They finished and she fell backwards into his arms, her Dutch bonnet slightly askew. He helped her step into her wooden clogs and sat back down to pack his pipe. I watched lustfully as he hitched his overalls back up. Then, suddenly, he started patting his pockets and cursing, scanning over the ground around him. It hit me: he needed a light for his pipe.
As I slid up the windowsill, I heard the collective gasp of the gnomes and other ornaments, all except my gnome, who looked at me with steady eyes. I lit a new match and held it out towards him. “I love you,” I whispered as he took tiny steps nearer. “Are you real?”
When he stepped into the light of the flame, a tight grip washed through me and I felt the vertigo of six decades falling away. My mind seemed new and just-born—I could only stare at him and make heavy breaths of wonder. The creases in his forehead were so small and delicate; all his skin seemed like a soft dried fruit.
I lit his pipe but then made the mistake of grazing his forehead with my hand. He instantly turned still and cold; the fire of his pipe went to ash.
I heard them at night, each night, working and toiling, but I wouldn’t let myself believe it until it actually happened. I woke up to the guest bedroom bathed in a soft, pink glow. When I got out of bed and saw his cone hat rising slowly from the ground like an emerging missile, I knew I’d been right in determining the cause of all the noise: they’d been digging a tunnel into my bedroom floor.
They began coming in each evening to perform for me, all of them: the animals and the swans and the gnomes and even the flamingos. Of course I didn’t get close or touch—I didn’t want a repeat of the last time, where it all disappeared and they hardened. It had made me feel like a cross between Midas and Medusa. And how awkward it would be to have to parade them all out from my bedroom back into the yard in the middle of the night, perhaps running into Robert as he headed to the bathroom with bowel trouble.
I grew and grew my collection, stopping almost daily to pick out new friends to meet in the flesh that evening. And understanding that My Gnome could not physically be mine, my jealousy faded; instead we became a team. I tried to choose the most beautiful and artfully sculpted female gnomes for him, knowing that he would trace them back to me as the root of his pleasure.
How he watched me when he was with them, and how I watched him. At first I only watched; I felt like such a simple old woman. But after a while, I began to touch myself while they played, and I watched them watch me. Often I’d cry because their miniature world was just so beautiful. I felt like my love was a giant blanket, the top of a tent, and each night they all came inside of it to move around and make me warm.
For Valentine’s Day, I cooked Robert a steak to keep him busy and then told him I wasn’t feeling so well. “Do you mind if I turn in a little early?” I asked. He did not look up from his potatoes, which were mashed. He was giving them a secondary mashing with his fork.
“Think I’ll be asleep pretty soon too,” he said.
With that, I put my dishes in the sink and ran to my bedroom. I’d gotten up early and painted togas onto all the gnomes and creatures with washable white paint—I wanted a Roman theme, and they did not disappoint.
Around three in the morning I was waving goodbye as they all crawled back down into the hole, everyone except my darling. He and I had held eyes the whole night, throughout everything. “Did you enjoy yourself?” I asked, and he smiled and nodded. His rosy, tulip-bud cheeks glistened in the lamplight. Then he pointed at my braid.
My braid is long and gray; I’ve been letting it grow since my thirties. “You want to touch it?” I asked. “Is that a good idea?” I didn’t want him to harden, though I thought of bringing him into bed in his statue form, even if he would feel like a cold doll. At least I could put my cheek to his and sleep throughout the night.
He shook his head and made a scissor motion, then posed his hands as though he had a shovel in them, digging up invisible earth and throwing it over his back.
“You want me to cut it off and bury it?”
He nodded. His large knuckles went to his lips as he blew me a kiss, then he disappeared down the magic rabbit hole they’d dug.
I didn’t get much sleep after they left. Was this a kind of power trip on My Gnome’s part? Did I really want to cut away thirty years of hair? Could he somehow enjoy my hair more if it was buried in the ground?
For days I thought it over, hoping each evening he would come to answer my questions. But no one came, not a single one of them. At nights when I’d look out my window he’d be there facing me, making the same scissor-shovel motions over and over. The rest of the ornaments stood behind him like disciples; with his large hat he seemed like a cult leader. They all nodded silently, appearing brainwashed.
By the fourth morning I was broken. Robert was playing solitaire on the computer and generating loud low-tech noises of victory and defeat. Fiery tears began to surge and I bounced up. I cannot live in the suburbs another day without him, I told myself, and I ran to the garage and shut my eyes and used wire cutters to snip the whole braid off below its rubber band.
When I dangled it out before me it looked impressively magic, like the long wiry skin of a snake I’d never want to meet.
I buried it at the male gnome’s feet, a shallow grave, and ran back inside. Robert glanced away from the computer screen momentarily. “Did you get a haircut?”
“I did, Robert.” I went into my bedroom and placed my pillow over my face and cried, and when I woke up it was already morning. My Gnome hadn’t come at all.
Manic, I went to every garden center in the tri-state area. I found each imaginable temptation: donkeys, centaurs, the prettiest and most apple-pie female gnomes available. When it was nine o’clock at night and all the stores were closing, I made my last purchase and handed the bills to the cashier. Unable to stop myself, I blurted out: “He has to love me. Or else I don’t know what.” She was young, perhaps sixteen, and chewing gum.
“I do not know anything about men,” she said.
As I pulled into my subdivision, my foot hit the gas when I saw a group of people had congregated across the street from my house. Some were pointing, others snickering. “Oh,” I exclaimed when I saw it. There was a life-sized marble statue of a heavyset middle-aged man in my garden.
I ran past everyone, ignoring all the calls of my name. A miniature giraffe fell to the ground from my arms and shattered. I ran inside yelling “Robert, Robert”: of course an answer didn’t come. There were deer grazing around the computer where Robert had been sitting, small chipmunks outside his bedroom door.
“Oh,” I cried, “oh, my.” There inside my bedroom sat my real dwarf in the flesh. I wish the whole world could’ve seen his rosy cheeks, the bed sheets turned down, his beard braided into a long braid the color and length of my former hair. I touched his bare skin and watched as it flushed and stayed soft.
DANCING RAT
I don’t know if I’m able to have children myself. Because we haven’t been able to conceive, my boyfriend calls our sex “free sex.” I’m not sure if he’s referring to the cost we save on contraceptives, the funds it takes to raise a child, what. If I ask, “What do you mean, free sex?” he says, “You know. No consequences.”
Kyle and I have a lot of free sex. Working on a children’s show, I almost feel bad about how very much sex I have.
Whisker-Bop! is a musical dance program that’s big on counting, manners, and going green. I am one of the primary characters (a mouse). I gallivant around with a raccoon and a bat, although this would never happen in nature, in addition to a small team of children. Due to their extraordinary length, our whiskers often comically get in the way of our counting/singing/dancing/morality-teaching. My name is Sneezoid because I have bad allergies; why this isn’t a concern I’m not sure. Every episode requires that I atch-hoo in a high-pitched voice and giggle afterwards. This prompts everyone else to giggle. During the interview for the job, I was asked to do little more than showcase my fake sneezing ability. I had a whole speech planned: how much I love kids, my work in an inner-city children’s community theater. It didn’t come up.