Terrarium
Short Story
“HEY! HEY YOU! WAKE UP!”
Mark awoke with sleep in his eyes on a soft bed of moss on the ground. He sat up and winced from a sharp stabbing pain in the back of his head. On reflex he reached back and felt a large bump that he didn’t remember receiving with dried blood sticking some of his black hair to his scalp.
Mark looked around in confusion to see that he was in an awe-inspiring garden filled with a broad variety of beautiful flowering plants. It was one of the most attractive places he’d ever been with blooming fruit trees and delicate flowers dotting the evergreen landscape. Off in the distance, he thought he could see mountains rising up above the foliage. He took a deep breath in as he gazed at his surroundings, expecting to feel clean, fresh air in his lungs, but the air was dry and slightly stale to his surprise.
“GOOD. LISTEN TO ME NOW, I AM RUFUS” came the booming voice again, “WALK FORWARD SO I CAN SEE YOU.”
Mark had never heard a sound so loud and he had to cover his ears to protect himself from its ungodly volume. He stood slowly on shaky legs and found he was not alone in the bewitching garden. Not fifteen feet away, hidden from his sight by some pretty pink hydrangea bushes had been another man about his size and age with light, fair hair and bright green eyes. Now that the two were standing Mark was able to see the stranger and wondered what on Earth they were both doing here.
“NO, TURN AND WALK FORWARD,” the voice thundered again, “TO ME.”
Mark and the other fellow were both startled when the voice sounded again and couldn’t seem to pinpoint the direction of the commands, but they turned and began to walk forward together as instructed.
“TO ME!”
Both men made a quick one hundred and eighty degree turn and walked the other way for a number of paces until they came upon a most confounding sight.
Mark stood frozen in shock as the garden ended in a gigantic glass wall that reached about a thousand feet high and stretched in both directions as far as the eye could see. The glass itself was the thickest Mark had laid eyes on in his twenty four years and he doubted there was anything strong enough to break it, short of an explosion or something of equal size by comparison. On the other side of the wall, which was so thick as to be nearly opaque, was an unfathomably large space beyond, filled with what Mark could only describe as planet sized objects, but at an incomprehensibly close distance. They seemed like solar system scaled representations of the interior of a person’s bedroom.
Mark had the horrifying feeling that he could drift off into the vastness of the space before him and nearly screamed.
With terrifying speed a massive object hurtled into view only to stop immediately in front of them. Mark felt a warm trickle down his leg and realized that he was peeing in his pants. In front of him, despite all logic or reason, was an extraordinarily large human head.
Considering the estimated distance and how much of his vision it filled, Mark could only guess that this head was roughly the size of the moon, and yet it was only on the other side of the glass, just some odd twenty or thirty feet away from him. He felt dizzy. Its huge brown eyes had the depth of small galaxies from this proximity, and they stared at Mark and the other man for a tense while before the voice came again.
“WELCOME MARK, WELCOME NEIL, TO YOUR NEW HOME!” Mark and Neil flinched at the words and glanced at each other before looking around. Mark could not see a stain on the front of Neil’s pants but his face conveyed the same mixed amount of confusion and fright that Mark himself was feeling.
“I HAVE CREATED THIS LAND JUST FOR YOU. I INVENTED A SHRINK RAY AND HAVE PAINSTAKINGLY MINIMIZED ALL OF THE PLANTS AND ANIMALS NEEDED TO CREATE A STABLE ECOSYSTEM WITHIN THIS TERRARIUM. I WANT TO SUSTAIN A WORLD WHERE THERE IS NO HUMAN SUFFERING, THIS IS MY DREAM!”
Mark groaned as he pressed his palms to his ears to try and soften some of the deafening noise. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Neil doing the same with a small rivulet of blood escaping from beneath his left hand.
“I HAVE BROUGHT YOU HERE TO LIVE FREE LIVES, FREE OF WORK, FREE OF HUNGER, FREE OF PAIN. YOU HAVE ALL OF THE FOOD YOU WILL EVER NEED. THERE ARE INSECTS TO POLLINATE THE FLOWERS AND I HAVE MODIFIED THEM SO THEY CANNOT HARM YOU. THERE ARE BIRDS TO EAT THE INSECTS AND PREDATORS TO EAT THE BIRDS HOWEVER I HAVE REDUCED THEIR SIZE SO THEY TOO CANNOT HARM YOU.
