Refrigerator

The Refrigerator changes from a familiar household appliance into a mountain-sized destination in Carey's cellar. Its open Cracker box offers Scott Carey a possible answer to hunger, but reaching it demands a journey across a landscape of objects that have become immense at his scale. The appliance is both a concrete resource and a measure of how radically shrinking has altered his relation to the domestic world.

Design and Changed Scale

The Refrigerator is an old-fashioned model stored in the cellar since the household moved into the house, apparently only months earlier. Its coils are enclosed in a cylindrical structure on top, beside which an open Cracker box stands. As far as Scott knows, that box contains the only food left in the cellar. He had placed it there himself one afternoon before he became trapped, so its location is not a new discovery; what has changed is the distance between knowing where food is and being able to reach it.

From the floor, the appliance’s white bulk fills his view. Its legs resemble piano legs, and its summit is likened to a mountain peak. The comparisons register more than fear or exaggeration: Scott’s shrinking has made ordinary dimensions functionally different. In his perspective, the Refrigerator is as high as a ten-story building, while the wicker table beside it is only half as high. He knows these are household objects, yet their material scale governs what he can attempt and what may remain inaccessible.

That altered scale also changes his sense of time. Scott remembers leaving the crackers on the Refrigerator before his confinement, but the interval seems much longer than it is. Hours, he feels, are made for people of normal size; for someone smaller, they stretch out in proportion. The food cache therefore marks a before and after: it preserves a trace of his former, ordinary relation to the house while confronting him with the altered body that must now negotiate it.

The Food Quest and Its Routes

The Refrigerator becomes urgent when Scott’s bread runs out. He has eaten a quarter loaf over five weeks, washing the last scraps down with water; with that supply gone, the crackers are the only food he knows of in the cellar. He approaches the appliance hungry and looks up at its sheer face, caught between the need to act and the difficulty of choosing a route. The oil burner’s sudden ignition interrupts his deliberation with a roar and vibrations through the floor, reminding him that even the surrounding machinery can feel threatening at his scale.

Several approaches are possible, none easy. Scott considers climbing a ladder propped against the fuel tank, crossing from the tank to stacked cardboard boxes, moving over the broad leather face of Louise Carey’s suitcase, and then climbing the hanging rope to the Refrigerator. Another route would begin at a red cross-legged table and continue across the cartons and suitcase to the rope. A third would use the nearby wicker table before the same final ascent. These alternatives turn the cellar into a network of precarious transfers: success depends not on one simple climb but on finding a connected path through objects that were never arranged for him.

The plans do not immediately overcome his hesitation. He stands staring at the Refrigerator, then forces himself out of bleak indecision: unless he reaches the crackers, he will starve. The decisive point is not that the climb becomes safe, but that the alternatives have narrowed to action or the loss of food. The Refrigerator thus gives his hunger a visible destination and converts an abstract need to survive into a specific, daunting task.

The Rope and the Summit

The final approach is especially demanding. Near the Refrigerator, Scott reaches a rope hanging down in twisted loops; it is body-thick from his perspective. A crumpled pink rag beside a large bottle of turpentine offers a brief chance to warm himself. He wraps part of it around his body, tucks it beneath his feet, and rests in its folds. The cloth smells of paint and turpentine, but the warmth it retains matters more. Only after resting does he recognize it as an old slip of Louise’s that she had torn up and discarded. The climb’s practical preparations therefore carry an unexpected reminder of the domestic life from which he is now separated.

Looking up from the rope, Scott reckons that the climb still amounts to roughly seventy-five feet, with no footholds except those he can find on the rope itself. He will have to pull himself upward. Hunger presses against his stomach as he rests, and thoughts of elaborate meals prompt him to get moving again. In the later scene at the summit, he pushes a bundle over the edge and watches it fall, bounce on the cellar floor, and land with a crunch; it has held together. The Refrigerator’s top has become more than a remote food shelf: Scott can occupy it, handle materials there, and use its height as part of his effort to manage life below.

A Cache of Food and a Trace of Public Attention

Once on top, Scott looks around for something useful and finds a newspaper folded against the cylindrical coil casing. Dust covers it, and water from the leaking sink has blotted its lettering and eaten into the cheap paper. The visible letters identify it as a copy of the New York Globe-Post, the newspaper that published his story, at least as much of it as he could bear to have told. The object he finds while searching the Refrigerator’s summit leads him back, in memory, to the day Mel Hammer came to make an offer.

The newspaper connects two otherwise distinct uses of the appliance. The Cracker box makes the Refrigerator the focus of immediate bodily survival; the paper on its top carries evidence of the public story that had grown around Scott’s shrinking. The top is not simply a vantage point above the cellar floor. It holds discarded household material and a damaged record of the attention his condition attracted, bringing the intimate geography of his confinement into contact with the wider circulation of his story.

Later Priorities and Significance

The Refrigerator’s importance belongs to a changing struggle, not to a permanent solution. Later, when Scott searches for a lost pin, he looks beneath the sponge and the box top but cannot find it. He suspects that a giant has kicked it away or that it has become embedded in the sole of a huge shoe. His attention shifts to a carton beneath the fuel tank, which looks miles away; he decides not to obtain another pin and resumes walking toward the water pump. Earlier, the distance to the Refrigerator had compelled him to plan a difficult climb for food. In this later moment, another distant object does not persuade him to renew an effort.

The contrast gives the Refrigerator its particular place in Scott’s cellar life. It is an ordinary appliance whose height and stored food become consequential under conditions of shrinking, and its summit is reached only through labor, improvised rest, and uncertain routes. The crackers make it a survival objective; the newspaper makes it a repository of memory. Across these uses, the Refrigerator exposes the gap between recognizing familiar things and being able to use them, a gap that grows as Scott’s body and the world around him fall out of their former proportions.