Knock, knock, knock!

I put down my book sprang over the armrest of the couch. I couldn't stick my eye right up to the door's peephole -- my muzzle was in the way -- but the person's hat and clipboard, along with the delivery van behind him, meant my package was here. The knob probably left a mark on the wall from me yanking the door open.

"Hello," the deliveryman began, eyes and mouth opening as far as mine did when I found out that book of transformation techniques was real.

I grinned, showing off as much of my teeth as possible.

He stepped back. "Sign here, please!" If he could hold the edge of the clipboard with just his fingernails, I would still be too close to him for his liking. He shifted his eyes from me, to the truck, and back to me, judging if he could beat me if I started chasing him. I'd probably win.

A great thing about being anthropomorphic was having paws that worked as well as human hands. I barely finished signing the last letter of my name when he swiped back the clipboard and tossed me my package. Free pen!

I went back inside. Now, everything smelled like fox instead of exhaust. One downside of fur was constant shedding. I had to be worse than a dog.

On the first day, I had worn socks, pants, and a sweatshirt, like a human, to try controlling the mess. They helped in the way grinding ice against a forehead helped a fever -- barely, if at all, while introducing new problems. My socks had to stretch to get over the otherwise unused heels of my longer feet, I couldn't keep my pants up without smothering my tail, and my hood didn't let my ears breathe. Overheating wasn't an issue, but my fur had tangled into rat nests in some places. Combing those out took time, but gave me an appreciation for my sharp claws.

Those claws also came in handy for opening stuff. There was no need to get a knife or a pair of scissors when I had something better. Inside the package was the book I had ordered: The Beauty of Scale. Written by the same author as Essentials of Transformation, which sat by the couch, I already knew what to expect: quality.

I assembled a tray, moved the new book and a bag of chips atop it, and sat down. I scanned the table of contents with one paw and fed myself with the other. While a human mouth was enough to do most tricks with chips, my muzzle allowed me to invent new ones. I filled the space between my teeth with chips and lightly ground my teeth back and forth. With my back teeth exposed, not covered by cheek skin, my face was like a chainsaw -- a really slow chainsaw that fell apart after a few seconds.

I skipped over the preface of the book and started with shrinking proper. As noted in Essentials, the preparations were similar to those in shapeshifting, focusing on eliminating as many disturbances as possible. I ate another chip. It was amazing how chips could taste delicious one moment and then bland as bread the next, like my tongue licked off flavor.

While I used to teach, the author wrote, I would have my students begin here. They would become small enough to appreciate the beauty of nature, while still being large enough that the world was in a somewhat-familiar state. There is nothing worse than diving right into atoms or otherwise becoming so small as to become overwhelmed and lost... The other introductory paragraphs were likely more stuff irrelevant to the technique. Essentials suffered from fluff, too.

Underneath the puddle of text was the silhouettes of two people, the one on the right coming up to the other's knee, and an arrow pointing from the bigger one to the smaller one. The reversal instructions were on the next page. The graphic by them was the same, but the arrow's direction was reversed.

My heart fluttered. I got up and took inventory of the room. The fan was off, the windows and doors were fully shut and locked so no wind could come in, and nothing was connected to the speakers. To be safe, I moved the bag of chips off the tray and made sure the legs were stable.

With my legs crossed on the seat of the couch, I sat down, closed my eyes, and took deep breaths.

In, and out. In, and out. Breathing was my only responsibility.

My paw glided with the grace of a butterfly to my neck. My pulse proved my heart was in no hurry. Slow and steady. I rested my arms on my thighs, letting my muscles be at peace. It was time to begin.

I reached out to the warmth that gave all things life. While it may not seem so for plants, cold-blooded creatures, and the strange bacteria that live at the bottom of the ocean, all it touched could connect to it so long as the creature could think. My insides became fuzzy, as if all the worms and birds of the world lived inside me. I remained still.

I saw my body in my mind, a form of light in the darkness. When I had transformed, I had manipulated that body, overlapping it with a fox's for reference and playing with my limbs like putty until I was a mix of a fox and a human.

