Lauren Woods
Serene’s family did not seem to notice when she began to shrink.
When her three children got off the school bus and came home, throwing shoes to the side and crashing around, she fit so perfectly in the hidden area between the refrigerator and the door to the outside that they looked for her only briefly. Then they poured out their crackers and cereals for snacks and went along their way to the basement.
When Charlie arrived home from work, he cocked his head to the side and said to Serene, “You look cute today,” and kissed the top of her head, stooping all the way down to the floor to do it.
Serene waved her hands, asking him to keep his voice down—she didn’t like the way the sound boomed and bounced through the kitchen—off the smeared trashcan, and the sticky fridge, and all the other metal surfaces with dents, the noise, always the noise. He asked in a louder voice, “What?”
And then Serene climbed to the top of the cat bowl and shouted, “Do you notice anything different about me?” And he gave a baffled smile. “Haircut?”
Serene shook her head and finished making dinner. Somehow being small didn’t stop her.
Charlie had made plans for them to visit his mother after dinner that evening. But Serene said she wasn’t feeling well, and they ought to go without her. Charlie asked whether she was sure.
“Don’t you notice anything different about me?” Serene repeated. Charlie seemed to be holding back a feeling, and the children seemed sad she wasn’t coming. Serene said she would get them settled into the car and that she would buckle Steven, the littlest, in the back, and then she followed them out to the car, kissed them goodbye, and returned to the house with relief. She felt herself grow an inch just seeing the car disappear around the corner.
It would be a long evening, as Charlie’s mother lived nearly an hour away. She expected they would drive, spend a couple hours visiting, and then return home a little before ten at night.
Serene unloaded the dishwasher, then found a leftover bowl of popcorn and dragged several pieces over to the couch. There, she mashed on the remote control and chose a serialized television drama. It was about a woman from the south of England who travels to the north, where factories have replaced the former pastoral way of life, where women and men labor over cotton looms, where the workers go on strike and children nearly starve as a result. When the drama got to the point of the strike, Serene turned it off, because she was tired of thinking about toil and feeding hungry bellies. She was tired of thinking about women who’d been overlooked in history. She was still hungry. She finished the popcorn. It was only then that she realized she was back to her normal size.
What Serene wanted most of all now was a tall glass of wine. She wished aloud for one, and then realized she must have poured herself a glass already while watching the show, because she found it waiting for her. She took it over to the couch, closed her eyes, and breathed in the smell. It was red and delicious, and the first red sip felt like the wine of heaven, her glass the holy grail. She would let it turn her teeth pink, she would breathe it in, she wouldn’t care about anything else for a little while.
Over the next hour, her phone was buzzing and buzzing, but Serene didn’t care about that. She was reading the last chapters of a novel she had been trying to get through for an entire year. She sipped the wine and cried for the novel’s heroine, who had lost her little boy. And although Serene’s three children were somewhere across the city, visiting their grandmother, she somehow found it much easier to cry for the heroine’s little boy, Neddy, than to miss her own. She thought of little Neddy and longed to cradle him. And then she moved over to the piano and began to play a melancholy song, making herself cry more. Then she gazed longingly at her bookshelf, picked up a short story collection, put it down, picked up another, feasting greedily on little paragraphs, ordering dish after dish, nibbling but never finishing, reveling in her freedom.
The silence was remarkable. And in that silence, too, her voice grew louder.
Because all this time alone, Serene had been growing. As she looked up from the pages, she found she had doubled her normal size. Her long legs and back no longer fit comfortably on the green velvet sofa, which was creaking under her weight.
“Oh, what is happening,” she muttered to herself.
“Did you never notice?” a voice responded. It was soft, barely audible and when she looked down, she saw her own mother, coming only up to her ankle. “The glass of wine? How it appeared the moment you wanted it?”
Serene yelped in terror. The sound boomed through the house and set off a car alarm somewhere down the street. A neighborhood dog began to howl in the distance.
More quietly, she said, “I did wonder about that. But Mom! Is that really you? You died!”
“Yes, it’s me, Serene.”
She regarded her mother, perfectly doll-sized, with her hair in a loose bun and wire-rimmed glasses on her nose. “Did you pour the glass?”
“Yes, of course. I come in at night sometimes, straighten things out here and there. I like helping you. Though—I seem to shrink when I do it. I took the day off today.”
“And I began shrinking.”
“So it seems.”
“Anyway—we buried you.”
