The first time Wilson saw them was when he opened the medicine  cabinet one groggy morning in search of aspirin and his toothbrush.  Between the familiar can of shaving cream and the plastic tumbler that  held his toothbrush, lying on his crushed and twisted tube of  toothpaste as if it were a luxurious pillow, were two tiny people.  They were no bigger than his thumb, and a little pinker, lounging in a  tangle of spindly limbs.  One of them lifted its head from the  toothpaste and he slammed the door shut. 

For a long time he faced his reflection in the mirror: stubbly  chin, rheumy eyes, skin around his neck loose and pallid.  The night  before he had been out late at Johnson's retirement happy hour,  over-staying the party as it moved by stages from jubilant to pensive  to melancholy, finally leaving just before it became morose and grim,  old Johnson growing older drink by drink and the last hangers-on  realizing that they could anticipate no higher pinnacle than this from  a lifetime of toil.  Wilson wasn't young himself, though still two  decades from any hope of retirement, and mornings after happy hours  had long ago ceased to be happy at all.  His mouth was a crackled dry  sponge, and his brain had shriveled to a smoldering gray coal. 

With a great surge of resolve he opened the cabinet again,  desperate to scrape the grunge from his teeth and certain the tiny  figments would be gone.  They weren't.  One of them was huddled behind  the tumbler, the distorting glass making it seem bulbous and soft.  The other was standing now, hands on its narrow hips, staring up at  him with hard eyes the size of pinheads. 

Or, rather, on his hips, for the little figure's tiny penis was  clearly visible.  And tiny though it was, in proportion to the  finger-sized body the little man was impressively endowed.  The little  man continued to stare at him, defiant, his chest slowly rising and  falling.  Wilson couldn't hold that gaze, so he looked away, mumbled  "Sorry," and pulled his toothbrush from the tumbler, careful not to  jostle it.  He brushed his teeth without paste, and was dissatisfied  for the rest of the day. 

By the middle of the next week Wilson had forgotten about the  tiny people, pushing them into the drawer of his memory reserved for  vivid dreams and shapes caught out of the corner of the eye.  He  ascribed them to his drink-addled state that morning, and chided  himself for being intimidated by the little figments.  That was what  made their next appearance, when he was stone sober and wide awake, so  startling. 

He had just got home from work, a little later than he liked  because Barber from accounting had lingered at his desk with questions  about the Cremola invoices.  He was sorting the mail onto the dining  room table-bills, junk, bills, junk-when he heard dripping water in  the kitchen.  The faucet had been threatening to leak for almost a  month now, taking longer than usual to shut off and letting a puddle  pool around the handles, so he marched in with a heavy heart, resolved  to spend the rest of the evening under the sink with a monkey wrench  and bucket. 

And in the sink, in the blue bowl from which he ate his  cornflakes that very morning, were the two little naked people.  The  bowl was filled with water, and the faucet dripped into it with a  slow, pinging rhythm, but the two little people were oblivious to the  drops.  They were locked in a passionate embrace, limbs wrapped around  each other, and the water rippled around them as they churned and  wiggled.  Wilson watched for what seemed a long time, stunned by the  urgent beauty of their lovemaking, the desperate writhing of the tiny  woman and the intense, measured focus of the little man. 

Then, quite suddenly, their gyrations stopped.  This time it  was the woman who looked at him with her hard black eyes, tiny breasts  (though again, he noticed, proportionately large) floating on the  water in the bowl.  She smiled a little, though at him or in the  afterglow of passion he couldn't say, and made no motions to cover  herself.  The little man leaned back in the bowl, his head touching  the water, and lazily stroked the woman's flanks. 

Wilson backed away, fumbling for the light switch, and went  into the living room.  He ordered General Tso's Chicken from the chow  mein shop a few blocks away, and didn't return to the kitchen until  the next morning.  The water in the bowl was still and cloudy, and he  made a point of running it twice through the dishwasher. 