According to the text, shrinking was simpler. I squeezed my body, giving the same mental effort as reading a book, and let the excess warmth flow back to its source. I opened my eyes.

An invisible force hugged me all over. My pretzel legs hovered an inch above the couch, then two inches, then three. I was shrinking upwards, centered on my head. In a fraction of a second, I had shrunk from five-foot-ten to one-foot-two, about knee-height, just like the diagram showed. Perfect!

My feet dangled above the tray. If I had been wearing clothes, they would be covering it and the book right now. I floated toward the empty space between the bottom of the book and the edge of the tray, which would survive my light weight. The words of the reversal page came closer.

Then farther away.

My heart thudded so strongly I could hear it. The hug returned. Instead of another person's comforting embrace, it was now the grip of a gorilla -- the squeeze of a python -- that came down on me, confining me, compressing me into an ever-shrinking box.

The words grew smaller, smaller, smaller. So did the tray. I looked past its edge.

Oh, no! The floor -- so far away! The squeezing stopped, no longer holding me from the drop it created. I opened my mouth and panted, raining down drops of saliva that disappeared before hitting the page. No, there was no way I could survive; I was going to fall too far!

Gravity pulled me down, while the air pushed me up. Even the planet was choking me out. "Ahh!" I cried out, but even if anyone else lived with me, all they would hear was the chatter of a fly. I twirled around in the air, watching the whole room blur past. Stretching my arms and legs out, I paddled, but no matter what direction I swam, I only made my situation worse.

My gut churned. I had to keep my food in, stop it from coming out on the back of a breath. A strand of fur left my body, dancing around as well, but in elegance, not flurrying in impending doom. I reached out for it, trying to grab on to it, something, anything, only to swat it out of reach.

My nose burned from hyperventilating. There was the ceiling, the page, the ceiling, the page, one running away and the other running closer whenever I couldn't look.

Here it comes... I shut my eyes.

Something rubbed my back, then my chest, then my back again. I stopped moving. Where was the impact?

I waited for my insides to straighten themselves out, then dared to take a peek. This was some sort of white pit, but it spun and warped too much to make out details. My brain would have floated away if my skull wasn't in the way.

I grasped for anything to pull myself up with but collapsed on my back. Before I did anything, I needed to regain control. I needed to... calm down, breathe in and out, regain my strength. A mouse could have survived the fall. An ant could have survived the fall. In fact, at full size, nothing would have happened either. Smaller eyes did not mean larger distances.

I stretched my arms out and got in position to push myself up. With useless muscles, still wobbly from panic, I was already on my feet. It was like I wasn't even real.

I walked up to the nearest ridge. It ended past my head and sloped in the wrong direction, but after my arms had demonstrated their strength, there was no issue. I reached around the edge with my fore-paws and jumped.

I shot into the air! Flying! The page looked like bundles of spider's thread thrown atop each other. Ahead of me, the pattern was broken by a fuzzy black line that curved outwards at its end. On the other side, it ran into the middle another black line, perpendicular to the first. That black line was capped on both ends with the same set of curves. It was a capital 'T', with serifs. There were more letters to the right, spelling out the word 'The'.

The air was thicker -- not in breathability, but in its resistance. I couldn't jump as high -- though, at first, going this far up while being so small seemed impossible -- but the air was friendly. I floated down like a feather, taking my sweet time. I sprawled my arms out, imagining I was floating on the surface of a pool, but instead of water shimmering below, there was just the page slowly getting closer, like someone walking toward me to ask how my day was going. Now that I wasn't tumbling, falling was relaxing. A part of me wanted to spin my tail in a circle like a helicopter blade, but imitating a video game character wasn't worth potentially ruining the moment if it would the rest of me spin too.

I landed hind-paws-first upon the highest, flattest fiber near me. A strand of fur got caught in my eye, so I had to rub my eye and fish the piece out with a finger. Good thing it was as eager to cling onto my paw-pad as eyelashes were onto human skin.