Serene’s mother covered her ears. “A little quieter? Oh, Serene. Silly girl, I’m too busy to die. Could you imagine it? Me, running around heaven, worried about you, unable to be of any use. What kind of heaven would that be? Well, I chose this. Maybe I’m in hell.” She paused a beat. “I’m joking, Serene. Shall I pour you another?”
Serene took a moment to let it all sink in. She had a crick in her neck from bending down. “Something is different about you.”
“I’m tiny, Serene.”
“Oh, yes.” That was it. She’d known it, of course, but it hadn’t clicked exactly until her mother said it. “Did it happen for you too? Is Grandma—”
Serene’s mother reached into her pocket and spoke into her hand.
“Is that her? She fits in your pocket? Mom, I can’t even see her.”
Serene’s mother paused thoughtfully. “It is odd. I suppose I never considered it. She is small, isn’t she? Maybe her spine compressed with age.” She added, “Mom, Serene is asking about you.” She appeared to listen. “Sorry, Mom. I’ll try to speak more quietly.” What came from her mouth next was inaudible.
Serene’s mother explained then that her own mother had not exactly died either, but instead had stuck around to help her, and of course she couldn’t bear not to watch her grandchildren grow older, except they were so large and loud and incomprehensibly different that they caused her to flee to the insides of walls most evenings. And they were too large to help at any rate, so Serene’s grandmother could only help her own daughter, who had to help Serene.
Serene looked closer. Her grandmother could not be seen, except with the use of a magnifying glass one of the children had left in a toy basket. And even with that, she was a speck, like an angel dancing on the head of a shoestring one of the children had left on the floor.
“Is my great-grandmother there?” Serene asked. “How far back does it go, the mothers and daughters?” Her mother nodded and then seemed to speak to her hand. They waited a long minute. “Are you still—” Serene’s mother spoke quietly to her own mother, who, Serene could see through the magnifying glass, gave a magnificent shrug. “They are still asking. Each one, asking another,” Serene’s mother said. They waited longer. Finally, Serene’s mother concluded, “We couldn’t possibly know how many of us there are.”
Serene had grown very large in this time. She moved from the couch to the floor, where her feet extended now almost outside the living room. She felt she was wasting precious time; her family would be gone only another couple of hours at most. Maybe it wasn’t waste, exactly, though it often felt that way. There was so little time, she had to be careful to use it to the fullest. She decided to look busy. She picked up a little here and there. Not too neat—otherwise, they might expect too much of her. She closed the piano, rinsed out the wine glass and put the wine bottle away, turned off the television, and filed away the books. This minimal tidying seemed to bring her back to her proper size.
And then, too soon, they were back. She heard them before she saw them, chattering outside, the wildness waiting in the wings. And she was gripped by joy—of course there was joy in seeing them, because she loved them—but equally by dread. The quiet had already been broken, and she could notice the moonlight coming in, and the streetlights and the shadows, and soon it would be all noise and thumping and stomping, and oh, here they were. She could feel herself shrinking at a rapid pace.
There was, after all, only so much space in the house, air in the room, people who could be front and center. She retreated to the back of the kitchen.
But then they flung themselves upon her, and she noticed the little one, Steven, five, was crying, and Charlie was grabbing for an icepack. And they shouted over each other that they’d been in an accident on the way to their grandmother’s, and so they never made it there, and they’d tried to call her but she hadn’t answered, and they were all right, except Steven hadn’t been buckled and had been slung to the side and maybe broken his arm. She saw their sweet, plump faces, chattering over each other, and one asked for water, another for a snack.
It was just like Neddy from her book, but Steven hadn’t fallen from a window, he’d been slammed against a car door, unbuckled, now crying quietly in pain. The little stoic. They would go to the hospital tonight, all together, to see about his hurt arm.
Serene rushed with them to the car and offered to drive, but Charlie said he would do it, and he tried to grab the keys from her, too roughly. Serene slammed her keys onto the hood of the car harder than she’d intended, and said, fine, and they were off. She spaced out in the car while the children chattered and Steven moaned quietly.
The doctor took Steven within the hour, and they measured and weighed him and took his blood pressure, and Serene noticed when they weighed him, how much he was growing. How many pounds since last time, she couldn’t be sure, she was never one of those mothers who knew her children’s height or weight, or even how much they’d weighed at birth, only that they were growing. The older one, his voice on the cusp of changing, hovering somewhere in between. And she liked to see the numbers go up, that they were all getting bigger, but she wished she didn’t also have to get smaller.
