Hunted

My name is James, and I am a borrower. If you are not familiar, we are tiny people who live in the houses of people you would consider normal size; that we refer to as “ beans ” We live under floorboards, in crawl spaces and between the walls. We “borrow” what we need from the big people to survive. There are three families of borrowers in the large house I live in.

The basement I lived in had been converted into some kind of laboratory. There were no floorboards to live under but plenty of room behind the cabinets that had been I'll fitted down here. This is where my family and I lived, although I had made my own home, two cabinets over; closer to the stairs. There was an air vent that gave us access to the floors above. The farther of the human family that lived in this house was some kind of inventor. This was a profession that earned him some respect to us borrowers, not that he knew it.

One night, while exploring the lab I accidentally knocked over and spilled some chemicals on myself. Since then I have gained the remarkable ability to speak to animals. It did not seem to be the intent of the human to create such a concoction and I don’t think he has worked out how the spill happened or the consequence of the mixture.