Who They Are
They are citizens of our town, who own property, pay taxes, and vote. They dress like us. They speak like us. They eat like us. They are two inches tall. They educate their children in their own schools, which by all available criteria are superior to ours. They have jobs like ours: doctors, teachers, computer programmers, bricklayers. They do not own or operate cars, preferring to walk or ride bicycles. They are wary of us, though friendships sometimes happen. Their voices are difficult for us to hear. In their presence we feel immense, ugly, loud, coarse, and menacing.
Where They Live
They live on a two-acre lot in the northwest section of our town, not far from the old mall. Last year they purchased an additional half acre, adjacent to one side of the lot and now in the final stages of preparation for housing development and the construction of a major shopping center. A few still live in undeveloped parts of town, like the woods behind the reservoir or the banks of West Creek, but life in such places is difficult, impermanent, and dangerous. Sometimes a family is invited into one of our homes for dinner and conversation, and may even spend the night before returning to their own community.
Their Community
Because our laws do not require residents to indicate religious belief, political affiliation, or height in inches, we would have no way of knowing their population were it not for their street addresses, all of which indicate residence within the two-acre lot. The latest census lists their number as 2,157, out of a total population of 32,476. In addition, a small and unknown number, probably between two hundred and three hundred, live in less civilized circumstances, without addresses, in other parts of town. The known citizens produce children at the same rate we do, with the difference that their children do not move out of the community, so that their population is increasing more rapidly than ours. On their two-acre lot, commonly known as Greenhaven, we can see a busy downtown avenue filled with shops and restaurants, with narrower streets leading to residential areas. In the northeast corner are smaller houses and rental apartments occupied by sanitation workers, firefighters, hospital employees, and street-repair personnel. The buildings of Greenhaven include two elementary schools, a middle school, and a high school, as well as a microchip plant, a waste-management plant, a four-year college with MA programs in business and engineering, a hospital and clinical research center, a library, two banks, a mall, and a new research facility notable for innovations in nanotechnology. Greenhaven is in many respects self-sufficient, though the larger town supplies its water and electric power by means of miniaturized pipes and wires designed by Greenhaven engineers.
The Enclosure
In response to the dangers presented by squirrels, chipmunks, skunks, and occasional rabbits, by birds that can swoop down at any moment, by unleashed dogs and outdoor cats, and by our own mischievous children, the inhabitants of Greenhaven agreed forty years ago to work with us in erecting a brick wall four feet high, pierced by four entrance gates and topped by a row of cast-iron spear-point finials. At each of the four corners rises a watchtower. The enclosure is equipped with an electronically operated retractable plexiglass roof, which can rise to cover the entire community for protection against violent downpours and heavy snowstorms. Teams of workers regularly scale the wall in order to clear the slanted glass panels of bird and squirrel droppings, stray twigs and leaves, and accumulations of snow. Many residents of Greenhaven object to the wall, which emphasizes their apartness. They call for a return to an earlier time, when inhabitants battled the weather bravely and guards armed with entrapment wire and tranquilizer guns surrounded and killed any animal that entered the grounds.
Our Town
Our town is for the most part white and middle-class, with a small percentage of African Americans and Asian Americans who work primarily in the legal and medical professions or run their own businesses. We are fiscally conservative but socially liberal and pride ourselves on welcoming to our community anyone who wishes to come here and can afford to stay. Although most of our places of worship are Protestant churches of the Congregational, Methodist, Presbyterian, and Episcopalian persuasions, we are also home to Congregation B’nai Israel and Temple Beth El, which serve our small but growing number of Reform and Orthodox Jews. At a recent town hall meeting, approval was granted for the construction of a mosque across from the Senior Center. Incidents of racial and religious bias, though rare, do occur and are taken very seriously by political parties of the left and right. But however much we make it our business to be fair to all people and to fight prejudice of every variety, we continually come up against the problem of the Little People. Here it is less a matter of being fair or unfair than of overcoming a sense that they are radically other. When they come into our homes, our chairs and tables rise over them like hills. When we walk over to Greenhaven, our shadows darken whole neighborhoods.