The landscape reminded me of a not-that-well-cared-for park. The paper was a white plain, ripped apart by shovels and cleats over years. Small caverns and pits were everywhere, each with their own ridges and outcroppings, interrupted only by channels and ponds of still, black ink. Any waves they had were frozen in time since the page was printed. Despite all of this, the park wasn't a swampy, mushy mess. The fiber stayed steady and strong as I walked across, and so did the next when I moved to that one.

Above the horizon was a white fence, erected in a hurry by someone who had no idea what a proper fence looked like -- or what nails were. The sky was my ceiling. Behind me was the window, too high up to see more than the actual sky, and my vacant couch. I wished my fan had a super-low speed setting so that I could have a safe wind blowing through my fur. And my ears. Breezes were amazing when they blew at my fox ears.

What did I do wrong to make the shrinking continue far longer than it was supposed to? Good thing I could just return to normal size; since shrinking was like transforming, growing should be intuitive.

Growing while on the tray would destroy it, however, so I walked, and walked, and walked, on and on. I headed in the direction opposite of the window, going up the page instead of across it. Based on what I remembered from my fall, I thought that was the closest way to the floor from where I was. I kept losing count of how many steps were between the top of a letter and the bottom of the next. Rubbing a hand along dry ink did little more than darken the hand slightly, but I didn't know how clingy the individual particles would be to me at this scale, so I steered clear of the letters. Even if they weren't sticky, getting ink out of my fur didn't sound fun.

The edge of the book appeared no closer. My stomach started to rumble. I didn't have any teeny-tiny foods on hand -- or any normal-sized foods. The paper I was treading on had to be edible since it was made from trees -- plants -- but I would rather not eat it if I didn't need to. I could survive. It shouldn't take that long to get off of here and grow back to normal.

Apparently not. My stomach cramped up. Did everything inside it disappear? I didn't remember needing to using the bathroom after shrinking, and I had stuffed myself with chips beforehand.

The pain went away, and the pain came back. Stronger. I clutched my gut and groaned. Maybe what I ate was used as fuel for the shrinking process, but that meant I should have been hungry right away instead of it kicking in now.

Food, food, I needed food. I ran toward the spine, the unforgiving-looking slope down into the dark trench between the pages, and groaned when my stomach complained again. Because it came in waves instead of being a constant pain, I couldn't get used to and ignore it.

"Ungh." My hind-paws clipped the edge of a fiber. I tipped forward. I swung my arms around, trying to regain my balance, but it wasn't enough, and I tumbled toward the edge of the hill. I stopped myself before sailing off, but another hunger pang knocked my weary body over. My eyes and muzzle were pointed down, down, down into the dark pit that could suck up my body like it sucked up light. If the latter couldn't escape, how could the former?

I slipped and floated down. The walls closed in around me, getting closer and closer. So did the shadows. If I hit the bottom, would I fade away too, never to be seen in the darkness? I tried to swim toward the fibers, but I was too weak to go anywhere. It was easier to do nothing, to accept whatever would happen to me.

My stomach hurt. I stopped floating. I was on top of something rough and yellow. I dragged myself forward, groaning from its scratchy surface. Whatever I was on sloped down, too, but it was easier to keep myself attached.

When my head filled with blood and pulsed with pressure, I stopped and peered over. The thing was shaped like a sphere. It smelled like a potato.

Food! A chip crumb!

I opened my mouth and dug in with my fangs, scraping out a crumb of the crumb. I chewed until it was no longer solid or had any taste, bracing for the next stab from my stomach, and waited for it to travel down my throat. Then I ate another, and another, more and more, until I was hurting from too much food instead of not enough.

The bit of the crumb I carved out was nothing compared to what was left. How long could I last on the whole crumb? Weeks? Months? Wow! Maybe the solution to world hunger was shrinking everyone when they wanted to eat. Food being digested had to scale with the rest of the body; otherwise, the chips I had eaten before shrinking would have sliced me apart.

To get out, I would need to climb back up the page, or -- oh, right! I could leap! I squatted down and pounced, shooting up and over the edge of the trench. I glided back down onto the page. It was like I was a living parachute. Again, a breeze through my fur would have been nice, but it would have blown me far off course.

