Read The Miniature Wife: and Other Stories for Free Online Page A

grabbed my jacket and was about to leave when one of my technicians came in with a problem, an accident in the lab, which, in the end, took me until lunchtime to correct. As soon as I could, though, I sped home, my heart in my throat.
    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