Employment
Although we never enter Greenhaven—quite apart from the existence of the wall, we would fear crushing people with our enormous feet, damaging homes and gardens, smashing street signs and lawn furniture, causing unspeakable destruction—members of their community often come to us. Many are skilled at tasks for which we eagerly employ them. Expert plumbers can enter the clogged pipes beneath our sinks and clear away obstacles more swiftly and thoroughly than our plumbers are able to do, with their crude plungers and clumsy snakes. Highly trained mechanics enter our vast refrigerators, stoves, and washing machines to remove dirt and grime, touch up scratched surfaces, and perform thorough inspections. Greenhaven women, in search of secondary incomes, advertise online an array of housecleaning skills, such as removing undetected particles of dust on mantelpieces, candlesticks, door handles, vases, and the tops of baseboards, or polishing hard-to-see places on countertops or chair legs. To watch a group of three housecleaners with their hair up in buns and their white aprons tied behind their backs as they push their meticulously crafted dust mops across tabletops or bend over with cloths the size of flies’ wings to remove dots of dust between the fringes of a throw rug is a pleasure and a revelation. Teams of window washers with ladders as tall as drinking straws and an ingenious system of ropes and pulleys are able to remove every visible and invisible smudge or spot from our suddenly gleaming windows. Meticulous gardeners disappear into the depths of our bushes and cut away dead leaves and rotten twigs before climbing down to chop lumps of soil into sand-fine particles. Our children’s birthdays are made memorable by intricate designs on the icing of pastries the size of bottlecaps and by ribbons on birthday presents tied by a team of ribbon masters to form lions, dragons, and rearing horses. The expert help provided by workers from Greenhaven is far more satisfactory than that provided by our own community, and we are continually discovering new tasks that demand their dedication and skill, such as cleaning the insides of our downspouts, removing lint from our laundered clothing, polishing our eyeglass lenses, and searching our cellars and attics for ants and mouse droppings.
Other Encounters
In addition to enlisting their help in a host of tasks, we regularly welcome the inhabitants of Greenhaven as equals on social occasions. We invite them to attend our places of worship, our town meetings, and our civic events, which include concerts in the park, parades on Main Street, charity fundraisers, and visits to historic houses; often special conveniences are provided, in order to make them feel comfortable and protect them from the many dangers of our world. One minister has paid for the construction of a miniature set of pews that he has placed on the bench of a front-row pew and that can be reached by a banistered stairway leading from floor to seat. Many of our clothing stores have set aside areas where specially manufactured shirts, blouses, dresses, suit jackets, jeans, and chinos are displayed on little shelves or hung from quarter-inch wooden hangers. Supermarkets, computer stores, restaurants, and furniture stores now offer arrangements of their own. Indeed, the manufacture of small objects suitable for the inhabitants of Greenhaven is a fast-growing industry in our town, where a new company called Design Innovations has led to more than two hundred jobs for members of both communities. In addition, our Department of Public Works has supplied many of our streets with carefully marked lanes for the bicycles of visitors from Greenhaven. One of the delights of a summer day in our town is strolling along a tree-shaded sidewalk while, just below the curb, a row of little bicycles moves along. Once, walking with my young daughter, I saw a disturbing sight. From the other side of the street a squirrel rushed toward six bicycles. The squirrel seemed to grow larger and larger; his head rose over the cyclists like the face of a monster in a bad movie. My daughter screamed and clung to my arm. Suddenly the squirrel lay twitching on its side with its front legs bound together as the six cyclists continued on their way. It all took place so swiftly that I remember only the glittering lines of thread or wire twisted around the squirrel’s legs.
Friendships
Mingling with members of the Greenhaven community often leads to more intimate occasions. Some of us, perhaps through a closeness formed with a houseworker or through repeated public events like Sunday sermons or town hall meetings, will invite a family to our homes for dinner. The initial awkwardness of such occasions is usually not difficult to overcome, especially if we have ordered a set of appropriately sized chairs, tables, dishes, and utensils, which can be arranged on our dining-room tables. The voices of our guests are so low that we are forced to bend forward with our monstrous heads and vast fleshy ears, but we are able to follow the conversation after some effort and are careful to speak in lowered voices. Our guests are invariably lively, intelligent, humorous, and well informed about all things pertaining to our town. Sometimes these visits develop into lasting friendships and a sense of deep loyalty. Quite apart from everything else, we admire the sheer physical beauty of the Little People, the elegance of their eyes and mouths, the delicacy of their fingers, the silken perfection of their skin. We want them to be happy. We want them to love us. We want them to forgive us.
