The Tiny Wife

by Andrew Kaufman

  I did not feel like talking to this thief, and I certainly didn’t feel like seeking his wisdom, but what choice did I have?

  “Why did you do this?” I asked.

  “Because it had to be done.”

  “Don’t give me that – ”

  “If you don’t like my answer, that’s fine. But that is my answer. May we continue?”

  “How do we undo it?”

  “Do you still love your wife?”

  “Of course.”

  “Are you sure?” he asked, and there was such permission in his voice. I knew that I could answer no and he wouldn’t judge me. That ‘no’ would be a perfectly acceptable answer here. It made me pause, and within this pause the thief continued.

  “Perhaps one of the hardest things about having kids is realizing that you love them more than your wife. That it’s possible to love someone more than you love your wife. What’s even worse is that it’s a love you don’t have to work at. It’s just there. It just sits there, indestructible, getting stronger and stronger. While the love for your wife, the one you do have to work at, and work so very hard at, gets nothing. Gets neglected, left to fend for itself. Like a houseplant forgotten on a windowsill.”

  I didn’t know what to say. We were silent for a while.

  “Sorry,” the thief finally said. “I was working up to the houseplant thing. Relying on metaphors too much lately. Anyway, listen, you have no idea how many of these calls I have to make tonight. Take care of yourself. You have quite a fine woman there. Take care of her.”

  “Will you call again?” I asked, but the line had already gone dead.

  ∨ The Tiny Wife ∧

  Nine

  Thirteen days after the robbery, just as the afternoon sun was starting to come in the bedroom window, Stacey was alone in our bedroom, measuring herself without me. She set down the pencil, stepped forward, turned, and looked. Her height was the same as it had been that morning, 1,146 millimeters, a loss of 91 millimeters overnight. She sat down and looked up at the ten black lines on the door jamb, each one marked with the date, her height, and the amount she’d lost overnight.

  Stacey stared at the numbers. If I had seen her, I would have told her to stop dwelling on it, to let it go, to focus on the positive. It would never have occurred to me that she was looking for a pattern. Her shrinking seemed such a random and unbelievable thing that I didn’t even think to look for some sort of sequence.

  Since we hadn’t noticed that she was shrinking until three days after the robbery, we didn’t know how quickly she shrank on those first days; we only knew that she’d lost 9 millimeters in total. But from that day forward, we’d charted her shrinking on the wall, and these were the numbers Stacey stared at.

  “Day 4, 10 millimeters,” she mumbled to herself. “Day 5, 15 millimeters. Day 6, 21 millimeters.”

  The sun had reached our bed. Stacey continued to stare. There did not appear to me to be a sequence. While the numbers were getting larger, they weren’t doubling, nor was the rate of shrinking an integer sequence, or some kind of root. The sun was fully in the room, making everything yellow and hopeful, when Stacey suddenly stood up.

  “28, 36, 45,” she said. She walked forward and reached up to touch the bottom black line. “55, 66, 78, 91: it’s a goddamn triangular number sequence!”

  What exactly a triangular number sequence consists of is not an easy concept to grasp. It involves a sequence of equilateral triangles, evenly filled with dots. It is, perhaps, easier to see it.

  The sequence starts with 1.

  •

  Next is 3.

  •

  • •

  Add another point to the bottom row, and you have six…

  •

  • •

  • • •

  And then 10…

  •

  • •

  • • •

  • • • •

  And then 15…

  •

  • •

  • • •

  • • • •

  • • • • •

  The sequence continues by adding another point to the bottom row of points; the formation remains a stacked series of equilateral triangles. After 15 comes 21, and then 28, 36, 45, 55, 66, 78, 91, 105, 120, 136, 153, 171, 190, 210, 231… and so on and so on.

  Stacey was invigorated. She’d figured it out. She swayed slightly in the yellow light of the afternoon bedroom sunlight. She was proud of herself for cracking the code, and then, just as quickly, she realized what it meant. She ran out of the bedroom and slid down the stairs. In the kitchen she climbed onto the table and found a pencil and paper. Much later, after all of it was over, I found this scrap of paper, hidden at the back of our closet. The numbers, written in a shaky version of her handwriting, were as follows.

  DAY TALL LOSS

  14 1,146 91

  15 1,041 105

  16 921 120

  17 785 136

  18 632 153

  19 461 171

  20 271 190

  21 61 210

  22 –

  I can only assume what Stacey did next. I’m almost positive she would have double-checked her calculations. Then she would have reviewed her hypothesis and confirmed it was sound. I imagine her putting down the pencil and sitting. I imagine her beginning to cry. She would have cried and cried. She’d made her shrinking predictable but she’d also proven, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that she would disappear completely in eight days.

  This was information she kept from both Jasper and myself. Although Stacey had gone to every meeting of the support group, at this point eight meetings in total, and she’d given me elaborate details about everything that transpired at each one, all the stories of what had happened to whom, that she had discovered the day when she would disappear was something she decided to keep secret.

