtook me as my clothes got even looser on me and I took a trip back through gradeschool. My stomach churned as my point of view sunk to meet the kid’s, then went even lower. Do you know what it’s like to look up to meet the eyes of a child? When you’re standing straight up? It’s unusual, to say the least.

“You’re smaller than me now!” the kid said gleefully. I knew this was one of this kid’s biggest dreams: seeing one of those villainous adults reduced to a status below his.

I might have been a couple inches shorter than the kid, and probably a few pounds lighter, but I refused to admit it to this punk. “That’s not true. I’m still bigger.”

He seemed to take this as a challenge, because he walked up closer to me to compare. I stood up on the tips of my toes, giving me a slight advantage in height. He couldn’t see me cheating because my feet were quite cloaked by the puddle of fabric down there. He scowled, and reached into the pocket of his swimming trunks. His hand emerged gripping a toy water pistol. Before I could react, he shot off a couple jets of water at me.

I wailed in surprise as I shrunk even smaller into my mountain of clothes. While I was still standing on my toes, it was clear that he had just won the advantage in height. He cracked a childish grin and stuffed the squirt gun back into his pocket.

“Now we can play. Come with me, we can get some clothes for you,” the kid said with a giggle. My clothes were absolutely enormous on my kindergartener frame; I easily stepped out of the shell of my pants. My shirt fit me like a dress would, and my tie hung loosely around my neck and almost extended to the ground.

I followed him, already planning to take his squirt gun once I’d grown a bit, then take off for my apartment.

“I’m Wade. What’s your name?” he asked me.

“Henry.”

Wade and I went in the back door to his house and up the stairs to his room. The house looked a lot larger inside than it did on the outside, but that might have been because I was under four feet tall at the time. Wade pawed through his closet for something, while I looked around at the childish decor of his room. My eyes resting briefly over each spaceship, toy dinosaur, and storm trooper, I realized I didn’t at all miss that period of my life. Unfortunately, I was unfairly thrust back into it for the time being. I sighed, and threw out my chubby arms as Wade tossed a pair of swimming trunks at me.

“These are my swim trunks from when I was littler,” he said, gesturing for me to try them on. I stripped off my shirt and paused to look at my immature body before trying the trunks. My limbs were round and lacked any sort of muscular definition, while I had a fat little belly that stuck out from my otherwise featureless torso. I tried not to think about that humiliating little thing that rested between my legs.

The swimming trunks were a little too big; I tied the drawstring as tight as I could but still had to hold them up with one hand. Wade was kind of a pudgy little kid, so he apparently needed extra-large clothes.

“Okay, let’s play!” Wade said, grabbing my arm and rushing down the stairs. I held on to my trunks and tried my best to keep up with him. When we were outside, Wade enthusiastically began describing the terms of his game. “We’re playing pirates. I’m First Mate Zoro and you can be Luffy.”

I had little idea what he was talking about, but I played along to keep him happy. I must have gotten so involved in helping him with his little fantasies that I didn’t notice I had grown into a nine-year-old until the swimming trunks started to constrict my waist painfully. And, to my delight, neither did Wade. As he was pointing out some fictitious treasure, he turned his back to me. I pounced on him, and easily outwrestled him with my superior size and experience. I slipped the water gun from his pocket, and hurled it with all my preadolescent might, aiming for the next yard over. I noted with some disappointment that it hardly even made it over the fence.

I didn’t even look back at Wade as I walked away to my apartment, until I heard a sob. Wade was almost crying, even though I knew I had only hurt him a little bit when we were wrestling.

“No, no fair...” he bawled. “You said you were going to play with me.”

I looked back at him, and felt pity for a couple of seconds. Then the memory of twenty minutes ago came back, and I said, “Kid, don’t you ever do that again.”

His soft wailings continued. I breathed deep, and continued. “Okay, I’m sorry. But I can’t be your friend. Don’t tell anyone about this, okay?”

He weakly nodded, and I gave him a little smile.

I didn’t get fired or anything for missing that day of work, but I got quite a reaming and a little pay cut. The worst part of the whole ordeal is that whenever I walk by that house, that fucking little kid is out there, and he always gives me this little knowing smile.