Names
Their names are like ours, with two exceptions. In the matter of surnames, theirs take only the form of the patronymic: Johnson, Robertson, Carlson, Edwards, Williams, Richardson, Peterson. The reign of the patronym suggests an early tribal culture, long before the present era. In the matter of first names, theirs are the same as ours—Mary, Brian, Karen, Steven—except in the case of working-class males, whose names sometimes refer to the type of work done by the father or grandfather: Brick Edwards, Stone Jameson, Shingle Johnson. These work-related first names have attracted interest in our community and are sometimes given to our newborn sons.
The Story of Catherine White and Shingle Johnson
Catherine White was a forty-two-year-old widow who lived alone in one of our better residential neighborhoods. Her husband, Edward White, an investment banker, had died in a car accident two years earlier, leaving her a secure monthly income and a diversified portfolio of stocks and bonds. After a period of mourning, Catherine resumed her active social life and spent her spare time refurbishing the house. Among the help she hired was Shingle Johnson, an expert woodworker from Greenhaven who had been named for his father, a skilled carpenter. He was employed by Catherine to remove scratches on mahogany table legs, repair the patterned wooden strips between the glass panes in the dining-room hutch, and replace the plain wooden knobs on the drawers of her bureau with a series of handmade knobs carved with intricate scenes showing village dances, bathers in lakes, and riverside cafés. Catherine White was so taken by the work of Shingle Johnson that she kept finding more for him to do. She paid him to repair her childhood collection of wooden animals from Germany and to build a complete set of doll furniture for her niece’s ninth birthday. She asked him to create three teakwood chests that rose to the height of his shoulders and were useful for storing paper clips, postage stamps, and duplicate keys. Shingle Johnson began spending so much time at Catherine White’s house that now and then she would invite him to stay overnight in order to spare him the effort of returning to Greenhaven, where he lived with his aunt and uncle while expanding his business and saving up for a down payment on a home of his own. On such nights he slept between two folded handkerchiefs on the seat of the leather chair in her late husband’s study. It was about this time that people began noticing a change in Catherine White. She had always been an attractive woman who dressed well. She now began dressing more daringly, though with impeccable taste, in skirts and silk blouses that emphasized her fine figure. She seemed more youthful; her skin was said to glow; she gave off an intensity and excitement that no one could miss, though at the same time she would often fall into states of abstraction in which she would stare out of windows or sit silently among friends. Exactly when she became aware that she was in love with Shingle Johnson is not clear. As we now know from her diary, she was struck one day by the sheer grace and beauty of Shingle Johnson as he stood in a shaft of sunlight at the base of an end table. But all of us are struck by the grace and beauty of the Little People. Catherine White, seated on the Oriental rug beside Shingle Johnson as she gave instructions about repairing the front feet of the clawfoot couch, or bending toward him as he knelt on a coaster on the lamp table examining a scratch on a cherrywood bowl, was startled by the perfection of his eyebrows, the bones of his cheek, his elegant wrists, his barely visible fingernails. One day, when he asked whether he could step onto her hand in order to be lifted from the base of the fireplace to the top of the upholstered armchair, so that he could set up his ladder and reach the bottom strip of an oak-framed painting, she nearly fainted as she felt the pressure of his feet against the skin of her hand. She could not bear to be away from him for a single moment, while at the same time she felt so gross and fleshy in his presence, despite her slenderness, that she wanted to rush out of the house and never return. She ate less and less; she weakened; she took to bed. One morning, waking after a night of restless half-sleep, she saw him standing beside her on the bedspread, looking at her with concern. Unable to stop herself, she blurted out her love for him, heard her words with horror, burst into apology, and covered her face with her hands. He told her that he had been in love with her from the moment he saw her bend her head to inhale the odor of a chrysanthemum in the vase on the sideboard. Tears streamed along Catherine White’s cheeks. He began sharing her bed; each morning she would wake up and find him lying beside her on her pillow. She loved him in a way that pierced her to the center of her being, but her feelings for him were not only spiritual. He liked to climb naked onto one or the other of her breasts as she lay naked on her back; once on top, he would seat himself on the areola and embrace the nipple with his legs. Holding the sides of the nipple with the