Miniature Wife : And Other Stories (9781101602041)

by Gonzales, Manuel

  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 enoug
h 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.

  William Corbin: A Meritorious Life

  CORBIN, WILLIAM (1570–1660). Clown. Place of birth: Manchester, England. After he died, William Corbin’s body was taken, in secret and at great peril to his acolytes, back into the heart of the Klounkova Territories, where, on a modern map, one might now find Moldova, though at one point, the Klounkova Territories ranged from the edge of the Black Sea and westward into the European continent, cutting large swaths through the Ukraine and Romania and parts of Bulgaria. Corbin was interred in the southern flatlands of Moldova, though it had been his wish to be buried deeper in, nearer the center of the Klounkovan encampments. In the end, his friends and followers dared not risk discovery by the nomadic and restless Klouns.

  Corbin owed his fascination with Klouns to his father, a village constable, who often took his three sons (of which William was the youngest) to variety acts and lowbrow, death-defying street shows, carnivals performed by traveling circuses hailing from Eastern European regions near or bordering the Black Sea. Inevitably, performing as part of one troupe or another, would be a Kloun, who, big-footed, of pale complexion, and with an over-expressive face, would often steal the show through popular movement skits and drama tumbles and the performance of ineffable sleights of hand. Although Corbin’s father detested the antics and the appearance of Klouns, William was enthralled by the graceful movements achieved by their curious and oblong shapes. Time and again, William would sneak past his father and watch with fascination, as “even their emboldened eyebrows danced along the contours of their paper-white faces.”

  One day, a young William broke from his family, found his way to a small congregation of Klouns, separate from the amassing crowd, and offered himself to them as an apprentice:

  Only after meeting them face-to-face, standing not two feet away, did I realize the truth of their size, speed & strength. Clearly, they stood a head taller than my own father, if not taller still, and were fit with powerful legs & exaggerated forearms. Silent they were as three stood & before I knew they had yet moved, surrounded me & lifted me above their heads. One supported my legs, the second my neck & shoulders, while the third walked alongside & beneath me, & they turned me over & over again, as if I were a spit hog, cooking over an open flame.

  The Klouns stripped the boy of his shoes, replaced them with a pair of their own, large and ridiculous, and then smeared a chalky substance across his face in uneven clumps before setting him back down and roughly pushing him back toward the crowd, whose attention had turned from the puppet show to the performance of the Klouns and Corbin.

  “Yet the whole time, not once did they speak, nor never did one even so much as smile.”

  At the age of sixteen and disillusioned but not swayed by this encounter, William Corbin began in secret to learn the actions, attitudes, and performances of Klouns. Spending long hours watching carnival sideshows where Klouns most frequently performed, William put to memory many of the more well-known Kloun acrobatics, such as Bênchï’s Ten Facial Forms and Coefçneuçi’s Six Corporal Attitudes, which he then practiced at night in an abandoned shed some miles outside of town. When not practicing the foot steps and body rolls of Klouns, William occupied himself with the design and construction of authentic feet—“overlarge and made of flesh-colored sap, fired and molded to a shape that, when placed flush to my own foot, fits so that one cannot tell that my feet are, in relation to most Klouns, abbreviated, and made of such materials, and with accurate texture and design, so as to act not as simple props, but to act as feet act.” He also spent his time mixing face powders with plant resins to produce makeup to pale the color of his face and redden the surface of skin around his cheeks, the recipes of which have long since been lost or forgotten. He worked for over three years to develop a mixture that would not fade or smear despite “sweat, the heat of a noonday sun, the salt waters of the Atlantic, nor the simple, casual touch of a child’s finger, drawn along my cheek to see if I am real, to see if I am in fact a Kloun.”

  At nineteen, confident in his appearance and the craft of his movements, confident, too, in his ability to pass as a Kloun, William Corbin began performing in the town’s main square, never once recognized by his neighbors or friends or even his father. He continued performing for six months before he joined a small traveling show that was headed back to mainland Europe with plans to return to Romania and hopes of performing along the way. He traveled for two years without incident or discovery, further honing his skills as a Kloun and learning the now extinct language of that people. Once in Romania, Corbin left the troupe and traveled into the Klounkova Territories, which had begun to shrink little by little, year after year. To his surprise, he was easily accepted by a highland tribe, with whom he traveled for two years, and where he married and he lived peacefully, and soon he began to feel not that he was disguised as but was in fact a Kloun.

  Although he kept a journal of his life from the time he left England, his entries are written almost exclusively in Klounkovan, a singular and indecipherable language, and so it is that no one knows how his charade was discovered, only that it was. In 1640, William Corbin was violently expelled from his tribe and was forced to leave the Territories. He was separated from his wife, who, it is believed, was pregnant, and he was often forced to hide even after crossing the border separating Klounkovan lands from the rest of Europe, even as he traveled back to England, shadowed as he was by a small, independent band of Klouns who believed exile too lax a punishment for Corbin’s crime and betrayal.

  Once he returned to England, Corbin continued to perform under different names and bearing different guises, and in time developed a system of training others in the movement arts of Klouns. Every week until his death, a small group of men (no more than ten at any given time) would gather at night and in secret in the chill and damp fields on the outskirts of town to learn Corbin’s craft. While these men’s movements paled in comparison to those of the original Klouns, and could not compete even with the inestimable power and abilities of Corbin himself, they continued to practice his craft nonetheless, and passed on his knowledge to others, and their descendants continue to perform even today, having, over time, outnumbered and then replaced the race of Klouns, which disappeared some few years after Corbin’s death and whose storied past has long since been forgotten.

  The Sounds of Early Morning

  She sat up in bed but couldn’t find her husband, then found him lying (“Poor exhausted bunny”) on the floor at the foot of the bed, the surgical mask still wrapped around his head, twisting around to cup not his mouth but his ear. If she squinted at him, he looked scrubbed and fresh and like a boy playing doctor, but she had to squint.

  How funny, she thought. How absolutely wonderful.

  Moving through the house to the kitchen, she noticed the cracks in the wall were bigger today than they had been the day before. They would have to mov
e soon, or else repaint.

  In the living room, the dog was barking, and though she couldn’t hear him, the force of his barks made her chest feel rubbery and beat upon, and so she moved quickly through the room, crouching behind the couch so that its cushions, already torn beyond repair, would absorb the brunt of the animal’s timbral and violent voice.

  There were still dangers, she decided. And if her husband continued to refuse to send the dog away, something else might have to be done. For their own protection.

  Once she had made it through the living room and into the kitchen, forgetting for the moment that her ears were protected, she moved gingerly among the items on the counter and the appliances in the cabinets, lifting pots and pans by two fingers instead of four, cracking the breakfast eggs the old way, wrapped in nonreactive plastic towels, rolling them under a heavy, padded, cast-iron pin so that the shells were crushed fine, would not be as noticeable when eaten. She had become so adept at her routine, so careful, so quiet, that it wasn’t until she dropped a dish that she remembered being protected, remembered her husband’s tiny knife, the sharp pains, and now the blessed, blessed silence.

  She smiled.

  The first task, she decided, was to take care of the dog. She was reluctant, but she couldn’t rightly avoid the dog forever.

  She wrapped herself in her afghan. She tightened her hood. She wore her mittens. The dog had chewed the goggles into a useless mess, so she approached him with her eyes closed, rapidly blinking at intervals to check her progress, his movements. Grabbing him, she covered his snout and threw him outside, and then beat him back with her voice until, with what she imagined was a whimper, he scuttled off. Better, she would explain to her husband, than cutting its vocal cords. No need to be cruel, she would explain. Can’t leave the poor thing defenseless.