Once upon a time, there was a family of Dwarves who lived in the cul-de-sac at the end of Amethyst Place in Trinity’s Field. I say “Dwarves” instead of “Dwarfs” because they were not exactly like the dwarfs we are (somewhat) used to in our society. Hypoplastic dwarfs can have children of a “normal” size, but Steve Sheehan’s Dwarf genes were dominant rather than recessive, which meant that all of Linda Larchman’s children with him were about the same size they were.

People often joked about them; many of the jokes they made were cruel, enough that even the ones that were harmless stung. One of the ones that came up all too frequently even as a serious question was whether they lived in a house that was as small as they were. They did not—in fact, their house was quite large to house their seven children, and the ceilings were even somewhat higher than normal on the first floor. But in the kitchens in particular, there were steps leading up to the counters and even to the cupboards, making the entire downstairs seem to the untrained eye like an obstacle course.

All of the children, from Alexander to Zachary, were sent to school with other children who were not Dwarves, the parents priding themselves on not being intimidated by or prejudiced against “big people”.

But when Rebecca Larchman-Sheehan went to Trinity High, she came back one day talking about a boyfriend.

Talking about Clovis Schumacher wasn’t that big of a deal, of course. By then, Alexander and Melissa had already dated and Victoria was practically engaged—in and of itself, there was nothing odd about this, then.

But then Rebecca brought Clovis home with her.

After the initial encounter, which Clovis, at least, had thought was pleasant enough,, Steve sat Rebecca down on the couch to talk to her about how she had blind-sided him.

“Blind-sided?” Rebecca was offended. “I told you I had a boyfriend and you knew he wasn’t a Dwarf because we’re the only ones in town!”

“Yes, but…” Steve wasn’t quite sure how to continue, aware he was not on the solidest ground. “You didn’t say that.”

“What? That he was black?”

At this, her father turned a brighter shade of red than she had ever seen on a person—not counting her little brother Richard when he’d had the chicken-pox. He (her father, that is, not Richard) subsequently launched into a tirade about how he, of all people, scorned and ridiculed by all, his whole life, how he could not possibly be accused of such levels of bigotry!

“Then what is it?” His daughter was going to make him say it.

Fine. “The man is a GIANT!” Steve Sheehan protested. “Our ceiling is seven and a half feet tall and he was ducking in here!”

“I think that may have just been his posture,” Linda interjected.

“That only makes it worse,” said Steve. “He’s so terrifyingly tall he probably has to duck wherever he goes!”

“The poor dear,” her mother supplied.

Rebecca now turned her incredulous offense on the woman who’d bourn her. “Are you in on this, too, now?”

Her mother sighed. “I just don’t know if it’s a good idea,” she confessed. “I mean, there are things one ought to think about…”

“Mechanical issues…” Steve realized too late he wasn’t saying it under his breath.

“Well, what will people think?” Linda finally put it.

“What will they say?” Rebecca finally stood up from the couch. “They’ll think it’s cute! They’ll think it’s adorable he’s three times my size!”

“But when they…” This was Steve again. “I mean, anyone would have to wonder… how…”

Ew was Rebecca’s only thought. “Seriously, dad, ew! Why would they think that and why would I care? It’s none of their business! For that matter why are you thinking about it? Just… ew!”

Linda, meanwhile, had bourn seven children by this time and was unconcerned with this issue.

“I’m just concerned,” her father pleaded to Rebecca. “I’m concerned about… well, about why. What do you see in him?”

This was a question calculated to give his daughter pause, to make her slow down for reflection. Rebecca needed to do no such thing.

“He’s not afraid of me,” she said. “Everyone in my life tiptoes around me and expects me to act like a child because of how I look. But him? Everyone else is so small to him, he didn’t even notice I was a dwarf. Didn’t treat me any differently.

“Also, he’s really into Magic: The Gathering.”

“I think there’s more to it than that,” said her father. “I think this is you, lashing out.” Rebecca had always been the wild child of the bunch, always contrary, always quick-witted—

“By falling in love?” was her retort this time. “Gee, wouldn’t that be original?”

“Maybe we should all just take a breath,” said Linda.

“Are you going to try to forbid me from dating him?”

The operative word “try” did not escape her parents’ notice.

Clovis never noticed any awkwardness or unkindness from Rebecca’s parents—though, to be fair, this may have been beacuase he was used to cold deference from white people and just figured that was how they were.

It took Steve and Linda some time to adjust their thinking and the angle at which they held their heads, but they got there eventually.

Rebecca and Clovis are together to this day. They still play Magic: The Gathering every week.

The morning before her first day at the new school, she had a new kind of dream. Or maybe it wasn’t new, but she didn’t remember having it before. It was like déjà-vu: everything seemed familiar, even the first time she saw it. Maybe that’s the way dreams always are. But this one felt different.

