Late in the early stages of mid-life, James Saunders awoke one morning to find that his life had been reduced by half. He was half his former height, his bed was half its former size, etcetera. Yet he didn’t realize the change at first, for he had no basis for comparison as he went about his morning routine: making coffee in his now small coffee maker, checking the surprisingly few emails in his Inbox, and reading half of the news stories he found interesting. It was only upon setting off for work, when he ambled down the stairs, that he had his first inkling of the change. On the outside of the mailbox, the carrier had posted a note: “Need biger [sic] mailbox, doesn’t meet regulation.” The bills and junk mail stuffed inside looked enormous.

     He turned and noticed that the neighboring houses towered over his half-sized house. While pondering his shrunken house and mailbox, Saunders shimmied open his paycheck envelope. His salary was half of what it should have been. He couldn’t possibly live on such an amount!

     He set off driving to work in a huff, prepared to demand an answer, but his anger soon gave way to fear: even the Hondas and Toyotas dwarfed his once mid-sized car; the SUVS and pickups that loomed in his rearview mirror and zoomed past pushed his heart into his throat. Upon arriving at his office building, he struggled to get leverage on the eye-level handle and wedge himself through the glass door. The receptionist, a rather large yet jovial woman, failed to greet him with her usual over-the-top “Good morning, James!” that always annoyed him. She informed him that his boss wouldn’t be in until later.

     “Do you have any idea why my paycheck is half what it normally is?” he asked.

     “Of course. You only work part time.”

     He opened his mouth but no words came out. What else might the day have in store? He went about his work routine, half as motivated as he’d been when he’d been hired, biding his time until his boss arrived. Meanwhile, his co-workers gave him half the respect he deserved.

     For the first time in his life, he reflected on his mortality. He had an intuition that his life was now half over, and he had accomplished half of what he’d expected — less than half. That in the coming days, the pleasure he’d always taken in solitude, of waking in the night and hearing the cars rumbling on the interstate, would increasingly be undergirded by fear.

     At the end of the four-hour workday, whose onslaught of previously unknown halfnesses left him twice as exhausted, he plopped himself down in his boss’s guest chair and poured out his frustration, his beseeching tone crying out for some explanation. His boss, an increasingly graying brunette a few years older than he, merely frowned and looked at her desk as she spoke. “You’ll get over it, Saunders. We all do.”

–this story appeared in Flash Fiction Magazine in 2024.