This Town Ain’t Big
Even as a child the place lacked the space my body needed. In my bedroom I had to lie on the floor in order to look out the window. I’d fold my legs up to my chest and crane my neck til it cramped just to see a blue sky, the moon. What would ever become of me there, I wondered. I dreamed of standing up straight, of filling my plate with enough food to fill my stomach.
Eventually I became a young man and left. I went further and further away until I felt I could breathe. In my new town my bones and skin seemed to expand. Everything felt fertile, ready to burst. I met a woman. Each of us picking out a peach of our own from a fruit stand, our hands never touching. Imagine.
We married and had a child. They themselves grew, and our lives became a metropolis, a mountain – bustling, expansive, towering. Then one day, years later, the town of my childhood began creeping into my thoughts. Had it really been so limiting, so physically and psychically cramped?
I decided to visit, and I traveled backward, further and further. When I arrived what I found startled me – it was even smaller than I remembered. Not just small, but shrunken, miniscule. The restaurants, the school, the buildings – I stood over it all like a giant. Curious and transfixed, I bent down and carefully gathered the town up, the whole place fitting into the palm of my hand.
I looked closely and could see everything, miniature neighborhoods and itty bitty factories and playgrounds. Streets and cars scaled down to an atomic level. Astounding.
Then something caught my attention, someone familiar. A friend from my childhood, now a man. I saw him leaving his house as the sun came up and I watched him go to work at an office in town. He ate lunch at the diner, went home and was with his wife and children – a meal, bedtime, a regular and normal life. Just infinitesimal.
I kept observing, compelled by the life taking place within something the size of a handful of earth.
Then, late into the night, with his wife and children asleep, he got up from bed and walked through the dark house. I watched him from high above as he opened his back door and stepped out into the backyard. It was a cool night, a little late-summer breeze in the trees. He wasn’t wearing shoes, his bare feet in the grass. Then he looked up into the sky, up at me.
I was so large he couldn’t distinguish me from the deep, vaulting layers of atmosphere and space. My giant body, blending into a vast universe. I had a sudden wish to be home, returned to the people I loved. But we stayed like that, my old friend and I, for what felt like ages – me watching him gaze into the black and glittering sky, him wondering what lay beyond the stars in my eyes.
Jeffrey Hermann's work has appeared in Okay Donkey, Electric Lit, Heavy Feather, and other publications. His first full-length collection will be published by ELJ Editions in 2026. Though less publicized, he finds his work as a father and husband to be rewarding beyond