I HAVE CAREFULLY CONSIDERED ALL OF YOUR NEEDS AND HAVE THOROUGHLY ADJUSTED EVERY ASPECT OF THIS PLACE TO SUIT THEM. THERE ARE TWO OF YOU SO YOU WILL NOT GET LONELY AND THE AIR HAS BEEN REFINED SO THAT YOUR TINY LUNGS ARE CAPABLE OF BREATHING DESPITE YOU NOW BEING SLIGHTLY LARGER THAN DUST PARTICLES.”
Neil fell to his knees still desperately grasping his ears and Mark could feel blood trickling beneath his own palms now. His head ached from the power of the sound.
“BECAUSE OF YOUR SIZE, YOU WILL NOT AGE NORMALLY. WHEN I AM AN OLD MAN YOU WILL HAVE ONLY AGED TEN YEARS, AND WHEN I AM READY TO DIE I WILL RELEASE YOU AND RESTORE YOU TO YOUR NATURAL SIZE. YOU WILL BE ABLE TO LIVE FREE AND ORDINARY LIVES FROM THEN ON.
UNTIL THEN THIS TERRARIUM WILL HOUSE YOU, IT WILL TAKE CARE OF YOU, PROVIDE FOR YOUR NEEDS AND PROTECT YOU FROM THE SUFFERING OF THE OUTSIDE WORLD. THIS IS MY ACHIEVEMENT AND YOU WILL BE PART OF MY SUCCESS. WELCOME TO YOUR NEW HOME!”
When the vibrations of the voice subsided, Mark was able to clear his head for a second. He looked at the blood on his hands and wiped it on the front of his yellow tee-shirt before rubbing his ears on the shoulder material to clear any residual blood that had pooled there.
Welcome to your new home?
Was Mark to believe that he and this person Neil were going to live here for a period of years? Multiple decades even? He didn’t think he could imagine it. He didn’t want to imagine it.
As he gazed around he reluctantly noted that the fruit did look delicious, and there were plenty of tiny insects hovering around the flowers and birds flitting through the trees to confirm that they had not been the only organisms shrunk down to scale. If Mark wasn’t so frightened and full of adrenaline he might actually be impressed with the accomplishment. He shuddered as the gigantic floating eyes retreated with the head that housed them and disappeared from view.
So that was it. He was to believe that some madman had kidnapped him, shrunk him down to the size of a particle of dust, and trapped him within this terrarium somewhere in their bedroom to be looked at like aquarium fish?
Mark was sure he was dreaming.
“Are you Mark?” Neil called over to him, still massaging one of his ears.
“Yeah, Neil right?”
“Right,” his counterpart confirmed, “This is crazy.”
“I know,” Mark agreed, “This was not something I was expecting when I got out of bed today.”
“So, how do we get out of here?” Neil asked looking around, “Might be able to head in that direction? If there’s a corner we could climb up somehow.”
“What about the breathing?” Mark asked.
“What?”
“He said that the air has been refined so that we can breathe with our tiny lungs,” Mark pointed out to his companion, “This place might be airtight.”
“Oh yeah,” Neil acknowledged, thinking for a moment before saying, “We could always see if we could break our way out?”
“But then how would we breathe?” Mark reminded him.
“Oh yeah,” Neil repeated.
While he was thinking, Mark couldn’t help but appreciate the beauty of the world they had been trapped in. A land without suffering? Where all of his needs were met? It was an interesting thought. He could eat whenever, do what he liked, and never have to worry about growing old or going broke? He couldn’t help but feel slightly lured by this heavenly promise of early retirement.
He had not been a big fan of the 9-5 grind that he had departed the safety of university for a few years earlier, and a recent financial mishap put his hopes of making this month’s rent incredibly far out of reach. He sighed to himself noting it was definitely impossible now that he was imprisoned in this metaphorical garden of Eden.
He could see no large animals but surmised maybe they had been left out because they could break bones and cause harm. There were some rabbits and other small herbivorous mammals around that could provide meat of sorts if the two tired of fruits and vegetables. He considered that all of these animals were smaller than usual and reasoned that perhaps there were miniature foxes or even wolves the size of house cats running about. The longer Mark looked around and thought about his situation, the more willing he was to entertain the idea of remaining caged in the terrarium to enjoy what he felt was a well earned vacation.