After that, the sightings became more frequent.  He saw the  little man walking along the windowsill in the kitchen, his tiny palm  streaking prints on the glass.  He saw the woman, her belly swollen as  if she had swallowed a marble, luxuriating in a shaft of morning light  that fell across the living room floor.  He saw them walking together,  hand in hand, across the bedroom floor, the little man helping the  woman over the discarded underwear as if they were a craggy hillock in  an Edenic field.  Always they were naked, and oblivious to him.  He  began to think of them as Adam and Eve, and himself as Jehovah. 

Then they disappeared for almost two weeks.  He took to walking  around his house in stocking feet and holding his breath, and sneaking  into rooms in a stoop in hopes of catching a glimpse of his little  tenants.  He became worried about them, and moved his furniture away  from the walls with trepidation, fearful of finding tiny corpses in  the dust along the floorboards. 

So it was with great joy that he saw the woman one morning,  sitting beside the coffee maker.  He crept around to the back of the  kitchen where he would have a better view, and his heart raced when he  saw that she was holding an infant to her breast, a pink ball no  bigger than a toenail clipping.  Suddenly the little man appeared,  coming around from behind the coffee maker with a cracker in his  hands, and he looked at Wilson with that hard stare again.  But this  time Wilson smiled at him, and a smile slid over the little man's  face. 

From then on Wilson made a point of leaving little gifts for  the family:  crackers and cheese crumbled into a measuring cup, the  cotton wads from aspirin bottles, bottle caps filled with milk.  Each  morning he put out an offering, and each evening he hurried home to  see if it had been accepted.  He learned in this way that they  preferred whole wheat crackers to corn flakes, appreciated bits of  silver foil and paper clips, and could consume all the cheddar cheese  he left wrapped in tiny bundles of wax paper. 

Over the next six months he watched that first tiny baby grow  into an ant-sized toddler, then a child the size of a vitamin tablet,  and then a young adult almost as tall (and equally as well-endowed) as  his father.  The first, because in those six months there would be  many children:  eight in all, including a pair of raisin-sized twins.  On several occasions he caught the parents making love, on the  cushions of the armchair and behind the mixing bowls in the kitchen.  He knew now to linger for only a moment, marveling at the minute  sinews that flexed and relaxed, the sheen of sweat that covered their  tiny bodies, before slipping quietly away to let them finish in peace. 

It was, perhaps, the incredible fecundity of these tiny people,  coupled with his feeling of God-like status in their world, that  emboldened Wilson to approach Natasha from human resources.  Natasha  was younger than Wilson, a black-haired beauty from Belarus who wore  stylishly short skirts and spiked heels that clicked with authority  when she walked down the halls at work.  She had gray eyes bordering  on blue that could drown a man, and though everyone Wilson worked  with-some of the women included-watched longingly as she swished  through the parking lot in the evening with her big purse tossed  casually over her shoulder, no one dared to speak to her unless they  had to change their tax withholding.  Wilson had not changed his  withholding for almost ten years, when his wife left him for her  chiropractor, but he was Jehovah and didn't need an excuse to talk to  Natasha. 

She gladly accepted his invitation to dinner, as no one had  invited her since she came to America except her landlord, a sweaty  little Russian who expected regional loyalty to be enough to coax her  into his bed.  And his invitation to after-dinner drinks at a wine bar  near his house was accepted because Wilson was quiet and confident and  generous, all qualities he had acquired in his months being God.  Going back to his house for a nightcap and a snuggle on the couch and  whatever might lead from that was a foregone conclusion after Natasha  enjoyed the red wine he selected. 

And Wilson thought he knew where things were leading, hoped  they were leading to a place he hadn't visited except in solitude for  almost two years.  Natasha offered no resistance when his lips were  joined by his tongue and all three made their way together from her  mouth to her chin to the hollow of her throat.  When his fumbling  hands found the clasp of her bra in the small of her back and suddenly  discovered their nimbleness, she pushed her breasts against his chest  to give him space to work.  But when his palm found her bare belly  under her cashmere sweater and started to work its way over her ribs,  Natasha suddenly stiffened and drew away.  Wilson slid his hand down  and moved it toward her back, but she continued to push away from him.   He followed, thinking that perhaps she was urging him into a prone  position where he could more easily access her charms, but her hands  slapping against his shoulders and her knee jammed up between his legs  signaled otherwise. 

