The Miniature Wife: and Other Stories (6 page)

Only in hindsight did I find it odd that the door was unlocked. I expected to see her waiting for me on the kitchen counter or on the coffee table. I stepped gingerly through the house, the cups around my ears so that I might hear her. Then I heard a noise from the upstairs bedroom, where I kept her dollhouse.
Of course,
I thought.
The dollhouse!
How silly of me to have forgotten! I took the stairs three and four at a time, reckless and youthful in my haste. I burst through the bedroom door and threw the house open, completely forgetting in my excitement that I might harm my wife, might split her in two.

And there she was.

In the dollhouse. In the bedroom. On our bed.

Naked.

And there, on the floor next to the bed, inexpertly covering himself with a pillow, was a cowering and miniature Richard Paul Wear.

My wife smiled at me and then leaned over to him, tousled his hair, and gave him a peck on the forehead.

Sleeping with my wife aside, Wear had broken company policy. Not only did he use his knowledge of miniaturization outside of the workplace, he did so on himself. Granted, I have made my own innumerable missteps, but surely anyone can see the difference between miniaturizing yourself so you can step out of the office for a nice go-around with your officemate’s miniaturized wife and stealing engorgement solutions and deminiaturizing machinery and using office resources to miniaturize beds and whatnot in order to make your (accidentally) miniaturized wife’s (temporary) miniaturized existence more comfortable.

But more important even than that, he knew about my own situation. Such knowledge could find its way back to the office, could spread among my employees, could result in my termination, an investigation, police reports, legal action.

So what else could I do but cover him in honey and seed and then feed him to the bird?

A conflict has arisen between my wife and me.

I destroyed the phone, lucky that my wife had not called the police, or worse yet, my supervisor, had only called Wear, whom she had met briefly at the last company picnic. Once the phone was destroyed, I locked my wife inside the dollhouse and covered it with a drop cloth.

“Live in darkness,” I yelled. “See how you like that.”

I came home to find the dollhouse burnt to the ground. Nothing else in our house had been damaged, aside from the tabletop scorched by the fire. I do not know how she managed to free herself from the dollhouse itself—I had nailed it shut, had covered the windows with squares of cardboard that I glued and then duct-taped to the outside of the house, had weighted down the drop cloth, had made it impossible to escape from. Nor do I know how she controlled the fire such that the house itself burned but nothing else. Yet there it is, or, rather, isn’t: The house, and everything inside of it (excepting, I can only assume, my wife), is gone.

I am not unprepared for this. To be honest, this is not unexpected. I am the kind of man who thinks through all possible courses of events. Horrifying or not, I did at one point imagine this might come to pass, or if not this exactly, something like this.

If she can burn down the dollhouse even as it sits inside our real house, then she is capable of almost anything. For this reason, I wear headphones and swimming goggles to sleep. I tie down the sheets, layer the bed three and four blankets thick. On far too many nights have I woken up only just in time to see the small figure of her jump from the top of our mattress and scurry beneath the bedroom door and into the hallway. Taking these precautions allows me to sleep peacefully, but when I wake in the morning, it is to the sickening smell of a dead cockroach, speared through its abdomen by a tiny metal skewer, the tip of which has been shoved firmly into the soft wood of our nightstand. She has set the whole thing on fire, hence the smell.

This is, unmistakably, an act of war.

In response, I am starving the bird. I haven’t fed him since I fired Wear. Tonight, before I go to sleep, I will set him free in the house.

This morning I woke to find the bird (dead) on my side of the bed, covered so that he appeared to be taking a nap. Either she guessed my next move or she had been planning this move all along.

How did she kill him? How did she manage to move him—he’s well over three times her size—and settle him on my pillow? How did she loosen the sheets, and when she did, why did she not do more to me? Questions I cannot answer, though I am not without my own next move. On my way home I will stop by our friend’s house and retrieve our cat.

