"ARRRRRRRRIEEEEEEETTYYYYYYYYY!"

The shriek was high, thin and piercing. It jolted her out of a sound sleep. She slapped her hands over her ears and felt grass between her fingers. The sunlight was blinding. She closed her eyes against it.

"Oh, Arrietty!" Her mother wasn't shrieking anymore, but her voice was still distressed. She was on the verge of tears. "You did have a bad dream, didn't you?"

Arrietty blinked. Her face felt gritty. She touched her cheek and found dust, dust migrating down from clumps in her hair, clumps prickly with grass roots. She looked down and saw the blankets, with their careful, ever so slightly irregular stitches - the size of napkins, perched over her navel, rising and falling with her breath. The buttons on her pajamas were the size of... well, buttons - human bean buttons, that is. From the waist up she was above the grass; she could see bluebells that were only as high as her elbow, bees the size of her thumbtip. From the waist down... well, she was afraid the lumps between her toes were their pots and pans, which meant her foot was in the kitchen.

Her mother was hovering near Arrietty's right hand, which was planted firmly in the bedroom's fireplace. The ashes were warm around her fingers. Arrietty wanted to comfort her, but she was afraid Mama would run if she moved her now enormous hand.

"Not a bad dream, Mama," Arrietty stammered. "Just a... a big dream."

X X X

"I never thought," her father said solemnly, "that bigness could be contagious."

Arrietty wrung her hands. She was happier than not to find that it was, but... "Are you sure I caught bigness from talking to - to human beans?"

Her father sighed and took a sip of his coffee. They had moved this little conference outdoors, since Arrietty was already mostly outdoors anyway, and Arrietty had done their dugout burrow the dignity of removing her hinter parts from it. She now sat crosslegged on the grass and the clover while her parents sat on pebbles perched atop a squirrel mound. This saved them from having to crane their necks until they snapped to get a look at their daughter.

"I'm not sure," he admitted, "but of the three of us, only you have gotten big, and only you have talked to a human bean."

He was not being accusative, merely stating facts. Arrietty winced anyway. "Mama saw him too..." More specifically, he had also seen Mama.

"Eh, but she didn't talk to him."

Mama, who had been fiddling with her teacup until now, nodded at this point. "He had a nice face," she recalled, a generous statement considering her situation at the time. "But I didn't talk to him."

And she didn't touch him, either, Arrietty thought. No need to bring that up just now. "Then, do you think I could get small again by tou- er, by talking to a Borrower?"

Homily sprang up. "That should do it, then, shouldn't it?" she cried. "We're talking to you right now!" Then she wilted, like a light going out. "But nothing's happened."

"We don't know that yet," her father said sensibly. "It took a few days for her to get big. Maybe she's already back on her way to small."

Oh, not yet! Arrietty looked about pleadingly, at the fields that were no longer so dangerous, at ravens croaking on the fence who she could now approach with impunity, at little streams and puddles and cow prints that didn't pose any great barrier to her new body.

But all she said was, very sensibly, "Well, shouldn't I fix the dugout then, before I go back to being small?"

"That's a good idea." Father finished his coffee and came over to pat her knee. A touch; but it was through the pajamas, not skin on skin. Maybe that didn't count. She'd been talking to her family for weeks since then, and it hadn't kept her from becoming big. If bigness really was contagious, she rather thought it was touch that passed it on and not talking.

"But where is she going to sleep in the meantime?" Mama, ever a mother, hovered as near the enormous knee as she dared come. "She's outside now, in the wind and the rain."

Arrietty hadn't thought of that. From her father's grave expression, he had thought of it but hadn't wanted to say anything until he thought of a solution too.

"Well..." Arrietty didn't want them to be anxious. She peered about, shading her eyes; her mother flinched when she raised her hand, but Father didn't budge. After a minute, she lowered it.

"I see a cowshed, there in the corner of the field." She pointed, but from the waist, so as not to frighten Mama by whipping her hand up. "Maybe there is something I can Borrow - blankets or - an umbrella, or something."

"So far away," her mother whispered. "Why, that cowshed is yards and yards from here!"

"It's not far, Mama." Arrietty smiled, brightened with an excitement she couldn't hold back. "Not for me!"