“So, what if he’s lying?” Neil asked finally.
“Lying about the air?” Mark clarified.
“Yeah, what if he just wants to disincentivize us from trying to escape?”
“Sure, he could be lying.”
“So we should try to find a corner to this place and see if we can climb out of here somehow.”
“I don’t know, this doesn’t seem all that bad.” Mark said. Neil looked at him with incredulity.
“You’re not thinking of staying?”
“I don’t know,” Mark confessed flatly, “All I know is that I can breathe here, and he said we can’t breathe out there. This is all so crazy I’m really not sure what to think.”
“It’s too good to be true,” Neil argued, “It’s not possible! And think about this: everyone you know outside, everyone will be dead by the time he lets you out of here, if he lets you out of here, keep in mind, because as I said he could be lying.”
“I don’t really have anyone out there,” Mark admitted, which wasn’t necessarily true but he also didn’t think he would be lost without the people that he did have. He didn’t have any immediate family, but he did have friends he liked that he would miss. Neil paused for a second and thought about his own situation.
“I mean, I don’t have any friends or family but I still want to live my life.” Neil pointed out, “It’s my life. I don’t want to be cooped up here to be released in fifty years! Who knows what the world will look like at that point? The robots could have taken over by then and made us all slaves, is that a chance you want to take?”
“I just don’t see what the hurry is,” Mark concluded, “If we can break out today we can break out tomorrow. Or a week from now. Do what you want but I’m going to relax for a bit. This place is really something.” His gaze was fixed on a distant hill that had a beautiful blue waterfall cascading down it.
“I can’t believe I’m hearing this,” Neil said in disbelief, “We’ve been kidnapped by a loony and you want to sit around and wait for them to come back and kill us?”
“Rufus said he wanted to create a world without suffering,” Mark countered condescendingly, “Why would he kill us?”
“RUFUS… COULD… BE… LYING” Neil shouted, slowly enunciating each word so that Mark was sure to understand him, “Why are you believing a word he says? What if he gonna end our suffering by killing us?”
Mark was annoyed by Neil’s persistence at this point.
“What if we age at a normal pace and he lets us out when we’re seventy?” Neil continued, “What if he’s going to experiment on us or feed us to some monstrous creature he has created? Huh?”
“I don’t know, good luck with your escape.”
With that he turned and began to walk towards the biggest waterfall he had ever beheld.
Neil’s shoulders slumped and he watched dumbfounded as Mark strode away. He quickly came to his senses however and proceeded with his plans of escape. He jogged over to the glass wall which became more terrifying the closer he got because the world outside loomed into clarity, and it was a nauseatingly far away view. He stopped upon reaching it to puke briefly before wiping his mouth, looking both ways down the wall, and deciding to go left as he had suggested earlier, because it seemed to be the shorter distance.
Neil’s trot quickly slowed to a walk, which gradually descended in pace as the hours drew on. Without the sun moving steadily through the sky, everything was the same color of bright white light, all day long and Neil had no way of keeping track of the time. Unbeknownst to him, he had been traveling for almost nine hours when there was a loud click and everything went dark.
A dim blue glow came into focus from somewhere in the ceiling of the terrarium but aside from that, Neil could barely see more than a few feet in front of his face. He continued for a little while in the dark using the glass wall to his right for guidance but the shadows and his weariness eventually wore on him and he decided to stop and rest for the night.
His sleep was light and troubled with frightening dreams of giant floating heads and he awoke to a loud click and the bright light of midday beaming down upon him. Neil sat up in the grass and looked around in dismay, devastated that he had not dreamed the whole experience. His hopes rose swiftly however when he spotted a welcome sight: the end of the world. He had, without knowing, been quite close to where the two glass walls of the terrarium meet and were joined by colossal heaps of clear caulking that ran all the way up to the top of the container.
Neil sprinted the final hundred feet to the corner, clearing small bushes and dodging around tree branches so he could jump up and grab onto the caulking.
He could grip it! He would be able to climb this with ease!
Neil quickly began, hand over hand, to scale the corner of the tank. He was careful not to look through the caulking or glass at the gigantic world outside for fear of agitating his newfound sense of megalophobia. With each reach of his arms he felt closer to his escape and to freedom.