No more walking. Walking was for big people. I hopped across the page, ruffling my fur with my paws mid-air, spilling droplets of potato chips onto the paper -- crumbs of crumbs from a crumb of a chip. Up here, instead of the strong scent of paper, I smelled the mini-crumbs that had been ground into my fur from crawling.

There was a hole in my gut again. Was an out-of-whack metabolism normal when tiny? No longer afraid, I leaped back into the chasm, bridging the gap between the walls with all four paws. Holding on was easy now that I had energy. I headed forward, squeezing my paw pads against the walls, and ducked under the nearest crumb. Thankfully, its bottom rested just above my head, so I lifted it up with my fore-paws and jumped back up onto the page. It was many times my size, but it weighed as much as a pencil. Ants had to feel like superheroes when they carried food into their hills.

After stopping to nibble, I continued leaping, bringing the crumb with me, and quickly reached the edge. It was the most jagged wall I had ever seen. White logs, fences, sticks, and knives were all balanced atop each other, the top looming so high that I could only see the room's ceiling. A normal-sized person would be trapped, but my muscles were no match for it. I vaulted over with my crumb and drifted past the edge of the tray.

I laughed. The furniture was huge! I couldn't imagine it all being small enough for me to use. A village could live on the cushions of the couch, and the legs supporting it evoked images of ancient redwood trees. My room had become the palace of a god. I chomped up with my jaws and took another bite of the crumb. The bag of chips, slumping down on the carpet, was to fall over any second, with the bag being crumpled up and the top looming over the rest of it. Too bad there wasn't a tiny demolition company I could call in to topple it over with a tiny wrecking ball. It was a skyscraper, ready to collapse. A safety hazard for all the tiny people that didn't live there.

Instead of landing atop one of the... what were they called? Carpet beads? Grains? I fell onto the side, tossing the crumb away so I could grab on with all four paws. No longer was I in a house -- I was outside in a jungle untouched by civilization, bulbs of some strange plant towering over me. Or, I was surrounded by discolored blades of grass that had too much to eat. And, speaking of eating, the feeling of fullness I had from my last bite of the crumb was already gone.

I climbed up onto the canopy. The crumb I discarded landed a few grains away. Did the five-second rule apply to me? Seeing as I was smaller but bacteria were not, the crumb would likely make me sick from having been in contact with the floor. My immune system already had a hard enough time dealing with germs when I was five-foot-ten; there was no way it could handle invaders that were hundreds or thousands of times larger. How small was I, exactly? Would a ruler that measured to the nearest millimeter be enough? Too bad mine was hidden away in the kitchen junk drawer light-years away.

I sat down cross-legged on my little section of carpet. My breathing slowed, my muscles relaxed, and my mind was emptied of unnecessary thoughts. Still as a statue, I reached out to the warmth of life again and found I was already connected to it. The link was weak, but like the root of a tooth that was overdue to fall out, it was still there, holding on for the sake of holding on.

With my mind, I plucked at my body. Because I was not seeing it with my eyes, its greatly enhanced size could not escape my vision. There was no need to zoom in or out. I brought my body near an image of a human's to check if my height was close to correct. If I was a few inches off, I could fix it after. I opened my eyes and stood up.

My growth was centered on my head, like my shrinking was. Since my legs couldn't grow into the ground, I was forced up, leg bones pressing into each other and up into my intestines. My spine turned to spaghetti, desperately maintaining its form like when carrying a heavy box. My head pulsed from my jaws being driven up into it, so I squeezed my head between my fore-paws. I forced my eyes to stay open, however.

I covered more distance with each step toward the couch.My feet covered a whole grain of carpet, then two, then four, no longer able to slip between them. Soon, I was eye-to-eye with the top of the couch leg. The room was losing its divinity, and with the window coming into view, its privacy as well. My head pulsed more as my size increased. My fore-paws squeezed harder against my head. I was now as tall as the couch seats.

I stopped growing. My headache fizzled away, and my bones came into an agreement with each other on where to be.

Staring down the tray, I waited. If I suddenly shrunk to microscopic proportions after pausing, why shouldn't I hit a growth spurt now? My muzzle itched, but that went away after scratching it.