  ∨ The Tiny Wife ∧

  Ten

  The only other manifestation that involved shrinking happened to David Bishop, who’d stood first in line and given the thief an old cheap watch. He was driving to his mother’s house for dinner when he checked his cell phone and found ninety-eight messages. Every one was from his mother. After listening to the first seventeen, he discovered that the wording in every message was exactly the same. Only her inflection changed with each message, and this only slightly. Pressing some other buttons, he learned that all ninety-eight messages were sent at exactly the same time. He found this strange.

  Arriving at his mother’s house, he parked and was getting out of the car when he heard a tiny voice. “Watch out, you oaf,” he heard, barely. Bishop looked down and saw that he was about to step on a very tiny version of his mother, roughly one ninety-eighth her usual size. With his foot hovering in the air he looked at her front yard. It was populated by many tiny versions of his mother. There were tiny mothers on the sidewalk. There were tiny mothers on the porch steps. There were tiny mothers everywhere.

  “I’m sorry,” David said. Very carefully he set his foot on the sidewalk.

  “Don’t be so dramatic,” said a tiny mother. “It happens with age.”

  “No it doesn’t.”

  “Does too.”

  “It hasn’t happened to anyone I know.”

  “How many old people do you know? It’s happened to me.”

  “What has?”

  “Pick us up. We’ll tell you inside,” one of David’s tiny mothers said, lifting up her arms. David stooped over and picked her up. As he walked toward the house, every tiny mother lifted her arms in the same fashion. David picked up all of them. Though they were tiny, he could only safely carry twelve at a time. Making nine trips, just to be safe, Bishop collected all ninety-eight of his tiny mothers and set them on the kitchen table in their house. They were slightly smaller then the pepper shaker.

  The tiny mothers all looked up at him. Not one of them seemed happy. David couldn’t believe how frail his tiny mothers looked. Ninety-eight graying heads, ninety-eight stooped sh
oulders, one hundred and ninety-six sets of crow’s feet around one hundred and ninety-six squinting eyes – in repetition, how she’d aged was impossible to ignore.

  He couldn’t leave them like this. Carefully he started putting mothers in his pockets. His jacket had six pockets; twelve tiny mothers fitted in each outside pocket, eight in each inside pocket, and twelve tiny mothers fitted in his deep overcoat pockets. Bishop put the remaining thirty-four in the box of a toaster he kept forgetting to return, which had been in his trunk for weeks. Some of the tiny mothers would have preferred outside pockets where they could see, while others would have preferred inside pockets, where it was warmer. None of them wanted to be in the toaster box. Bishop didn’t ask their preferences, he just put tiny mothers away as he reached for them. There was a lot of complaining. Carefully he carried the box to the car, carefully setting it on the floor in the back seat. Carefully he got into his car and then he drove home, carefully. Wendy, his wife, was paying bills at the kitchen table when he walked into the house, setting the box beside her.

  “I thought you were going to return that,” she said.

  Bishop didn’t answer her. He started taking tiny mothers out of his pockets and setting them on the dining room table.

  “What happened?”

  “She seems to have split.”

  “Is she staying here?”

  “I can’t leave her like this.”

  “No. I don’t suppose you can.”

  Although the mothers were tiny, they proved no easier to take care of. Each tiny mother was just as particular in her eating, sleeping, and social habits as David’s mother had been when she’d stood five foot. They all wore the same dress, but had just that one dress to wear. They had no cutlery or plates to eat from, and they were forced to sleep on makeshift beds of Popsicle sticks and cotton wool.

  The tiny mothers got all over the house. They would wander away and become unable to find their way back. David was constantly finding tiny mothers hanging from the heating vents or stuck knee-deep in the soil of potted plants. For some reason they especially liked the medicine cabinet. Several went missing.

  The next day Wendy called David at work, asking him to come home. When he got there he found more tiny mothers standing on the kitchen table than he could count.

  “What’s happened?”

  “They split again.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  David watched the tiny mothers split again. Their numbers doubled, as they got doubly small.

  “What do we do?” David asked.

  “I don’t know if there’s anything we can do.”

  Standing shoulder to shoulder they covered every inch of the dining room table. The tiny mothers split again. Collectively they all raised their heads, motioning David to bend lower. He did, turning his head so his ear was almost touching the tops of their tiny heads.

  “We’re not afraid,” they said.

  “That’s good,” David replied. He wanted to hold their hands, but they were so tiny he couldn’t even see their hands, so he held Wendy’s instead. Moments later the tiny mothers split again and then split once more after that, becoming so small David could only see them if he squinted. Walking to the window, David opened it and let in a breeze that swept across the kitchen table and picked up all the tiny mothers and carried them away.

  ∨ The Tiny Wife ∧

  Eleven

  On Friday 9th March, sixteen days after the robbery, I carried Stacey up the steps of St Matthew’s Church. Neither of us knew that this, the twelfth, would be the last meeting of the Branch #117 Support Group. Stacey had gone to each one, watching the attendance dwindle and dwindle.

  She was 785 millimeters tall. If you picture the ruler you used all through high school, my wife was one and a half times as long. A list of things taller than my wife would include the seat of her chair, most television sets, and her two-and-a-half-year-old son.

