Tiny Atlas: Part One

Being the first part in five of the autobiographical chronicle of a curious dwarf and his even curiouser career, as related to Mr. Florian Eckhardt at a Men’s Penal Colony in the late autumn of 2007. Read onward!

When people first meet me, the first thing they notice is not the tiny dwarf standing before them, or — as my school chums used to call me right before grabbing me by my ankles, swinging me around their heads and lazily chucking me into the stratosphere — “Tiny Midget Mowcher.” Nor is it my throbbing biceps, my oiled pectorals, my abdominals arrayed like a colony of quivering, bronze-shelled oysters. In fact, when people first meet me, they don’t notice me at all, but only the enormous, fluid-filled scrotum I carry around on my back. In short, I suppose you could say that the first thing people notice about me is my career, and considering the fact that most people define themselves by their professions, I guess that makes me as normal as the rest of you.

I will not say that my career is my dream job. I think most of us understand that youthful aspirations to be a cowboy, rocket ship captain or limbless, prehensile gynecologist are soon thwarted by stark reality. My reality was always, if not starker, then at least four feet lower. I dreamed of being given a tiny little badge by the local transit authority; of marching authoritatively between canopies supported by lanugo-glistening pillar that wobbled with the sway of the rush hour subways sliding through their cthonic arteries; of dutifully making notes on my clipboard as a pensioned metropolitan underwear inspector. Even when I learned there was no such career path available to me, I tried to undertake it: it was the resulting thirty-six month incarceration that gave me my chiseled upper-body physique, my torso of tattoos, my ambidextrous acumen with a pair of silver switchblades and my penchant for slicing through a man’s pelvic arteries and watching his blood spill out of him like a punctured bladder, all in a rush.

I don’t want to talk about prison. When you are diminutive, the defilements of the jailhouse shower become less about something covered in soap and more about being covered in soap yourself, then crammed. Still, even this experience became a bullet-point on my CV: after three years in the pen, my staunch heterosexuality was no longer threatened by close proximity to male genitalia.

It was perhaps that quality more than any other which gleamed my parole officer’s eyes so dreamily when I walked in for my first appointment. This is a man with potential, they twinkled in morse. This is a man who can be employed.

“So. Mr. Mowcher,” my parole officer said, after a perfunctory examination of my file. “Looking for work?”

“Looking,” I affirmed, standing on the chair he had offered and looking him straight in the puckered, glaucomic eye.

“You can’t wait around until Christmas, you know. Gainful employment is a condition of your parole.”

“The Local Transit Authority has not called me back about my most recent application, but I’m calling every day to keep my name fresh in their minds,” I reminded him.

“Mmm. You may want to consider interim work. How would you feel about being a manservant?”

“I had quite enough of that in prison, thank you,” I replied.

“It means butler. But what I’m thinking is something somewhere between butler, chauffeur and body guard,” my parole officer explained. “We’ve got a position like that. There’s some physical labor involved, naturally.”

“This body loves hard work,” I said.

At moments like these, I wished they made t-shirts small enough that I could flex my muscles all at once and make the cloth explode off of me in an expanding corona of polyester confetti. I made a mental note to check the newborn section at the local department store for t-shirts suitable for a muscular-framed neonate. I did not want to be caught off-guard again.

It was as if my parole officer had read my mind. He arched an eyebrow at me and winked, “I assume you won’t have a problem working shirtless?”

In answer, I flexed, but my t-shirt only tore at the sleeves a little, so I tore it off, twisted around and, raising my arms to cradle my head, demonstrated for the flabby man my best front abdominal-thigh isolation.Then I did a backflip off the chair to demonstrate my natural acumen in acrobatics. My parole officer whistled and slapped his gut appreciatively.

“Does that answer your question?” I asked.

I admit, I was a bit smug about that, but my dominant alpha male instinct had never been quelled by the mere happenstance of being shoved at birth into a tiny humanoid’s homunculus.

“I’m sold!” my parole officer exclaimed. “And what about your legs? Are they strong? I hear many of you people have problems with your hips.”

Ignoring the smug, bigoted allusion to “my people”, I demonstrated my fitness the only way I knew how. But my parole officer soon waved his hand at me, and I knew I’d gone too far. Some of us are not so staunch in our heterosexuality that we can fully appreciate the oiled, quivering splendor of the male form, even when concentrated into a sinewy package of about the same size and weight as a medium-sized Thanksgiving Turkey. But then again, not all of us have been to prison.

“Mr. Mowcher,” my parole officer scolded. “There’s no need for that. Please put your pants back on. I’ll send you over to Mr. Atlas for an interview.”

TO BE CONTINUED…