Nothing happened. What was going on? Why wasn't anything going on? I was stuck at the height I was supposed to be in the first place! Why couldn't I keep my size up?

I reached over the seat of the couch with my fore-paws and jumped. Instead of flying into the air, I just climbed up, straining my arms slightly. At least things were somewhat back to normal. Choosing a spot in the center of the cushion, I closed my eyes and commuted with the life-warmth again. Like last time, I was already linked to it. I repeated the growth process, making sure to check my size again, and opened my eyes. My fur tingled, like when getting goosebumps as a human, but nothing happened. Or, did it? Was the window now a little higher up?

If anything had an answer as to why changing size was being wonky, it would be the book. Good thing I was big enough to read more than one word of it at a time! I stood on the couch and reached toward the lip of the tray, hoping that was the last time I needed to pull myself up somewhere today.

I leaped back. The tray tipped over, its legs clonking together as they bit into the couch and slid to the floor. The book booped my gut and started sliding between my legs. I pushed down on its pages to prevent it from closing.

Even though I could flip the pages, I was glad the book didn't lose its place. The weight was getting uncomfortable, so I pushed it off my lap and onto the next cushion over. I stood up so I had a better angle and looked over the text again, this time reading it word-for-word instead of skimming.

There was a note in a box on the shrinking page. Unlike in transformation, I read, when the body's size is changed without its shape being changed, the body has a tendency to retain a connection. This causes some size to 'leak away' while growing or shrinking, resulting in the body being a much smaller size than desired. Therefore, make sure to look for and sever this link when manipulating size.

I pushed the book farther away to make space and dangled my legs off the couch. When I closed my eyes, relaxed, and welcomed the warmth, the familiar sense of my body and its link returned to my mind. I scaled myself back up to my normal size.

I turned my attention to the link coming off my body. It seemed so weak, like a loose thread on a shirt. The note didn't specify how to break it, so I dragged my body away from it. That only lengthened the link.

My body had the consistency of clay here, so I couldn't rotate a limb without stretching or compressing it and needing to correct it before finishing. I yanked my arm, stretching it like I was a cartoon character until my hand was above the line, and pulled downwards. My hand passed through the link instead of slicing it. I pushed and prodded my arm back to its proper proportions. However, I overcorrected a few times, so I had to finely nudge it into proper form.

The line was connected to my head -- a bad place to make a hole or lump if I tried experimenting. Since it was a part of my body, would I be able to manipulate it like I could with everything else?

Yes, but it involved stretching the line downwards and pushing its base into me. Now, it was at the tip of my tail.

There was one more thing to try. I had never removed any of part of me before, only reshaping them so it looked like the part was gone. If I tried hard enough...

I had no tip for my tail. It wasn't a wish. It wasn't a belief. It was a fact.

Then, it became actual truth, leaving a speck of a gap between me and the link. The line snapped back to where it came from. My eyes shot open.

I grew taller. My butt pressed down into the seat of the couch, and my chest forced my neck up. The pads of my hind-paws reached the carpet. Behind me, the window snaked downwards, letting me see the grass and houses again. A few people were out and about, unaware of the events that had passed in my house.

The room came to a halt. The television screen faced right at me instead of above me. Up above, while I could reach the ceiling with a jump, it wasn't an oppressive thing looming over me. However, it was now the four walls that felt oppressive; was the room really this small? And, how did I manage to get through that doorframe without smacking my ears against the top?

I stood up, stretched out, and peeked at my tail. There was a clump of fur missing at the tip, about the size of a screw head. Nobody would see it; they would be too busy freaking out over a talking and walking fox, like the delivery man did.

I picked up the tray, checked it for damage, and propped it against the wall. I moved the book by its cousin and flopped across the couch. So cramped! I had to lift my legs on top of the armrest. Maybe I should buy a larger couch soon -- or be smaller, which was cheaper.

As for my tail, I could have reached out to the warmth and be more careful in unlinking so I wouldn't take off such a big chunk -- or just forget that and transform into something else, like a wolf, and back to this -- but I had enough of that for now.

Using the remote underneath the couch, I turned on the television and took a mental break.