This madman wasn’t going to imprison him here. He would break out and find the shrinking machine and reverse this terrible affliction. When worries about how he would operate the device or what he had to do once he was outside swam into his mind, he quickly focussed on his breathing and on the short term concern of escape. It was all he could do to prevent from being overwhelmed by anxiety at these new prospective problems.
Right over left. Right over left.
All he had to do was escape and then he would figure it out from there.
Two hundred feet was an incredibly daunting distance to climb vertically let alone a thousand, but the caulk was lumpy enough that Neil found several spots with space enough for him to sit and rest to regain his strength and he eventually made his way to the summit.
The view of the terrarium was majestic and stole Neil’s breath as he surveyed the world below him. It really was an incredible accomplishment. He could see great big mountains in the distance, and rivers and lakes splashing the artful green horizon with beautiful hints of dazzling blues that shimmered under the bright lights. He could even see the lights themselves, gigantic LED bulbs embedded in a massive black rectangle that stretched out of sight along the top of the tank. It really was remarkable.
Neil sighed as he surveyed the landscape for a final time and then set his focus on escape once more. Here at the top there was what looked like a lid made of colorless plastic, although it was incredibly thick plastic compared to what Neil was used to and he had no hopes of breaking it. He pulled himself onto the rim of the terrarium and began to walk along the broad edge of the glass wall, heading away from the front of the tank and towards the back.
Neil walked in silence, with slowly diminishing hope until he saw something shiny and glinting far off in the distance. It was something metal. Neil rushed onward and after a while his spotted target came fully into view. It was a large silver machine with pipes that stretched through the top of the tank and whirring fans running up its side. Was this the air refining system? Was the kidnapper telling the truth? Neil felt torn between his consideration for this fact and the final attainment of his freedom.
This was a way out. He at least had to try.
All he had to do was get into one of the metal pipes and he could climb straight out to the other side. He stopped and looked back.
Should he go get Mark?
Should he at least tell him that this is here? Neil eventually shrugged and thought better of it. He had come a long way only to journey back to give information to someone who probably wasn’t interested. Neil concluded it would be a waste of his time.
He approached the machine which was making a soft humming sound and examined its front. There were panels here that he could pull away, and when he did, he found a clear opening into the pipes.
Neil was overjoyed! He quickly climbed in and pulled the panels back into place, in case leaving them off would damage the machine’s air refining ability. He didn’t care much for Mark but he didn’t want to murder the guy. Neil then squeezed himself along the horizontal vent until he got to where it ascended vertically and he did likewise, following it up for a minute or so with his shoes desperately gripping the metal interior until he finally came to its end.
He pushed on the metal lid and it shifted slightly, allowing him to move it entirely when he braced himself properly. Neil reached onto the edges of the shaft and pulled himself up into the world outside.
FREEDOM!
He took a deep breath and coughed hard. The air out here felt like it was full of smoke, but it was breathable nonetheless.
The scientist had lied!
Neil stood up and reset the lid on the vent, placing his hands on his hips and looking around triumphantly at the unfathomably ginormous landscape before him.
He began to feel queasy.
He saw a machine in the distance that could possibly be the shrink ray, but it seemed like it was hundreds of miles away and far larger than he might be able to climb. He bore in mind with much anxiety that he might need to get there before the scientist returned and discovered him missing. Taking deep gulping breaths and coughing back the thick air, he hurried off to find a place where he could safely climb down.
When Mark arrived at the waterfall he couldn’t help but smile. It was even more beautiful up close. The journey had been further than he expected and with his goal in sight, the lights had gone out last night causing him to make camp and continue at the click of day. The water was crystal clear up close and Mark could see all sorts of small, beautiful fish swimming in the river that the falls tumbled into.
This was truly a paradise.
Mark surveyed his surroundings and grinned. What could be so great outside that was worth all of the suffering? The rainy days? All of the pain? All of the news of the starvation and sadness in the world? All of the hours spent in cubicles counting numbers on a glowing screen in order to scrape enough money together to pay your bills and fall further and further into debt?
Why would he ever want to go back?
Mark considered the possibility that he might get bored but he concluded that it might take years for that to happen. This place was huge, there was plenty to explore. There were animals he could befriend, there were delicious fruits to try, and a whole wealth of knowledge he still hadn’t learned about this new world.