Not just the cat, now; we also have a number of spiders and cockroaches that I set free to wander through the house. I like to picture my wife as Jason or one of his Argonauts, a sword in hand, fighting large and mystical beasts. Hordes of skeletons. Giant cats.

I have, furthermore, flooded the bedroom. The bed now sits on stilts. I have waders sitting just outside the bedroom door for when I come home and want to go to bed. The water is about a foot and a half deep. It is an unnecessary precaution. The cat will find my wife eventually if he hasn’t done so already. But one can never be too careful. With a large sheet of plastic spread along the perimeter of the room, I’ve built a miniature pool, a moat of sorts. Now that the room is flooded, I’ve stopped wearing my goggles and headphones. I sleep, some nights, without covers at all. And when I dream, I dream of the cat charging down on my wife. He has no front claws, but he has teeth. He has plenty of teeth.

I’ve also developed the habit of checking the house for spiderwebs and checking those webs for wife-shaped mummies. I have only found a fly or two. I scour the kitchen and the living room for the remains of my wife, but, again, nothing.

I’ve found nothing and have heard nothing.

Jason and the Argonauts. It is almost as if, by making the comparison in my head, I have brought this all upon myself. Now I am blind in my left eye, and the cat is drowned, floating next to the bed.

She loved that cat.

It all happened while I slept, of course. Though the cat must have been dead before it was drowned. Surely, the sound she would have made while struggling to drown her cat would have woken me.

I knew that she was still in the room. She must have been. She was somewhere hidden, her boat—how did she learn to make a boat, and where did she find the materials for the hull, the rudder, the oars, the sail?—safely anchored next to the bed. There was a good deal of pain after she stabbed me through, but partly I was acting as I writhed about the bed and tossed around the room, my hand cupped over my eye. While one eye bled, the other searched the room for signs of her.

I stumbled from the bed to the dresser to the closet, looking for threads, tiny ropes, anything she might have used to cross over the water. Nothing. She must have swum for it in those first moments when I was distracted by the pain. The waves thrown about by my stamping feet might have carried her even faster to the water’s edge.

Or perhaps she is even cleverer than that.

Perhaps she is still in her boat or just beneath it, bobbing just under the surface of the water, a small tube feeding her air.

With a quick swipe of my hand, I smash her ship, slam it under water and into the bedroom floor. Smash at it again and again and again until my hand is sore and bruised.

When I stop, the pieces of the boat float to the surface, but, sadly, my wife is not among them.

My wife is stronger than I am. I am ready to admit that now.

You are stronger than me.

I haven’t slept in three days.

Can you see the white flag, dear? Am I waving it high enough for you?

Part of the house, now, is entirely hers. She has set traps, trip wires. She nearly took me down the other day as I ventured into the kitchen, feeling all at once like Gulliver brought down by the Lilliputians, as thin but strong hemp twine twined its way around my ankles, my waist, my wrists. I stumbled into the stove but then shoved myself back and out of the kitchen, landing flat on my back, but with enough force to break the twine around my ankles, and quickly, then, I stood and kicked and screamed, in case she was nearby, ready to pounce again.

She has stuck tiny spears into the carpet, has formed a perimeter around her camp. Small spears bearing the heads of a spider or two, and some cockroaches, and at night, I can see a small bonfire and I stare at it, transfixed, wondering what she is burning. Pieces of carpet? Or insects? Or what?

Her camp. That’s where I am headed now. I will follow in her footsteps. It will be difficult and, small now as I am, blind in one eye, weak from lack of sleep, I doubt that I will make it very far, certainly not to her camp, and if I do make it through the living room and across the cold landscape of the kitchen and into the den where she waits for me, then I can only guess at the fate that awaits me there. But I will do everything in my power, will fend off hordes of spiders or cockroaches if necessary, will sacrifice my right eye if only it will allow me even the one last opportunity to creep up on her as she sleeps, wrap my hands around her thick neck, and strangle the life out of her tiny body.