It’s Sunday night. A dwarf lady works graveyards at the Fil-A-Sak.
An average sized salesman stops for gas on his way home after a long week – fourteen hour days, no thank yous, paper work out the wazoo.
The salesfloor looks strangely like a smallscale cityscape. Like LegoLand. Twelve pack sodas are stacked everywhere into towers and staircases and platforms and miniature skyscrapers. He looks around. Nobody. He lays his Visa on the counter and turns to test his weight on the bottom step of a Sprite stairway. Tentatively he ascends. At just one extra foot off the ground he wonders how the view can be so different. Is this what it’s like to be very tall?
“As a matter of fact, the weather’s fine up here,” he answers an imaginary critic.
He climbs the rest of the sodasteps, keeping balance by brushing the ceiling with his fingertips, gradually shrinking his body to forcefit himself between his soles and the acoustic tile. With gravity on his side he races down fullspeed and then up the Nehi grape staircase on the opposite wall. Centrifugal force carries him past the landing and up the glass door of the beer cooler. He feels like Donald O’Connor. From up top he longjumps across a three foot expanse of linoleum to the peak of a Dr. Pepper pyramid and then geronimoes off its back side onto the raised curb of Coca-Cola that perimeters the place. Now he’s a tightrope walker in training. He briefly ponders the possibility of a trapeze - no, a rope and grappling hook. He scales the face of a Mountain Dew skyscraper, a revised King Kong.
“There are cameras, you know,” says the dwarf lady from out of nowhere.
The salesman suddenly feels very large and very tiny at the same time. He wishes he could hop down off this Diet Coke Empire State Building graciously but that last step is a doozy and he has to stretch his toe just to reach real floor and he doesn’t quite stick the landing.
.
“I can’t reach things, you know, being this size,” says the dwarf lady. “You should see my house.”
So the salesman, taking this a s a come-on, goes home with the dwarf lady to see her mini-amusement-park-house, lined all around with stepladders and cinderblocks, and crisscrossed ziplines, and stools and milk crates and poles with climbing spikes, and when they make love he feels very tall.
But she begins to wonder if he loves her for herself or for the rides.
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Submission Name: A Dwarf Lady