She was in a room. It wasn’t a small room, as rooms go—in fact, for a bedroom, it seemed like something straight out of a Disney castle, with blues and reds popping out from the walls and the wardrobe and furniture, and a bright purple bed in the center.

That bed.

At first, it felt like she was alone in the room, but then all at once, she felt hands circling her waist, soon followed by a nuzzling kiss on the back of her neck. She had never been touched like that, awake, yet it felt natural, and like she knew the man who did it. She turned around to greet him—

And that was when she woke up.

As dreams go, it wasn’t too elaborate, but it left an impression that lingered during breakfast and the ride on the metro with the woman trying to be her mother, and even when she joined the class that would be hers.

She couldn’t help but wonder, later on, if that dream had been what made her fall so quickly and completely in love with almost the first boy she came into contact with.

His face was soon put upon the body that called to hers in the dreams. That very night, they picked up where they’d left off in the not-so-small room, gazing into one another’s eyes and drinking deep. There was a caution in those first few nights, but it was born of excitement and played as a lingering within each other’s touch, a savoring of the company of each other’s dreams.

They didn’t speak much at school, but when they did, he smiled and she was always aware of his presence, even when she pretended not to be. But they didn’t speak much, even when their eyes found each other across rooms and the crowded courtyard.

Until they did.

“I hear you write songs,” she was bold enough to say to him after sitting down near him in the study hall.

In response, he merely lifted his eyes up at her with the shadow of a smile on his lips.

“What are you writing about?” He twirled the fountain-pen in his fingers like a tool for inspiration and the words on the page were arranged like verses.

“Everything,” he told her.

It was a megalomaniacal answer, for sure, but “Does that include love?”

He seemed taken aback by the directness of this riposte and she caught his eyes flickering up and down her frame. “Perhaps,” he confessed, and then lifted the pen to his lips like a cigarette for a long, magical drag of inspiration.

That night in the red-blue-to-purple room, they explored the bed at last, its purple majesty, tossing sheets about like waves as they dove into one another. It occurred to her that though the room was hers, this was his domain, and he played the fabric of this little world like a chef in his kitchen, like a librarian on the subject of his endless collection, like a rockstar performing for billions and then surfing their waves. All she could do was cling to him. It made her feel safe, but at the same time, excited.

The next time they spoke, he showed her one of his songs, upon request. It wasn’t a song about love (not yet) but it was lovely and it resonated: it was about a home across the sea and living in two different worlds, not sure which of them was the real one. They didn’t talk about love, but she thought she caught him gazing at her neck and wanted him to kiss her there.

Every time they spoke, no matter how many other people were nearby, there was a tension between them. They would stand next to each other. They would lean in and “accidentally” touch. But then they would back away. She wasn’t sure why. She did it because he did it, and she couldn’t help but wonder if the same was true for him.

At night, there was certainty and purpose. He would bend the world around them both and wrap her up in its sheets. He would build mountains and cities out of fabric and then wrinkle them down into dust. He would whisper her name in her ear from behind her as he pointed out their room in the palace of silk, but it wasn’t her name, not the same one she answered to, awake. This name was older.

There was a trip, with school. After driving eight hours South, they would spend a week in the wilderness, biking and hiking, an adventure, if somewhat controlled. The bus drove down at night and though they had held hands once or twice, no words had been spoken between them that mattered. But on a bus ride South with school, no one gets much sleep and what sleep they get, they get at different times. That was how she came upon him sleeping and found herself lingering a bit too long, wondering a bit too seriously what he might be dreaming about, and she heard him breathe her name.

Not her real name, mind you. Her name. That name. From the dream.

She couldn’t know before that moment it was real, but now she did. Now she knew it and the knowledge was almost too much. Could she bring it up? No, it was crazy. Even if she knew it was true, it was crazy—especially then. But how could she just let it linger, let the word fester between them. One of them had to do something!

They unloaded and climbed on their bikes far too early in the morning. She had slept only briefly and dreamed a different dream, an older dream, covered in ash, where she was smoking blue flames, chased by spiders to a door she couldn’t go through until a storm hit—it wasn’t important, she told herself. They had slept at different times, so of course their dreams had been different. But now they spread out, seventy of them, kids on bikes going up mountains, careful of cars on the roads. Now she could speak to him.

She caught him alone on the trail, and, weak in the knees, her resolve and her confidence drifted away at the sight of him. They spoke, but only as they had spoken before, in vague whispers of what they really meant and riddles disguised as jokes. She wanted to do something drastic, she wanted to talk about rooms and how big they could be if you let them, or at the very least mention sheets, to see where he’d go with it. But it wasn’t until they crested the final ridge that he started humming a song and finally crooning the soft words he had written about a lady who was dressed in blue flames.

