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myself every night after coming home. I could sleep with my wife then. We could be together. Though it goes against my sense of ethics, true, it is so much simpler a solution.
    And I have so far tried just about every known process for deminiaturization that I can think of. I have brought home engorgement and enlargement solutions, a number of which I developed myself and know for certain to be foolproof; I’ve made her spend four hours inside the Magnifying Chamber, a rather small device itself, small enough, anyway, to slip into my pocket before I left the office for home, breaking, again, any number of laws and office policies; and, as a last resort, I carried her out of the house and drove her to the remote piece of badlands owned by the company and there, uncertain as to whether she would even survive, I pushed her through the Fibonacci Tunnel.
    Nothing has worked.
    I’ll leave my wife a note explaining my idea to her. If we discuss it, I’m sure she’ll see the benefits. I’m sure she’ll see that this might in fact be the best thing for us.

     
    For a moment, for one single moment, a long but single moment, I harbored a fantasy of what life might be like, what our life together might be like, if I were unable to restore my wife to her original size. If we were to live together in the dollhouse I built for her, which is, as I’ve said before, a very nice house, a much nicer house. Then I spoke that fantasy out loud, and then the fantasy was ruined.
    What I mean to say is: This ordeal has taken its toll on all of us.
    Today, I had to fire one of my employees, Richard Paul Wear. He was not the best man—as his actions proved—but he was a very good miniaturist; he was ambitious.
    And though his actions are unpardonable, I cannot blame him entirely. I should have known that miniaturizing a phone for my wife would lead to, if not this exactly, something similar. But I was concerned. I had had no word from my wife since I finished the project, and after the first two days, I saw no more signs of life in the house. The bed was made; the rooms were neat and untouched. I left her notes, but they went unanswered. She had stopped leaving me notes long before all of this. My questions about miniaturizing myself were ignored. I called for her, softly so as not to damage her shrunken ears, but my voice did nothing but agitate the bird. The truth is, I sorely missed my wife. The construction of the dollhouse, as it was for her, helped me manage through her absence, and there were little signs of her presence around the house—the flies, the dulled razors, the notes, the torn buttons—and though annoyances, they proved to me that she was still around. Since the completion of the house, I have heard nothing.
    Therefore, I bought a cordless phone and miniaturized it. (The depths to which I have sunk!)
    I wasn’t sure if the signal would work for such a small phone, nor did I have a means of testing the equipment, but I figured there was nothing left to lose. With a pair of tweezers, I placed the tiny phone on the coffee table of the downstairs living room of the dollhouse, where my wife could easily find it. Three days passed without word from her. I called home once or twice a day. The phone must not have worked, I thought. Or she has left me—even if she had not yet left the house—or she was dead.
    On the fourth day, I came back to my desk from a meeting and found a message on my phone. “Come home for lunch, dear. I’ve missed you so.”
    Until that moment, I hadn’t realized just how much I had missed the sound of her voice, full and loud and loving. Why hadn’t I thought of the phone before? There was nothing small about her over the phone line. I did not hear the voice of my shrunken wife, but rather the voice of the woman I loved, the woman whose touch I missed. The sound of it brought tears to my eyes. I felt faint. I wanted to leave immediately, drive home, meet my wife, tell her how much I loved her. I