Walk Slowly and Bring a Magnifying Glass

by Marie Croke

All the buildings in my town started shrinking once I turned eighteen. I noticed one foggy morning before the end of school, pointing out how the kitchen door frame grazed my hair, but my parents just laughed and said they’d known I’d always end up taller than them. I presumed my memories of high school, about how large it had been on that long-ago first day, were likely just a distant haze of incorrect recollection.

Yet, I left that autumn believing the world had expanded, become larger than the circle I’d endlessly traversed in my youth. An expanse for me to explore.

When I returned the next summer, the roads narrowed with each turn. The streets squeezed me, claustrophobic-like. White lines pressing close, ripple pads vibrating through the tires if I so much as wavered out of place. Everything tight, like a favorite too-small shirt I insisted on wearing anyway despite having outgrown.

My car no longer fit within my parents’ garage. I had to park on the street and ignore the neighbors’ sidelong glances at my size. The mailbox, once large enough to hide a bird’s nest when left open too long, was smaller than my pencil case. Mom’s flower bed of hyssops and columbine and sage too far away to smell unless I knelt in the dirt. I could scarcely hear the bees crawling across the azaleas.

I had to duck to squeeze inside the house. In the living room, I took up an entire couch, the quilted blanket draping its back familiar, but no longer large enough to make a fort I might fit underneath. Dad looked frail where he claimed his recliner, Mom a bustle of energy walking back and forth so the cookies wouldn’t burn nor my glass of ice tea run out. I told them all about my time away, my classes, my part-time job, the new friends I’d made who were all so very different, and yet each beloved in their own way.

Mom claimed I didn’t write enough and pointed to where she kept the couple of letters I’d sent, folded in a place of honor on her hutch. “Do you have enough stamps?” she wanted to know. Then didn’t listen when I told her I could buy my own, pressing a whole roll in my palm saying, “I’ll send you some fun stationery too.”

So I wrote to her more often. The stationery she sent was the size of an index card, but I used it anyway, shrinking my handwriting as small as I could to add details about my life, grades I’d received, stories of customers at the retail job I worked on weekends, the parks and landmarks I visited on break, the people I dated once or twice or longer.

When I returned home again, I could see over their house the way I used to be able to see over their car. I had to watch where I stepped, for children still ran chasing balls into the streets and dogs pulled at leashes on the sidewalks. I no longer fit inside the door and had to lay across the driveway and stick my head into the garage in order to carry on a somewhat normal conversation with my parents. Mom commented on how I’ve grown. Dad complained that the grass never got cut quite as well anymore, all the services he used worthless compared to my summer upkeep before I’d left, so I began plucking the strands, twisting them between my fingers until he yelled at me to stop because I’d yanked up too much dirt.

He’d never been one for yelling before, but I couldn’t hear his softening, shrinking voice otherwise.

I didn’t come home the next two summers. Work. And friends. Life, I said in my letters. Then met a man who made me smile even on my worst days. Snagged an internship I’d been craving. Said yes to a trip out of country, using money I’d saved up myself. I wrote to them, bragging about my independence.

Mom wrote back, in handwriting so small and cursive I had to hold it to my nose to read. Said they were glad I was doing well, how proud they were of me, and here, she’d sent me a gift card for the grocery store. And “will you be home for the holidays, perhaps?”

I wasn’t, not that year. I had plans to visit his parents for their holidays, and I couldn’t do both.

She understood. Sent care packages with plastic-wrapped cookies that tasted like cinnamon and childhood. Even after graduation, even after finding a job where I worked a nine-to-five, five days a week, forgotten subscription services for mediocre shows filling my evenings, she’d send care packages every now and then. Sometimes with new stationery—decorated with long-stemmed roses or pastel turtles or geometric designs—to slightly nudge me to write more, write often, hinting that the short, emoji-filled texts I sent weren’t enough.

She didn’t call to tell me Dad was sick. Instead, I received a letter, so tiny the postman must have struggled to read the scrawled address. I almost missed the envelope for it fell from between bills and bounced off my toe. I could scarcely hold it between two fingers and had to use a pair of tweezers to open up the paper and fetch a magnifying glass to read Mom’s cursive.

That trip home, I could no longer stick my head in the garage. I had to squish my body in the street, careful that my elbows didn’t knock down the neighbors’ trashcans.

Dad’s casket was easy enough to carry, but the cemetery was difficult to traverse, the gravestones like little toys pointing up, threatening to poke and prod my feet if I dared step foot in the burial ground.

I could scarcely hear the priest. But I stared at Mom the whole time, as she cried and hugged herself. Wished I could hug her. Settled for stroking her back, which she would respond to by looking up at me with a watery gaze and an attempt at a smile.

She bade me leave after. “Town’s too small to hold you. You’ve got places to be, things to accomplish.” Blew me kisses from below. I stayed a little anyway, just to listen to her ramble on about days when I’d still been small enough to fit inside the house. Fit inside her arms.