Wilson sat up and looked at her, but she was looking past him  in wide-eyed horror.  He turned, slowly, and saw, standing on the arm  of the couch, the first-born son of Adam and Eve, his tiny fist  holding his little penis.  Wilson fixed him with the hard stare he had  learned from the youth's parents, but it was too late; Natasha was  gone, the front door wide open, her black spike-heeled shoes abandoned  beside the coffee table. 

It was not long after that Wilson noticed a second generation  was being born.  He turned on the bathroom light one morning to find  the second-born child, a girl with brown hair like her mother and  broad shoulders like her father, nursing an infant between the shampoo  bottles.  The first-born son, the little creature who had ruined his  night with Natasha, appeared from behind a damp towel on the floor.  He looked up at Wilson with his beady black eyes and smirked. 

Wilson felt his stomach turn.  Until then, he had thought of  the little people as miniature humans.  He had invested them with tiny  souls of the kind he imagined he possessed himself, inward sparks that  gravitated toward joy and goodness.  Though they were a little wild  and barbarous, he ascribed those qualities to their innocence; and  though they were immodest and ungrateful, he had imagined they would  mature over time. 

But now he realized, looking down at the smirking, incestuous  monster by his towel, that they were not human at all.  They were  animals, vermin, driven by the imperative to reproduce, not by love.  He saw now that the vignettes he had stumbled on were episodes of  rutting, not innocent passion.  Wilson kicked at the little man, but  he was too quick for the big clumsy foot and ducked behind the towel,  still smirking. 

First, Wilson cut off the gifts.  He no longer put out toast  smeared with peanut butter and warm piles of dryer lint.  After a week  he noticed that the boxes of wheat crackers in his cupboard had been  ripped open, and sugar spilled off his shelves in gritty cataracts, so  he bought toddler locks to hold his pantry shut.  When a bowl of soup  disappeared from the kitchen counter when he went to answer the phone  one night, he fell into the habit of eating his meals in the bathroom  with the door locked, after first poking the plunger under the sink  and behind the toilet to make sure the vermin weren't lying in wait. 

That was when he started to notice the carcasses of mice,  stripped down to bone and fur, behind the stove, and sometimes sparrow  wings scattered on the back steps.  He had not known the little  creatures to be carnivorous, but now nothing surprised him.  He locked  his bedroom door at night, and stuffed towels around the cracks to  keep them from coming inside. 

When he came home one night to find his house filled with the  smell of gas and the oven door wide open, he realized that coexistence  was not an option.  The vermin must be eradicated or evicted.  He  bought new locks for his bedroom door and windows and heavy boards to  block the gaps under the door, and traps.  The old-fashioned wire  kind, with a heavy spring and a killing bar that could cut a mouse in  two.  After securing his room, Wilson baited the traps with little  squares of cheddar cheese.  He felt a tiny pang of guilt in his  stomach while he locked the spring-was it only last month he was  wrapping this cheese as little gifts for his guests?-but he remembered  the smell of gas, the rapping sounds he heard sometimes at night, the  eldest son's voyeurism, and pushed the guilt down and out 

He felt deceived-more, perhaps, by himself than by the  vermin-and now he wanted revenge. 

He lay awake in his fortified room, both dreading and praying  for the snap of the killing wire.  Several times he got up to make  sure the door was secured, the windows locked, that he hadn't missed a  secret hole in the closet or behind the dresser.  More than once he  had to stop himself from running to the kitchen to spring the trap  himself. 

Finally, past midnight, he heard the gruesome spring uncoil  with a noise like a gunshot.  There was a loud clattering sound as the  wooden trap fell from the counter, and then a terrible scraping sound  as it dragged along the floor.  Then silence, then a final convulsive  smacking sound, then silence again.  Wilson exhaled-he had not noticed  that his lungs were screaming to be emptied-and felt consciousness  floating away from him with his breath.  He slept in dreamless dark,  and almost slumbered through the alarm clock's tinny ring. 

