“Played trains!” Jasper said. “No. No. Mommy no! Pasta!”
“What were you thinking?” I asked her.
“Not now, David.”
“You really thought that was funny?”
“Well, you won’t have to put up with me for much longer.”
“What, are you threatening to leave me?”
“You’re such an asshole.”
“I’m the asshole?” I asked her. I hit the steering wheel with my fist. Jasper started crying again. I turned in my seat so that I could look at her, and through the passenger window I saw the grill of a minivan quite close and not stopping. It pushed our car sideways through the intersection. I looked up, and then down, and then up again. The sound reminded me of when I lived in Winnipeg, walking on cold crisp snow. Then it was over.
I struggled to turn around but couldn’t for a while, until I remembered the seat belt. Unbuckling, I twisted in my seat. Jasper was safely secured in his car seat. The expression on his face asked whether he should be frightened or not. I forced a smile and nodded my head and Jasper laughed. “Again!” Jasper called, raising his little arms and kicking his little legs. “Again, Daddy, again!”
Then I saw that she wasn’t on his shoulder. “Stacey?” I called. I leaned into the back seat and searched the floor.
“Stacey?” I repeated. Jasper began crying. There was a knock on the passenger side window. I searched the floor with my hands. His crying became a wail, high-pitched and piercing.
“Hey – are you guys okay?” the other driver asked.
“Stacey?”
“Is that the kid? Is she okay?”
“Stacey!”
“Are you alright?”
“Stacey, where are you?”
I lifted the floor mat and Jasper’s screams got louder. The man at the window continued to knock. Then she crawled out from under the seat. There was a cut on her forehead.
“I’m okay, I’m okay,” she said.
“You’re hurt.”
“No. Not badly. Just get rid of this idiot.”
I looked out the passenger window and noticed the driver for the first time. “You almost killed all of us,” I said. “Go and get your registrations and insurance.”
The man disappeared from the window. I bent back toward the floor and carefully picked up my wife. I held her up so that Jasper could see her.
“Here she is!” I said. “Here’s Mommy.”
“Put me on his shoulder.”
I did as Stacey asked. Jasper stopped crying, but he continued to take long deep breaths. I watched her whisper into his ear.
∨ The Tiny Wife ∧
Sixteen
After the police and the call to the insurance agent and the tow truck, we were all in the back seat of a taxi heading toward our house. Jasper fell asleep in my arms. Stacey climbed out of my pocket and up to my shoulder. She stood on her tiptoes and kissed the bottom of my earlobe.
“I know things haven’t been good for us for a while,” she said. “But I do love you. I love you and Jasper more than I’ve ever loved anything in my life.”
Then she sat down and leaned against my neck. The cab continued south on Dufferin. The streetlights shone overhead. Neither of us moved until the taxi stopped in front of our house.
Jasper woke up as I carried him inside. It was past his bedtime but we let him stay up. He played trains on the living room floor, ramming a red one into a blue one in a way that mimicked the crash. I took some cotton from the end of a Q-tip and used Scotch Tape to fasten it over the cut above Stacey’s eye. The bleeding stopped but she continued to sit on the living room floor, staring at the wall. From the hallway I watched both of them, wondering why Stacey couldn’t have been one of the people whose manifestation had actually helped their lives.
♦
George Walterby had stood twelfth in line and given the thief his daughter’s pacifier, which he had accidentally put in his pocket that morning. When he got home, he discovered that his baby had begun to shit money: tens, twenties, the occasional hundred.
Over the course of the next three days the baby didn’t sleep a lot, but every time they changed her diaper there was money inside. The baby shit enough money that the parents didn’t have to worry about money anymore, which was a big relief since that’s what they had been worried about, before the robbery.
“We have the perfect baby,” George said.
Then, overnight, the baby got a fever. They took her to the doctor. The doctor shone a light in her eyes. He looked concerned and ordered tests. A machine was attached to the baby’s index finger. A nurse drained blood from her tiny arm. George had to look away.
Afterwards, George and his wife settled the baby down and waited with her in an over-lit room with curtains for walls. Children cried all around them. Three hours later the doctor returned. He went straight to the baby and shone the light in her eyes again.
“Have you noticed anything special about her?” the doctor asked.
“She shits money,” George said.
“Hmmm,” the doctor said, and he retreated through the curtain. Two more hours passed and then he returned again.
“She’s very sick, and we need to operate,” the doctor said. “The operation will fix her, but she will cease to excrete currency.”
“Do it,” George and his wife said in unison.
The doctors performed the operation, and the baby got better immediately. They took her home. The baby played and was happy, but George remained worried.
All afternoon he watched his daughter’s diaper sag. He did not change her. Just before evening he picked her up and set her on the couch. He pulled open the plastic tabs. He took a very deep breath. He took off her diaper. When all he found inside was shit George became happier than he’d ever been in his life.