I left her with some happy news that I’d been waiting to share until three months along, but eight weeks was close enough, I decided, and she looked like she needed it. Told her my due date. She clapped through her tears and immediately set about finding her crochet hooks, colors and patterns and yarn weight an endless murmur off her lips.

The blanket she sent seven months later was a lovely teal with open holes. It was also the size of a washcloth. I draped it over the crib railing anyway.

The next time I came home, the Uber dropped me miles outside of town. “Can’t drive any closer, ma’am. Liable to crush the whole town. Walk slowly,” he suggested with a stress on the slow, “because some kid crushed the Lutheran church a couple weeks ago and the county’s getting bogged down in emails demanding better protections since. Just be careful. You’re from here?”

I nodded.

“Weird, that.”

But he didn’t explain what he meant before putting up his window and driving off again, leaving me on a shrinking road lined with what looked like bushes that I swore had once been tall oaks and beautiful sycamores. I could travel the whole street within a few steps. And the street after that.

The church the driver had mentioned cut a crumbling figure. I picked up a handful of rubble, its steeple a tiny point rising out of the brick and the bell a glint of bronze. I’d not thought to bring a magnifying glass. Next time, I reasoned. Next time.

This time I met my mother on the outskirts of the neighborhood where I wouldn’t inadvertently crush anyone and wrote on paper so my voice would not boom. She was doing well, she said. Wanted to see photos of the baby. Lamented not being there at the birth.

She offered me freshly-baked cookies that looked like they’d been bought from the dollhouse section of a hobby store. I ate the whole plate and imagined I tasted the molasses of the gingersnaps burning pleasantly on my tongue.

Mom took up emailing after that, forwarding me messages to let me know the county was putting up walls to stop anyone from trampling on them. I professed gratefulness that the county was seeing sense; Mom professed irritation that there would be rules now in place over me visiting. She’d wanted to see the grandchildren in person. Wanted to hold them, though she was much too small for that now. Wanted to teach them how to bake cookies, like she’d taught me.

I had her send me the recipes and video called her to watch and read stories she’d read to me as I let my toddler stir the flour and sugar, let them plop globs of dough onto a baking sheet, as they tasted the hot cookies right from the oven.

“That’s what grandma’s house tastes like,” Mom said. “Don’t ever forget, okay? That’s what’s it’s like at my house. Cookies and stories and—” She lifted her hands, spotty with age, to indicate the kitchen all around her, though I knew what she was really gesturing to was herself.

Cookies and stories and her.

The last time I went home, I didn’t receive a letter first, nor a text, nor an email. Just a call, the voice tinny as the mechanized autotune increased the volume automatically as it did for anyone from home.

Mom was buried next to Dad, the two of them side by side. I imagined them holding hands there, under the dirt, like they had when we’d gone for walks. The concave writing on the gravestones difficult to read despite bringing my magnifying glass.

I’d been given special dispensation to visit. Limited duration. Mini caution tape blowing in the breeze far down by my feet to mark the only path I was allowed to take in and out. I crouched, pressed one careful finger to their front door—the front door I’d been carried through, toddled through, ran through to catch the bus, to drive away. It swung open.

And abruptly, I was inside again. Small—no, tiny: stealing from the cookie jar, thinking Mom didn’t know; curling up on her lap as she read me a bedtime story; dancing in the living room to her favorite songs. Baking for every holiday. Pinning up my hair for a dance. Holding me during my first breakup. Just holding me for no reason at all, her embrace wide and strong enough to keep the world at bay.

My tears were big and fat, splashed like puddles on the sidewalk.

The town shrunk even further when I stepped out that last time. Where before I could have picked up the church, could have flicked the school against my forefinger, could have seen individual faces staring up at me. Now, all I saw was an expanse of blurred, pixelated color, like I’d hopped a plane and stared down at the winding strings that had once been streets I’d driven—the little green patches once yards I’d played in.

I went home to the man who made me smile, to our house, to our baby. To our home.

I wondered, with an ache in my heart, how long before the two of us began to shrink—before this pandemic reached our borders. Before we were pushing our own child out, into the rest of the world that they might escape the shrink that would catch us with the same intensity.

And I hoped, fiercely, that I would be as large a force in their life, as Mom had been in mine.

Marie Croke is a fantasy, science-fiction, and horror writer with over forty-five stories in publication. She is a graduate of the Odyssey workshop, first-place winner in the Writers of the Future contest, and her work has been published in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Apex Magazine, Diabolical Plots, Flash Fiction Online, Fireside and Cast of Wonders among many other fine magazines and anthologies. She has also worked for multiple magazines, including khōréō and Dark Matter, and has written articles for writers for the SFWA Blog. She lives in Maryland with her family and enjoys crocheting, kayaking, and aerial dancing in her free time.