When he went into the kitchen in the morning, he found the trap  near the door.  A long streak of pinkish-red blood stretched from a  puddle near the counter to the upside-down trap.  He used a broom  handle to flip the trap over, and was relieved to find it empty except  for a sticky blot beneath the wire bar.  The little square of cheese  was still stuck to the platform, and he swept it up with the trap into  a dustpan and tossed it into the trash. 

There was no trail leading from the trap, and he found only the  usual grime and detritus when he swept out the corners.  With no  corpse there was no proof of his trap's efficacy, but he was somehow  glad not to have the evidence.  Though he reminded himself that they  weren't human, he couldn't help but imagine the terror of the thing  that had sprung the trap, the horror of its family finding it bleeding  and crushed after the awful clattering struggle, the tiny mourning  party-how many were left? Ten now, or more, could a third generation  be gestating?-carrying the body away. 

Wilson called in sick to work and spent the day at the library,  reading about methods of extermination: water traps and fumigation,  poisons to cause hemorrhaging or dehydration of asphyxiation, live  traps for carting vermin away to more appropriate environments and  bear claw traps that snap limbs like brittle twigs.  Then he read  about the funeral practices of primitive tribes who smeared themselves  with the ashes of the dead, burned offerings to fearsome and jealous  ancestors, even ingested the hearts and livers of the deceased.  He  feared returning home to find a tiny corpse flayed and skinned like  the wrecked mice, or a pile of damp ashes in the kitchen, or a circle  of keening pygmies camped beside his bedroom door.  At last he left  with a book about cats, thinking a mouser might be a more respectful,  if no more human, means to rid his home of vermin. 

When he got home he found deep gouges carved into his bedroom  door, some as high as his knees, and the bloody remains of a squirrel  smeared on the floor, its pointy face frozen in an expression of  surprise and pain.  He checked the lock, found it still held firm, and  slipped quickly inside.  All night he sat up in bed, fully dressed,  and dozed fitfully at dawn, waiting for the sounds of little  barbarians massing at the gates.  They never came. 

For three weeks he set and baited the traps, the cruel wire  traps, and every morning he found them undisturbed.  He still had  trouble sleeping at night, and now went to the library every evening  to nap in the periodical stacks, finding the dusty green spines of  bound economics journals especially soothing.  He sprinkled flour in  front of his door in hope of catching little footprints, but the white  dust stayed smooth and slowly worked into the cracks between the floor  boards. 

At last Wilson began to reclaim his house, cleaning the kitchen  he had abandoned after the first trap was sprung and eating his supper  at the table again.  One night he decided to rearrange the pots and  pans in the bottom cupboard, and found a nest made of dryer lint and  shredded newspaper; it was cold to the touch, and musty, and let off  an odor like peanut butter and feces when he crumbled it into a  plastic bag.  He threw away the traps too, and the moldering block of  cheese.  When the garbage truck came the next morning and he heard his  trash cans rattling into its maw, he suddenly felt his house to be  spacious and bright. 

It was in this expansive mood that, two days later, he invited  Dorothy from legal home after Miller's retirement happy hour.  He made  sure to leave when the mood was still congratulatory and comradely,  while the toasts were still being made to the long afternoon naps and  fishing trips in Miller's future. 

Dorothy was not Natasha.  For one thing, she was Wilson's age,  maybe a little older, and she had been disappointed many times  already.  And Dorothy was no beauty, with her brittle colored hair and  fleshy forearms.  But then, Wilson was no longer Jehovah; he was  merely a man with a clean house. 

Dorothy required no coaxing, and she undressed herself, in the  dark, and climbed into his bed.  Wilson climbed in close behind, and  dispensed of the preliminaries, since they both knew what they were  doing and didn't need to concoct an alibi. 

He didn't open his eyes until he had mounted her, and when he  did he saw a row of tiny faces pressed against his window, the  streetlights outside casting long shadows across his pillow.  He  caught their black-eyed stares, held their gazes, and let his smile  curl into a smirk.

Michael Hartford lives in Minneapolis with his wife and two sons. He's a writer and photographer. His stories have been published in Going Down Swinging, Failbetter, Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet and Duck & Herring.