palms of both hands, he would rub his face back and forth across the sides and top, rousing her to shuddering paroxysms that she had never dreamed possible. We know less about how he satisfied his own strong desire. From hints in the diary, it appears that he liked to lie on her stomach and make love to her navel, but sometimes he preferred a more daring method: he would kneel naked on her lower lip as she lay back in bed with parted lips, and from there he would lean forward against her upper lip with both arms spread in order to steady himself as he thrust against the tip of her tongue. Their love was joyful but not without difficulty. She required continual reassurance that her towering face, her nostrils the size of caverns, her massive fingers thicker than his thighs, the bloody gashes in her slimy eye-whites, did not fill him with disgust and revulsion, while he, a lean and powerful two-inch man, was troubled by his sense of smallness and weakness. They loved doing things together: reading side by side, speaking about their childhoods, taking rides in her car to have a picnic lunch on the bank of West Creek, discussing home improvements, and solving crossword puzzles (he with the aid of a demagnifying glass that reduced the words and squares to readable size). She loved looking at his face, with its tanned and glowing skin, its strong, delicate cheekbones that looked as if they had been carved by a master, and its teeth so small that she could distinguish them only when she bent close; he loved lying on his back in the palm of her hand with his hands clasped behind his head. One day she drove home from a garden store with a potted chrysanthemum and found Shingle Johnson lying on the bottom step of the porch with his legs shattered and blood pouring from his chest and neck. In terror she called an ambulance and accompanied him to the east gate of Greenhaven, where a team of medics placed him on a wheeled bed and rolled him swiftly to the hospital. A stray cat had snatched him up as he was strolling in the yard and had dropped him onto the porch step. Shingle Johnson survived, but both legs had to be amputated and an artificial lung implanted. He did not leave Greenhaven again. Catherine White never forgave herself for leaving him alone that day. She vowed to take care of him for the rest of her life, but his aunt and uncle blamed her for the accident and stopped all communication between them. Catherine White dressed in black for twelve months, during which she scarcely left the house. When she came out of mourning, her face had changed, as if she had aged ten years. She dressed carelessly, in loose-fitting smocks or baggy jeans, saw few people, and died six months later. Rumors of suicide made the rounds, but we knew she had died of grief. A long obituary in the local paper spoke of her years as an elementary-school teacher, her marriage to Edward Pearsall White, and her many contributions to local charities.
History
The two-acre lot later known as Greenhaven was turned over to the Little People some seventy-five years ago by a philanthropic businessman who owned a few hundred acres in different parts of town. He paid for the vacant lot to be cleared—trees cut down and stumps uprooted, boulders removed, an old rusted shopping cart hauled away—before the parcel of land was divided into small units by its new owners. The progression of the two-acre lot from a stony field to a village of primitive farmers to a fully modern community over the course of seventy-five years is one of the remarkable developments in the history of our town. The property was officially named Greenhaven at a town hall meeting in the year of the American bicentennial. Today the inhabitants are in certain respects more advanced than we are, especially in the fields of microelectronics and software design. Not long after the clearing of the land, the settlers erected a large stone wall, two inches high, around the entire lot, but the wall proved ineffective against animal invasion. Squirrels in particular had always been a menace, though a specially trained force of guardians quickly became expert at trapping and killing them in a ditch skirting the inner wall. The controversial four-foot brick enclosure was in part a response to the attack of a neighbor’s cat, who smashed several houses and mauled dozens of inhabitants before the guards secured it with ropes and put it to death. The earlier history of the inhabitants of Greenhaven is less well documented. They appear to have lived in temporary communities all over our town, in woods, vacant lots, and even in backyards; evidence suggests they were present at the time of the Revolutionary War and of our town’s origin as a farming village in 1696. One respected Greenhaven historian traces the presence of his people back several centuries before that, to a time when the land was inhabited by roaming tribes of Native Americans, and still earlier, to a world of forests and streams inhabited by deer and wolves. There is every reason to believe that the ancestors of the people of Greenhaven were here long before our earliest settlers and that our forebears drove them from their land.
