"The Small Things" Short Story

This is a story about a microscope. Thinking about microscopes brings me back to high school Biology class, using old and outdated equipment that wouldn't focus. Thank goodness this story isn't about that.
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Now...
The Small Things

“Thanks for nothing,” Tim sniffed. He held the last box of his belongings. “I’m going to find a real man. One who tries to fix problems.”

Seth looked at the man who had once meant something to him, the man who still might mean something if he was a lot smaller. The insult stung in a distant and half-formed way, a pain dreamed rather than felt.

When Seth said nothing, Tim’s shoulders lifted like a dog’s hackles rising. “Oh, fuck you!” he cried, and stormed out the front door. It slammed shut behind him.

Seth studied his fingers, the grime caught underneath his nails. Somewhere in the back of his mind he knew he should have been more bothered about what was happening. Instead, relief loosened his lungs. Tim’s departure had removed a choking restraint from around his neck. Without Tim, he could do what he pleased, and there was only one thing he wanted to do anymore. 

He locked the door to prevent Tim from coming back if he changed his mind. Then, he mounted the stairs to the second floor and climbed the ladder to the attic. The wood squeaked in a friendly voice, an old friend inviting him home. 

Seth let his gaze wander over the items of furniture, the cheap garage sale chairs with their price tags still attached, and the old dolls pulled from antique store shelves. If it was old and funny-smelling and odd, he would buy it. Tim used to find that habit endearing, especially when Seth spent hours perusing second-hand shops for unique gifts. 

Endearing, until the microscope.

Seth walked over to the desk at the far end of the attic, underneath a large and dusty window. The space he once used for restoring old paintings and repairing broken china tea sets was bare now, devoid of all the tools he spent his life accumulating. In their place was a microscope, a bright yellow instrument he picked up last month. He hadn’t thought anyone lived in that strange house at the end of the road. When he saw homemade signs leading in that direction, and the tables of odds-and-ends set up on the lawn, he had been unable to resist a visit. 

Seth caressed the top of the microscope, the way a religious man might touch a Bible. He sat in his chair and leaned over to put his eye to the eye piece. He squinted, and stared, and lost himself in the dazzling sight.

There was nothing on the stage, no slide containing an interesting sample. The old woman selling the microscope had been so right when she told him he wouldn’t need any such gimmicks. 

Like all microscopes, this one offered a view of what couldn’t be seen with the naked eye. It saw through. Through a veil, through time and space, through everything, to a strange and amorphous place of dapples. Everything was light and shadow, a monochromatic field upon which slithering life forms of indeterminable shape and identity twisted and writhed. The creatures were unknown, hidden sideways on some other plane of existence no one had ever glimpsed before. 

Nothing compared to watching their lives in the chaotic and undefined unknown, a world reversed from the one Seth knew.

He switched eyes and leaned his elbows on his desk. He sat there, and he watched the magnified lifeforms as the sun descended across the sky and eventually beneath the horizon. Even when he couldn’t see any longer what he was looking at, he stayed unmoving at the microscope to wait for morning. 

The view was worth it.

©2019 Emily Blue