  “Jasper, be careful of your mother,” I said. He took a step back and I set Stacey down. She walked inside the church and Jasper reached up and took my hand. I squeezed too hard. Jasper shook his hand free, turned, and hopped down, his feet making a smacking sound as they hit each step. Inside the church, Stacey employed the same technique as she made her way down to the basement.

  No folding chairs had been unfolded in the Sunday School room. There were no name tags or Sharpie pens. No smell of brewing coffee. Stacey sat on the bottom step and looked up at the light switch.

  The meeting was scheduled to have started fifteen minutes earlier. Stacey was the only one in the room. After twenty more minutes Stacey heard loud commanding steps coming down the stairs. Turning her head, she saw Detective Phillips, whom she hadn’t seen since the ninth meeting of the Branch #117 Support Group, and whom she’d simply assumed was dead.

  ♦

  On the day of the robbery, Detective William Phillips had handed the thief a large old-fashioned key, and decided not to play the hero. He was in the bank to pay his phone bill. The key was the original front door key of 152 Patrick Street, in Toronto, Ontario, the house where he’d always lived.

  The decision not to play the hero haunted Detective Phillips for the next fourteen days. On the evening of the fifteenth day, shortly after 6.30 p.m, just as he was preparing to leave for the tenth meeting of the Branch #117 Support Group, Detective Phillips was wiping the kitchen table when a large piece of history fell from the ceiling and struck him on the back of the head. He looked up just as the rest of the history became solid and fell.

  Two previous generations of Phillipses had lived in the house before him; there was much history to fall. If he had been in the front hallway his chances would have been better. The history there was relatively light, nothing but goodbyes and short-term reunions. But Detective Phillips was in the kitchen, the scene of countless late night desperations and early morning epiphanies, not to mention three conceptions. The most important moments that had happened in the house had occurred in that kitchen. The history that fell was numerous and weighty. It crashed down on Detective Phillips and buried him completely.

  “Help!” Detective Phillips called, but no one heard him. The history was piled too high. It covered the windows. It was dark underneath it and hard to move. What little air remained was thick and stifling.

  All through the night Detective Phillips repeatedly called out for help, but no help came. He had no food or water. He became weaker and weaker, and obsessed with the thought that none of this would be happening if he’d found the courage to stop the thief. He wouldn’t be trapped underneath all of this history. Jenna Jacob and Grace Gainsfleld wouldn’t have met their unfortunate ends. What was happening to Stacey Hinderland and Dawn Michaels could have been prevented.

  Detective Phillips spent the next day trapped beneath his family’s history. He spent a second night as well. He slept very little. His hunger and his thirst became overwhelming. In the morning, as he entered his thirty-seventh hour trapped, he grew desperate. Detective Phillips had been afraid to move for fear it would cause the history to shift and crush him. Now he knew he had no other choice, and he began to wiggle and shimmy. The history shifted above him, but instead of taking away the pocket of air he was in, a tiny shaft of light fell upon his eyes. For the first time since being buried alive he could see.

  The piece of history in front of him was an inappropriate remark made by a drunken uncle at a tense Christmas dinner. Detective Phillips looked to his right, where his great-grandfather was having a midnight realization that the bills could not be paid. Above that was his great-aunt’s tearful confession of repeated extra-marital affairs. With each piece of history Detective Phillips witnessed, he became a little stronger. He wiggled in the history and made enough room to stand. He put his feet on the linoleum floor and pushed and swam upward through the history.

  Detective Phillips swam past relatives he’d never met, never even known existed, and watched as they lost their jobs, their spouses, and their hope.
He saw failed businesses, broken promises, failed and broken men. In less then six minutes he broke through the top of the pile and swam to the west wall, where he hung onto a curtain rod.

  “You’re all losers!” he yelled toward the pile of family history. “We’re a family of losers! Three generations of it!” Detective Phillips laughed. He took a very deep breath. He let go of the curtain rod and gracefully dived below the surface.

  ♦

  As Detective Phillips came down the steps, the musty smell of history preceded him. He stopped three steps above Stacey, shocked by how much smaller she was. He looked around and noticed that none of the chairs were unfolded and that there was no smell of coffee.

  “Where is everybody?” he asked.

  “I thought I was the only one left,” Stacey said.

  “Do you want some help getting up?”

  Stacey shook her head no.

  “You just want to sit by yourself for a bit?” he asked.

  Stacey shook her head yes and then she listened to the sound of his receding steps behind her. She waited for twenty more minutes, but no one else came.

  ∨ The Tiny Wife ∧

  BOOK THREE

  ∨ The Tiny Wife ∧

  Twelve

  Four mornings after the last meeting of the Branch #117 Support Group, Stacey woke up on the couch in the living room with two gigantic eyes staring at her. The eyes were blue and all she could see; the nose was below the cushion, and the forehead was above her field of vision. Stacey became frightened. The eyes continued to stare. They blinked, and then the corners turned upward, and she recognized them as the eyes of her son.

  She did not need me to draw a black line on the white paint to know that she’d lost 210 millimeters overnight and that she was now 61 millimeters tall. She was now smaller than a car key.