Money
Their money is identical to ours in all respects except one: it is so minuscule that we can barely see it. A Greenhaven quarter is only a little larger than a grain of sand. For this reason our banks and businesses own Converters, machines that accept Greenhaven money and convert it to the size we are accustomed to, as well as Enhancers, machines that magnify Greenhaven credit cards and debit cards so that we can read them. The machines are also programmed to work in the opposite direction, thereby enabling us to purchase goods sold by Greenhaven merchants in our stores. Online transactions between both communities have become more and more common. Those of us who employ Greenhaven workers pay them by notifying the Greenhaven Accounts Department of any of our banks, which in turn transfer the sum to the main bank in Greenhaven. Before this arrangement, we were required to drive to a bank and convert our bills and coins to miniature dimensions, storing the barely visible money in envelopes the size of postage stamps, in order to have a supply of wages on hand. The recent connection between our banking systems, supported by both communities, is a development that many of us see as an encouraging sign of increased interdependence.
Plants and Animals
For most of their history, the Little People have lived among soaring blades of grass, wild berries bigger than their heads, leaves the size of porch roofs, and trees so vast that small hollows were sufficient for sheltering many families. Precisely when the smaller strains of plant life were developed is a matter of debate among Greenhaven historians, but most agree that it began soon after the two-acre lot was turned over to its inhabitants and became their place of settlement. Within a generation, the new grass, the new dandelions, and the new violets had begun to appear. By the time the four-foot wall was erected, more than two dozen varieties of plants and flowers were growing in the yards of Greenhaven, along with three varieties of maple tree, eight to fourteen inches in height, and two of spruce. Greenhaven researchers work tirelessly to cultivate miniature strains of all flora that grow in our town, as well as new cross-strains unknown in our community. The fate of Greenhaven fauna is less clear. At present, genetic scientists have failed to produce a single successful animal, though recent laboratory experiments have led to predictions of a Greenhaven German shepherd within the next five years. Greenhaven is still not safe from our enormous insects, in particular our mosquitoes, ants, spiders, and flies, which are trapped and killed swiftly, or from our dangerous birds, which are caught in nets, taken outside the gates, and released. At town hall meetings, frequent debates about how to control the flights of our birds have led to no useful answers.
Outsiders
Very little is known about the two hundred to three hundred inhabitants who live outside the walls of Greenhaven. They appear to be descendants of roaming tribes that chose not to settle on the two-acre lot when it was turned over to their community seventy-five years ago. Now and then a rebellious Greenhaven adolescent, male or female, will escape from life behind the wall and join the outsiders, who fend for themselves and live off the land, though more often than not the experiment does not outlast a year. More rarely, a youthful outsider will ask to be admitted to the enclave of Greenhaven, with or without parental consent. The usual fate of such youngsters is to be adopted by a volunteer family and enrolled in a special school program, with varying degrees of success. Dr. Henry Josephson, a leading Greenhaven neuroscientist, is the most remarkable example of radical transformation. Sometimes at dusk, when we glance out at our darkening backyards, we are aware of a slight movement in the grass, which might be a chipmunk or a sparrow or, as we secretly desire, a group of outsiders, passing through.
Greenhaven Homes
Although it is impossible for us to enter their homes, whose chimneys rise to the height of our knees, we are familiar with their rooms and furnishings through photographs taken by Greenhaven residents and sent to our computers and mobile devices. We observe the kitchen cabinets, the dining-room tables, the wickerwork patio chairs, the flat-screen TVs, the shower stalls with sliding glass doors, the double beds with quilts and headboards, and understand that they live just as we do. But gradually we become aware of small differences, especially if we zoom in on the images. Then we notice details that were invisible before: the carved arabesques on window muntins, the painted rural scenes on the edges of bookshelves, the circus animals carved in cameo along the tops of baseboards in dens and playrooms. As we continue to enlarge, we discover new details within the details, such as wooden eighth notes carved along the sides of the vertical grooves of a piano leg, with an occasional mischievous face peeking out from behind a note. Many of us adopt in our own homes the hidden designs we discover in theirs, hiring experts from Greenhaven to bring about the desired effect. We admire the perfection of complex small objects like laptops or televisions that can rest on the tips of our fingers, but what fascinates us is the sense of an invisible world perpetually on the verge of becoming visible.