They arrived at the camp site and she wrote him a note to meet her at the large rock over the river at sunset—

I can’t tell you the end of this story. It’s too much. It’s stupid, the heartbreak. The reasons why it happened the way it did. How could she miss this appointment. She, of all people, she who had set it and made the arrangements. Stood him up. And for what? Reasons, she had aplenty. Excuses, she had none. Not ones she could tell herself. And when the day broke and camp was unsettled, she sought him out to apologize, and saw the truth of it, how in her absence someone else had been there when she’d stood him up, and now she was on his arm, she held his gaze and he avoided the one that hadn’t been there for him.

No wonder their dream had taken such a turn that night. Instead of in bed, they were upright and the door was open and he was turned away from her, light streaming in from outside, shadows dancing across the room. She kept trying to call to him, but when she ran to him, she slammed into the invisible glass between them, keeping her out, and he didn’t hear her.
I won’t tell you the end of this story. And neither will she. It pains her still, her part in it, and the fact that even now, it still isn’t over. But every night—not for the entire night, but some portion—she finds herself locked in that room, where the man she loves takes a stranger in her bed, thinking that it’s her. Why couldn’t she have just told the truth? Even now, why can’t she just tell him?

She tells herself it was all her imagination anyway. If only she could believe it.

And then suddenly I’m standing at your door again. How did I get here? I don’t understand. One moment I was out for a walk, clearing my head in another part of the city, and now I’m back here.

Instinct tells me I should ring the bell or knock because those are the things that you do when you’re standing in front of your girlfriend’s door, on the wrong side of it, not sure if she’s even still your girlfriend. Do I want to ring the bell? Do I want to talk to you? I’m not sure why I’m even thinking about it. Hell, I don’t know how I even got here—

But then you open the door. You’re not looking, at first. You’ve got that purse I gave you slung over your shoulder like you’re going out, going out to do something. Like you’re going to a club, but you’re not dressed for the club—where are you going? Where do you happen to be going right now? I think in the split-second it takes you to see me.

And then your whole face changes—everything. For a minute, I think you think this is the part of the movie where I’ve come back and we don’t even have to talk, you’re just gonna put your hand on my lips, “Shhh,” and then kiss me.

But then I guess you remember.

“Hey,” you tell me, desperately trying to make it sound neutral.

“Hey,” I croak, desperately trying the same and failing, flailing, thinking How the hell did I even get here?

You readjust the strap of your purse so it doesn’t slide right off your shoulder. “What are you doing here?” You sound surprised, but not unpleasantly—not delighted, but not horrified.

“I don’t know,” I confess to you, and there’s something about standing here, dripping wet from the rain, saying those words, that makes me feel like the very worst thing about Hollywood movies.

“Do you…” You’re looking at me, looking at my lips, looking from my chest and shoulders to my eyes, then quickly looking away, looking back inside. “Did you want to come in?”

“No.” I don’t even want to be here, don’t know how I got here, but I don’t want to sound crazy.

“Do you want to talk about it?” You’re doing that thing now, shifting your weight, tipping your toes, like you do when you’re nervous. One of those things I always loved about y—

“No,” I say, and turn to leave.

“Wait—“ you say. You say my name. “Please!” Take my hand.

Why did you have to take my hand? “I shouldn’t even be here,” I whisper.

You hear me and say, “Shhh,” taking the opportunity to move in closer, wrapping yourself around my arm. You say my name again, quietly, not to calm me down, but tenderly, like I’m already calm and you’re trying to savor.

But I’m not calm. So I reclaim my arm from you. I force you to look me in the eyes. I look in your right eye, the one that’s on my left, but you’re doing that thing where you’re shifting back and forth, not sure which eye you want to focus on.

You’re frightened. You’re scared of me and your fear is justified.

I ask you, “Why?” and I watch your face break into a thousand million pieces I don’t want to pick up because each broken bit is a memory and I realize too late I don’t want any answers.

But you give them to me anyway. You remind me what a jerk I was, that I never did like to take responsibility, but then just as I turn to go, to leave in disgrace, you stop me again and you tell me all the wonderful things I once knew about myself but forgot after what you did, after what happened between us, stuff only you could know, only you could remind me of, and that’s when I start to think, you know, maybe whatever brought me here tonight knew what it was doing.

Donald Radcliffe looks at himself in the mirror and doesn’t like what he sees. It’s his face, you see, the lack of hair on it, particularly the lack of hair on his upper lip, just below his nose.

Since early childhood, Donald Radcliffe has associated male attributes—not just virility but honor—with the quality and grooming of a man’s mustache. He had imagined his adult self at the time with a thick growth of long mustache-hair, easily twirlible into strands. In his wildest imaginings, he could twirl the ends of his mustache into thick ropes that could be used for climbing, for fishing, or even, with the appropriate small clubs attached to the ends, as nunchucks during battles with schoolyard bullies.