But of course it was a zero-sum game. A mother’s love wasn’t infinite, like they’d told her. It could be given or hoarded for the self, but it couldn’t do both. She could read the novel and play the piano, or she could put away their things. She could take her own mother’s acts of service, or she could do the tasks herself and let her mother rest. It was all about finding the right combination of shrinking, growing, shrinking again, and she wasn’t sure how she could ever get it right. Priorities, her mother might have called it, but to Serene, it was something more like getting the proportions right, how the needs of one measured up against another. Everything had a cost, a measurement, a gain somewhere that was a loss somewhere else. One exchange of strength for another, Serene thought, that’s what love is.
After the doctor checked on Steven, while they waited to get an X-ray, Serene excused herself to the bathroom. She remembered this hospital and its hallways well. She had given birth to all of the children here. When she was first pregnant, the doctor told her not to worry too much about the nutrition, because the baby would take what he needed from her, and she was so weak those nine months she could hardly move; the sleep-deprivation later was nothing at all compared to carrying a child. It was back then she should’ve known, must have, that all love comes with a cost. It was a bald lie that it didn’t.
Along the way back, Serene stopped into a little garden just outside. She wasn’t quite ready to return to the sterile hospital room. She pulled a flask from her purse, where she’d kept a little more of the wine, and let herself savor it for a quiet moment. They would be all right without her for an extra minute. Here, in the quiet alcove outside, under a black sky, surrounded by low hedges, some purple aster, the stars shining, Serene felt her heart quiet, and then she felt a stirring in her hip pocket where the flask had been and remembered her mother, who had pulled herself up to the top of Serene’s pocket and was swinging a leg around to the outside.
Serene lifted her mother gently onto her palm and told her all about what had happened to Steven. Serene’s mother patted Serene so gently she couldn’t feel the movement, only see it, but she felt its power all the same, and it soothed her. “Steven will be all right. I’m sure of it.” They were quiet for a long moment. Serene liked the little movement, the tiny pressures of her mother stretching out her legs and tickling the palm of her hand.
“Mom, why didn’t I see you this way before?”
“Oh, Serene, no one ever sees her mother truly until she becomes a bit more like her mother. As you are now. Anyhow, it wouldn’t be fair, to see how much you take from your mother. Children are still so little, and they need so much. They have no idea how much. And it’s better not to know, isn’t it? It would gut them to know what it costs to love them.”
Serene shrugged. It was good to be seen now, anyway, by her mother. And what about the men? Did they shrink and grow? Serene’s mother said she wasn’t sure, that she’d never thought about it before, that it had been only her mother who’d rested in her hand, though it was possible a father could too, sure, why not. Maybe it’s changing, this generation is so different. The men do more. Not all of them, but many.
Maybe Serene’s dad preferred heaven to a life of continued service; who knew? He had certainly worked hard enough in this life, and maybe heaven would be a nice respite. Serene’s mother said she did miss him, but only in the kind of way she missed him when he was watching a show in the study and she was doing the dishes in the other room. They had already spent all those years together. That was how Serene’s mother explained it.
Back inside, Serene found she’d missed Steven’s transfer, but a nurse walked her to the room, and she found her family just as a technician was gently positioning Steven’s bruised arm on the table under the X-ray. And the brave little smile on his face when he saw Serene made her heart want to burst.
While they waited for the results, Steven rested, and the other children began to argue over a game on the iPad they had brought with them. Serene whispered for them to quiet, and felt herself shrinking again as they ignored her and bickered louder, causing a nurse passing by to poke her head into the room.
Charlie noticed the flask then in Serene’s open purse, let out a deep sigh and said, “You shouldn’t have brought that,” and returned to his phone.
“I’ve shrunk again,” she whispered to him. “Can you tell?”
After a pause, he said, “Did you notice? I’m diaphanous.”
Serene thought Charlie might be lying about being see-through. And if he was, she suspected, he might just be doing it for attention. But now that she thought of it, she couldn’t deny Charlie did seem to fade sometimes when he overextended himself. And even now, Serene could see through Charlie to a little of the color of the blue chair he was sitting on.
She remembered now how, sometimes, just before they made love, she could see completely through him, and only when they finished did he become solid again, with muscle and weight. If Charlie was becoming diaphanous and Serene hadn’t noticed, that was embarrassing. And maybe it was true she wasn’t observant enough about him, like when he got a new haircut, or he shaved, and Serene didn’t register it.
