by Jean-Luke Swanepoel
Transcript of “Downsizing”
For years my mother lived in a three-bedroom house, a bougainvillea bleeding blossoms in the yard. It was a house with a number—225—and a street with a name, in a town that fit snugly within the triangle formed by three intersecting interstates. This town had a hospital, and the doctors there said that cancer was blooming like a field of wildflowers in her chest. Three bedrooms and a bathtub became mere theory before long: the staircase, now precipitous, became insuperable. In theory there was a street, and in theory there was a town; in theory there was light and color beyond the incessant hospital rounds. When her breathing became shallow and her legs turned ornamental, my father began to carry her up the staircase in his arms, and if she seemed surprised at the sheer size of the place, it was only because of the endless corners against which tender and tumorous limbs and digits might be bumped. She downsized to the downstairs living room after that—one window framed magenta blossoms in the sun—and when she grew tired of this same sedate scene, she closed her eyes and relocated again. Her final four walls. The smallest dwelling of the bunch. No windows, no white walls, no long nights, no sun. No staircase, no bathtub, no bougainvillea in bloom, she was dust, collecting dust, on a shelf suddenly, in a solemn corner of the dining room.
Jean-Luke Swanepoel was born in South Africa, and he currently lives in California with his husband. His work has most recently appeared in The Westchester Review, Hawaiʻi Pacific Review, and New Limestone Review. His sophomore novel, The Book of David, was published in January 2025. Find him on Goodreads at www.goodreads.com/jlswanepoel.