But as it stands, Donald Radcliffe will never perform such heroics, as his is a face built to be cleanly shaved that could not grow so much as what is popularly known as a “child-molester” mustache, try though he might. And this is, he is convinced, why he does not have a girlfriend to this day.

Which is why he invented Stachio.

Karen Johnson-Jones does not have a boyfriend, either–a fact she, too, laments as she looks in the mirror. For her, it’s her breasts. When she takes off only her shirt to look at them, she has to strain her eyes to convince herself that she isn’t a boy, and sometimes even then she feels the need to rub her legs together just to be sure.

This is not the person she wanted to be. I’m a woman, she thinks, and I want the pectoral protrusions to prove it!

Why couldn’t she be more like her mother? Now there was a woman! Some of her earliest memories are of the various instruments and implements and affects her mother could produce from her cleavage, from money and keys and make-up pouches to CDs and small furry animals and sandwiches. Once—she was sure of it—Karen Johnson-Jones had seen her mother emerge from her chest of wonders with a bottle of 1979 Horace Landing Pinot Grigio. It was the stuff of legends!

And yet here was her daughter, unable to squeeze the two together well enough to hold a penny aloft. Disgraceful!

Which was why she invented her alter-ego, Bigtits.

These two, Bigtits and Stachio, represent what these two poor unfortunate souls wish they could look like. We haunt their dreams and taunt their memories with visions of what might have been. Are we right? Correct? Who cares? We are alive and we are having fun!

On this of all days, though, Donald Radcliffe and Karen Johnson-Jones both have laundry to do and, conveniently (for this, at least) neither have the facilities and so are forced both to make their separate ways to the local Laundromatic, where they are destined to meet each other for the first time.

Now, Donald Radcliffe and Karen Johnson-Jones would be perfect for each other. Their interests and opinions align, their quirks match up; you know it, I know it, the laundromat knows it, inasmuch as the laundromat knows anything. There’s just one thing standing in their way. Well, two: Bigtits and Stachio.

You see, he sees her and he thinks “Hot damn, that’s a fine-looking woman.” But any time Donald Radcliffe thinks “Hot damn, that’s a fine-looking woman,” he knows that she’s out of his league, because he doesn’t have a mustache. So he does his best not to even look at her. He’s not there to look anyway, right? He’s there to do laundry. Meanwhile, Karen Johnson-Jones looks at this nice-looking boy and her mind starts to work at it, chipping away, until she realizes this nice-looking boy isn’t looking at her. Why isn’t he looking at her? Oh, I know. It’s because he would rather be looking at Bigtits.

Bigtits has wiles, you see, of a feminine variety, a way of bouncing her bosom to draw the eye. And Stachio? Why, he sees a fine-looking woman like that and, hot damn, he will twirl his mustache until she throws her number at him—though, admittedly, several other things would probably have to happen as well before that.

As each of them struggles with their machines, they soon realize they are struggling with us, their deepest fears keeping them from acting, from making a move, yet all the while, they find their eyes keep seeking one another out, much as they try keeping them to themselves until finally he looks up and sees her looking at him and once he’s looking at her, she smiles.

This should be the happy ending. Their time has come now, right?

But there’s still one more step left to make.

They do their folding standing next to each other and lingered long enough looking at each other and lingered long enough looking at each other’s catchy T-shirts to warrant explanations.

“Oh, yeah,” said Karen Johnson-Jones, “I got this at an Aardvark on Toast concert a couple years back. It’s actually a boys’ shirt, but that’s great ’cause, like…” She gestured at her figure.

But he seemed confused.

“No chest,” she helped, “Nothing to see here.”

“Nothing to see?”

“My breasts. They’re kinda… not a thing…”

“Oh. I really hadn’t noticed.”

It seemed an ambiguous statement that could go either way, but something about the way he said it plunged a knife deep down between Bigtits’s breasts, past the breadcrumbs, lost freshman boys and broken dreams, and cracked her ribcage, piercing her very soul.

“Oh,” said Karen Johnson-Jones, “Well, thanks, for… um… not noticing that.”

They continued folding until Karen Johnson-Jones asked “So do you have a girlfriend?”

It took Donald Radcliffe by surprise, giving him hope and provoking Stachio to use one side to lasso his attentions to his own insecurities (all the while twirling the other). “No,” he sighed.

To which, Karen Johnson-Jones: “Oh… why not?”

And even just the fact that she asked it and smiled when he turned his clean-shaved face to her, pulled both strands of Stachio’s facial armament all the way around his head and strangled Donald Radcliffe’s insecurities with his own mustache, allowing him to reply: “I don’t know. Guess I just haven’t found the right flat-chested girl.”

This made her smile and they both lived happily ever after, leaving Bigtits and Stachio’s mangled corpses on the floor of the laundromat.