He reached up to a nearby tree laden with strawberries and sampled one. It was delicious! He delighted in the flavors as the bright crimson juices dribbled down his chin. It didn’t matter to him that strawberries don’t normally grow on trees. Mark was excited about this prospective new life and he stripped off his clothes and jumped into the river to swim in the waters that ran from the falls.
When Rufus arrived home from work on the first evening and he looked into the terrarium, he saw the tiny Mark making his way towards the waterfall and he caught sight of tiny Neil scurrying along the front glass panel towards the right corner. Both men seemed pleasantly occupied and when the lights turned out, Rufus also went to bed.
When he arrived home on the second evening Mark had arrived at the waterfall, but Rufus couldn’t see Neil anywhere. He adjusted his position, peering through the glass to try and discern any movement in the forests at the back of the terrarium, but every time he thought he spotted Neil, it was only a small mammal or bird. Once the dim blue light clicked on, it didn’t provide much visibility and despite continuing to search for a period, Rufus retired unsuccessful.
On the third evening, when Rufus could still not find Neil he tried asking the other resident of the tank.
“MARK!” Rufus called, “WHERE IS NEIL?”
The tiny Mark hollered out something but Rufus couldn’t hear it. He opened the top of the tank, letting a waft of outside air in, and lowered his ear so that it hung in the sky of the terrarium.
Neil is gone, the tiny reply came, barely a whisper despite being Mark’s loudest shout.
Rufus closed the lid again so the air refining machine could clear up any particulates that had gotten into the tank and he stepped back.
Gone? As in escaped? But why?
Rufus had provided everything they could ever want. He was disheartened by this news and looked around the glass container but wasn’t able to find any sign of Neil. He went to bed that night in a sour mood which did not improve when he woke the next day to grey clouds and left for work in the rain.
That evening when Rufus arrived home he had another, more thorough look around the base of the terrarium and even on the floor around his desk where the tank sat. Finally, to his great sadness, he found Neil’s lifeless body lying at the base of the desk leg.
Rufus was devastated.
He carefully picked up the tiny human and examined him. He did not note any broken limbs or external damage to the corpse, but there was blood around his mouth. Rufus guessed that Neil had died slowly from breathing in the unrefined air and it eventually filled his lungs and suffocated him. Rufus looked back up to the terrarium on his desk and marveled at what an incredible distance the tiny man had climbed with failing lungs. It was such a shame that Rufus’s hard work to prevent such suffering had been admirably overcome in a way that only assured it’s occurrence.
He reminded himself that it had been Neil to instigate his own demise in spite of the paradise Rufus had provided.
And at least there was still Mark.
Rufus checked on the terrarium every day when he returned from work and it brought him endless joy to see Mark exuberantly celebrating the splendors of the world that had been carefully designed for him.
A few days later Rufus was arrested for the kidnapping of Mark and Neil. The police had been contacted by several individuals for each event, all of whom witnessed Rufus drive up behind the men, jump out of his vehicle and beat them over the head with a rubber hammer until they were unconscious. Subtlety had not been a part of his plan. Before any of the witnesses could react, Rufus grabbed his victims and heaved them into the back of his silver minivan before speeding away, having removed the middle seats of the van to make the snatch and grab easier.
Two officers apprehended Rufus at his place of work and although they questioned him several times he would not reveal where he had taken Neil or Mark. The police threw their captured criminal into a holding cell and quickly retrieved a warrant to search Rufus’s flat. After they relished kicking his door down, they searched high and low for any sign or clue as to where the madman may have imprisoned the poor victims or stashed their deceased bodies. The officers had been searching for over two weeks at this point and despite being exhausted, felt encouraged by the new developments in the case.
The policemen overturned furniture, searched under his bed and spilled the trashcan all in a determined frenzy to find some way of locating the kidnappees, but to no avail. Their hopes withered and died after being fully rekindled by the arrest of their main suspect. In frustration, one of the cops shoved the serene terrarium scape off of Rufus’s desk and onto the floor, causing all of the contents to shift suddenly to one side as it smashed on the carpet in a pitiable heap.
© 2025 Sebastian Arends | Sincerely Seb. All Rights Reserved
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Five stars 🌟 i love 🥰 it so much I read it twice 💙💙
the way u write just flows and i feel like i know u i love it 🤍⭐️⭐️eee i would love your feedback bc you’re a strong writer on the post i put up last night i don’t mind if it’s constructive or what you think i cld improve!!!!