♦
The day after she attended the first meeting of the Branch #117 Support Group and two weeks after her fourth miscarriage, Diane Wagner and her husband had retreated to their cottage when they noticed a storm coming in from the lake. Diane rushed around and closed the window in the living room, and her husband closed the windows in the bathroom and the kitchen. They rushed upstairs and closed all the windows up there. They sat on the bed and listened to the storm, which was directly overhead.
Thump, they heard. Thump! Thump! Thump!
“Those are awfully large raindrops,” her husband said.
“Yes,” Diane agreed. She was strangely nervous as she stood and walked to the window. Her palms were sweaty as she unlocked it. Her heart beat wildly as she opened the sash, reached outside and caught one.
∨ The Tiny Wife ∧
Seventeen
I left Stacey and Jasper in the living room and went into the kitchen and put the kettle on the stove, and then the phone rang. This time I heard it – it was an alarm, not a ring, and I raced to answer it.
“Can I speak to Stacey?”
“Who’s calling?”
“It’s Dawn,” she said. I carried the phone to the living room. Stacey and Jasper were playing trains on the carpet. Setting the bottom end of the receiver in front of her, I pushed the button for speakerphone and went back into the kitchen, where I listened over the sound of the boiling water.
♦
Dawn had been running from her lion, as she had been for the last eighteen days. Ducking into the liquor store at Bloor and Ossington she was pretty sure that it hadn’t seen her. She walked through the wines trying to catch her breath. In the middle of Australian she saw a purple hat on the other side of the aisle.
She followed him to the back of the store, and she was about to confront him when she heard screaming. Turning, she saw the lion bound into the store.
The staff and customers fled. Dawn, the thief, and the lion were alone in the store. Its claws clicked on the floor as it walked toward them. Dawn and the thief stepped backward until they were cornered. The thief pressed his back against the bottles of bourbon and Dawn pressed hers against the
rum.
“Do you remember me?” she asked him.
“I do,” he said. “I presume this is yours?”
Dawn nodded her head. The lion pushed hot breath through its nostrils. Dawn and the thief flinched. Bottles fell off the shelves and broke open as they hit the floor.
“Now would be a good time to let me know how to make it stop.”
Dawn looked at the thief and saw that he was more afraid than she was. She looked at the lion and saw that its gaze was not so much threatening as quizzical. It was the first time she’d been close enough and calm enough to see this. Her fear began to diminish. She clapped her hands once and the lion looked at her. It tilted its head sideways. Dawn extended her finger. She pointed at the thief.
“Get him,” Dawn said.
♦
“Is he dead?” Stacey asked.
“No. But I let it hurt him. He’s in the hospital.”
“Do you think that was okay?”
“I don’t know, but as soon as I called it off, it went back to being a tattoo on my leg.”
Stacey looked up from the floor. She touched the makeshift bandage on her forehead.
“Kind of weird,” Dawn continued, but there was no response from Stacey. I heard Dawn repeatedly call her name. I heard Jasper pick up the phone and pretend to have a conversation. I edged up to the kitchen wall and I heard Stacey using the knotted rope we’d run down the stairs so she could climb them on her own.
In the bedroom she scrambled over dress shoes until she’d reached the door jamb. She pushed her bare heels against the white wood. Extending her index finger, the tip of which was now smaller than the point of a pencil, she placed it flat against the top of her head. She touched the wall and closed her eyes. She waited for several moments, and then she waited several moments more. Keeping her finger in place, Stacey turned around to look. The tip of her finger rested directly on that morning’s line. She remained 61 millimeters tall.
∨ The Tiny Wife ∧
Eighteen
That evening, Stacey stood in front of Jasper’s door for a very long time. He did not cry or moan or even toss his tiny body underneath his covers.
Still she continued to stand there. Then she turned and walked away.
“David?” she whispered. “I have something to tell you.”
“I’m in the bath,” I called.
Stacey came into the bathroom. Candles were lit. I’d also hollowed out a sponge to create something like a pool lounger for her.
“Come in,” I said, and I held out my hand.
I will never know why she agreed to get in. Maybe the emotions the accident had stirred up were still with her. Or maybe the fact that she thought she had just hours left made all the resentment and anger irrelevant. Maybe she was simply cold and the water looked warm. I don’t know. But she got undressed and I helped her in.
It took several attempts for Stacey to find her balance on the sponge. If I moved even a little it almost swamped her, so I had to stop moving entirely. We both shut our eyes. The candles nickered. She was just dozing off when she drifted toward me, and the back of her head touched my arm. At first I thought it was a bead of water but when I opened my eyes I discovered it was her.
“At least we both fit in the bath now,” I said.
Stacey laughed. The laugh was neither loud nor long, but it was heartfelt. It was the first time I’d made her laugh since she’d begun to shrink. It was the first time I’d made her laugh in a lot longer than that. She looked up at me and smiled. She closed her eyes and sighed, deeply. Tiny ripples spread outward from the sponge she floated upon.
I thought nothing of them. Nor did Stacey. It would take us months before either of us realized that this was the moment when she imperceptibly, microscopically, but undeniably began to grow.
EOF
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