Louis woke up because someone was sitting on his left leg. This was confusing, since he’d gone to bed alone and had planned on staying that way. There were no explanations he could think of that wouldn’t confuse him even more than he already was (and half-asleep Louis was pretty hard to out-confuse), so after a little pause of a hundred years with his eyes shut he opened them, ready to scream or maybe sigh.
It wasn’t someone. It was several hundred someones. They were bigger than fleas and smaller than gnats and their dwellings were simple but nobly rustic, fashioned with ingenuous use of local materials.
The local materials were the hairs of Louis’s leg.
“Hey,” said Louis, blankly.
The someones didn’t pay him any mind. Or if they did, he couldn’t see their tiny heads moving to track him. Or even tell if they had heads. Or if they were human-shaped.
“I need to get up,” he told them. “I have to pee.”
The someones listened exactly as attentively as they had to his last words.
“I mean it. I’ll be careful, okay? But this might get bumpy.
The someones gave no response.
“Alright. Here we go.” And Louis sat up and gently swung out of bed.
The reaction was immediate and cataclysmic. The someones swarmed like ants in a stomped colony; clinging to leg hairs and toppling down the length of Louis’s ankle. Houses fell to pieces and dropped off the map. A tiny but terribly almost-existing noise tickled the very edge of his hearing and he realized it was the anguished screams of the dying.
Louis very, very, very gently swung back into bed.
***
The best thing to do after a traumatic event was sleep. Louis did as he was meant to.
The someones, to his discomfort, did not. When he drifted out of his shameful and slightly nightmare-haunted haze, they had colonized his right leg as well, from calf to thigh. Parts of his shin were nearly clear-cut, and the sweat rivulets were being diverted and the runoff used for poregriculture.
He had to pee so very badly it was insane.
It took the better part of a cautious, desperate, lip-biting hour, but with a strategic series of rolls, planks, and stretches Louis reached the bathroom without mass death and with the most brutal morning workout of his life. The toilet bowl loomed overhead, silent and dark because the switch was out of arm’s reach from the floor. His head hurt and his vision blurred from dehydration. His legs throbbed with stiffness; his arms were aflame. His bladder was unthinkable. He had to get up there.
Maybe.
Probably. In a minute.
Six minutes later he hauled himself upright, legs rigid, toes pointed, and screamed the entire time. The someones bestirred themselves, but none of the panic caused by his earlier shifting was present. It seemed they were as deaf to his cries as he was to theirs.
The toilet itself was, after the journey, a footnote. Then Louis was on the floor again carefully—but-quickly, body prickling and burning all at once, and why would he ever want to move?
***
Something tickled his feet and he shifted and grumbled and turned and bonked his forehead into the toilet. That got him awake again, and just in time to see a few dozen someones plummet – tethered together for safety – from his big toe to the bathroom tile.
Oh no.
There were now fresh settlements atop his bedclothes from boxers to t—shirt; if he turned his head just so he could very nearly get the largest buildings into focus. The newer models were woven from stray threads as opposed to the older hair-logged cabins, and some of them reached dozens of millimetres into the air.
Food was easier than the bathroom had been. Louis simply pulled himself into the kitchen in small painful ways and opened the cupboard closest to ground level and thanked every god to ever exist that he didn’t keep his cereal on top of the counter. He ate it without bowl or spoon or milk and felt distinctly less sophisticated than every single other lifeform in his apartment. He also felt gross, gritty, tired, sore, and pathetic, and had no ideas on what to do about any of it without killing unknowable numbers of real albeit impossibly tiny people.
So instead of thinking, which was hard, he dragged himself back to bed, which was easy, and let himself go blank, which was the hardest and the easiest thing of all.
***
Louis slept, and slept poorly; barely; on the brink of waking. Accordingly, he dreamed.
He dreamed of tiny axes clearing land, felling hair.
He dreamed of epicutaneous strip mines, harvesting sky patches to forge new stronger buildings to house new hungry minds.
He dreamed of the fierce struggles for control over the Belly Button Basin, and of the gastroquakes suffered by those who eventually came to inhabit it.
He dreamed of the closest the someones ever came to actual war – when a maniacal epidemic of greed led to the seizure of the Forehead Heights by militants armed with repurposed construction tools and demands for priority settlement, which were only halted by last-minute heroics and treaties concerning the division of ear estate and the borders of brows.
He dreamed of the ascension of the cowlick, and the first someones to stand at the pinnacle of all that there was and wonder if there was more.
He dreamed of the new building codes enacted after the Tosses and Turns of 10:15 AM, and of the movement for double—stitched construction that spurred the investigation and exploitation of the strange ‘pillow’ that surrounded the skull that had hitherto been the summit of the whole universe.
He dreamed of the discovery of the dust mites in the deep pillow mines, and of the subsequent brutal war of annihilation, where pore-scourers and follicle-drills and dandruff eliminators turned the scalp into a barren wasteland for generations and filled the air with death.
He dreamed of the restlessness that filled every new batch of leaders, each filled with fresh ambitions undreamed of by their predecessors, each wanting more, and better, and bigger.
He dreamed of boom times and golden ages; of a world filled with life and thought and furious business; of elaborate lacework dwellings cramming MORE into every space, connecting eyelash to eyelash; earlobe to neck; toe to toe.
He dreamed of new equations and new imaginings, of vehicles the likes of which someones had never imagined, of dustborne probes into the unknown and passengers that traveled by hairicopter.
He dreamed of The Program To Explore Beyond the Pillow and the visionary fanatics behind it, who asked the questions like Are We Alone? and more importantly If We Are, Who Gets All The Stuff?
And then he awoke and found out that all those dreams were true, except that The Program To Explore Beyond the Pillow had already been launched and suffered mass casualties upon encountering a rogue spider.
***
So there lay Louis, surrounded in perfect harmony and perfectly frozen, encased within the webs and snares and structures of a hundred million tiny living things any and all of which would rupture and explode if he so much as breathed funny.
And then his nose started to itch.