Another family rushed by outside the room, and Serene and Charlie paused long enough to observe them and exchange a long glance. When the doctor returned, he said Steven’s arm wasn’t broken after all, just a nasty bruise. The doctor said they should watch him a few days though, especially since Steven said he had hit his head in the accident. Then the doctor adjusted his glasses and asked in a quiet voice, “Was he buckled?”
And Charlie looked at Serene’s feet, and Serene stared at her own and tried and tried to remember whether she had done it when she had followed them to the car and said she would, or whether someone else might’ve done it for her. But as she tried to conjure the moment, and Steven’s little face, all she could remember was the relief at the quiet, and the staying home, and she couldn’t remember what her fingers had or hadn’t done with the buckle, only the way she’d felt afterward. She tugged at her wedding ring and said, “Should have been,” and neither she nor Charlie would look at the other. When Serene reached into her pocket again, her mother was gone. Oh, where had she gone, just when Serene needed her most?
The doctor said he thought Steven would probably be all right but that they ought to watch for headaches and changes in vision and other signs. They were quiet on the drive home. Charlie said he’d put the kids to bed, and Serene stared at the house and wondered what to make of it. It looked, once more, like a tornado had hit it. She was small again, too small and tired to make a dent in the mess. They would need to get the car repaired too after the accident, to get it checked out at the very least, so now there was an inspection, and the list went on and on.
And then Steven gave a little wave to his mother as he passed by on the way to his bedroom. Steven, stocky and solid and growing. All those meals packed into him.
Serene had trouble, sometimes, telling her children she loved them. She tried to make herself enjoy moments with them, tried to treasure them, only she felt so small, and it was difficult to articulate any particular moment to treasure. She wasn’t sure why it was so difficult to put into words. Their voices were so loud and so urgent that it was so often difficult to form a thought at all. Often, it was easier to do something for them.
She poured another glass of wine and sipped, and it was only then, with the pleasant warmth in her body, and all of them gone into other rooms, that she could feel herself start to come alive and grow again. It was easier to love from a distance, from a book, on the page, after some wine.
Maybe, Serene thought, she really was distant and forgetful, but she did pick up their little things and drive them places and check what boxes she could. And if her heart wasn’t always in it, well she’d at least accomplished some of the tasks to help them along before they inevitably eased away from her.
Serene knew the children would be gone someday, and sometimes she wondered whether she’d be a better mother then. She thought of a mother at the children’s school who had never missed a school recital or a parent-teacher conference, and wondered why she couldn’t be that kind of mother. Serene was sorry she wasn’t that mother, and sometimes, she suspected she was on the verge of becoming like another, better, mother. But most of the time, she was mustering through. Serene, for a brief moment, wondered whether her own mother had ever felt that way, and why the thought had never before occurred to her.
Serene moved to empty the dishwasher and was surprised to see it mostly empty. She felt a surge of affection toward Charlie. Then, she vaguely remembered having done it herself earlier in the evening. It couldn’t have been her mother, because her mother hadn’t been there at that moment. Serene was the one who had unloaded the dishwasher. She had herself to thank. But, if that was true, if Serene really was the one responsible, then Serene had also been the one who had forgotten to buckle Steven. She couldn’t blame that on anyone but herself.
The older two children rushed into the kitchen just as the thought was sinking in. The boy said he had been promised the first chance at a shower, the girl said he would use all the hot water if he got there first, and couldn’t they put him on a timer? She said Serene had promised to put them to bed too, and Serene had, but now surveying the mess of the house, she wanted to find a way out of it.
As Serene tried to hold a clear thought about what to do next, she began to shrink at a terrible rate. She could see the children, looming, waiting for answers about the showers and bedtimes. She could hear Steven in the other room begging Charlie for another story, and she regretted that it wasn’t her he asked for. In that moment, what Serene wished for more than anything in the world was to tuck her three children tenderly into bed. But she was shrinking too quickly, slipping along the counter. She grabbed onto a cork for dear life. Serene wished desperately for someone, anyone, to hold her and slow her descent, but there was no hand or seat belt to be found, only the skidding of the cork across the countertop, closer and closer to the edge.
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Lauren D. Woods is the author of The Great Grown-Up Game of Make-Believe, a short story collection forthcoming with Autumn House Press in October 2025. She lives in Washington, DC with her family.