There is no short cut to love, especially when your parents try to help.
Love is like a mega-vitamin. Swallow it with a little pride and a gulp of chagrin and it works wonders, mysteriously. (You can do this alone, but everyone knows that mystery loves company.) Good photographers can capture the small emotional details of life, more often than not accidentally. But that's life.
Now, life was something that Marta hadn't spent a lot of time wondering about, especially the small details. But then, she had the most beautiful hands, with tiny, wonderful fingers that were slender as fine blown glass. Just that delicate.
People often stared at her oversized head, the rounded, bandy legs and plump torso; but all was forgiven when they spied her hands. If there was a god, he must be sensitive to restoring a balance to an oversight.
They were really wonderful hands.
Her parents were ordinary folk. Father was a towering five foot eleven and mother, six inches shorter. Marta was three foot seven, and if they hadn't lived in a small town she might have had a tormented childhood. There were sixty in all in the school, and the novelty of her height had worn off by sixth grade. While she wasn't quite ordinary, she wasn't excluded socially.
That is, without mentioning the sack race at the senior picnic.
Unfortunately, ordinary folk worry about ordinary things, and Marta's parents were concerned she might not be able to lead a normal life. She was their only success after six miscarriages, and while she wasn't exactly a triumph, their daughter was their only chance to approach the American ideal family.
Her father once remarked that if they could only have two more, they would truly achieve the norm of two and two thirds children. And though Marta heard the slap and saw her father leave the house with an angry red mark on his face, she didn't see him come home drunk that night.
It was the only time it happened.
On her nineteenth birthday, they sat her down to discuss her future. It was important to them that she lead an ordinary life. The nearest university was a state school and she was sure to encounter a great deal of abuse. It would be better if she got married as soon as possible.
Her laughter sounded like a tinkling bell. She had no objection to marriage, in principle, but she had yet to go on her first date, much less been kissed.
The tinkle tinkle tinkle was her laughter.
The laughter echoed off her father's face, exposing a trace of frustration and something indecipherable. "We've decided to place an ad in several large city newspapers. We figured it was the only way...." He stopped when he saw the color drain from her face. Her fingers curled into her fine hands; fisted spiders.
"Don't be like that, honey. Do you want to see the ad? It's very tastefully done."
Her oversized head sagged weakly back and forth. She felt like a little girl whose parents were selling her favorite doll. An imaginary troop of midgets and dwarfs lined up outside the house, waiting to place the high bid for her hand.
"Well, you go think about it for awhile."
Marta's fears were justified by the first three letters to arrive. One came from a rich octogenarian in San Francisco who offered to leave her the bulk of his estate if she would consent to videotape their wedding night, including the conjugal activities following the reception.
A nicer communication came from a lonely circus midget, who was, unfortunately a woman. The third was from a witty fellow in Boston who began by saying he was used to getting the short end of the stick, and that he was in fine health, except for an occasional shortness of breath, etc. But the fourth letter came from a man genuinely interested in matrimony. He owned his own business, drove his own car and owned his own home. He was, in short, his own man.
One of the problems with growing up in a small town is that one develops very narrow definitions for what it pleasing and what is not. For example, his picture was not pleasing. True, Marta was no beauty, but she really had little opportunity to look at herself. Also, being somewhat different that everyone else makes for low self-esteem.
In other words, he looked a lot like her.
Her father didn't tell her he had written back to the man until the day of his arrival. Both, father and mother, held their breath after announcing the fact, and were chilled by the look of cold hatred in her eyes before she turned and walked upstairs without speaking.
Marta heard the car in the driveway. Snapping the latch on her small suitcase, she walked down the stairs as her father finished introducing her mother to the small man in the doorway. The three then turned to watch her.
"Can we leave right away? I don't like driving in the dark."
"But, honey, you haven't even met the man yet." It was a mother's complaint.
"Good-bye, Mother. Good-bye Father."
The man looked at her father and shrugged. He watched as the girl's mother leaned over to kiss her daughter good-bye. The girl raised a tiny, shapely hand to ward off her father's kiss.
"You'll write us, won't you dear?"
"Don't worry, I'll drop a short note every once in awhile."
The acid of her words cut through her parents like wire, but they didn't acknowledge the hurt. The courtship may not have been storybook, but it was more than they expected.
So was she, for that matter.
Ten miles out of town he broke the silence, "I don't know what kind of trouble you've had with your parents, but I think you'll like our lifestyle."
"What has style got to do with life?"
An hour later, he decided to try his luck again, "Have you ever been to Spokane before?"
"For some reason, my parents never liked traveling."
This time, he was determined to continue. "What a pity. We're going to do a lot of traveling. I mean, if you'd like to. Myself, I love to travel."
Marta looked at him closely, trying to see if he was lying to impress her. He turned and smiled.
"Don't be angry with your parents. It's the people closest to us who make the biggest mistakes."
"When are we getting married?" Marta asked sharply. "I suppose you want to get it over with as soon as possible."
"We can take as long as you like." He smiled. "I don't want to get anything over with. The longer anything takes, the more I enjoy it." He noticed her confusion and reached out his hand in her direction. "Have you ever been on a date?
Marta shook her head 'no'.
"Either have I. Does that surprise you?"
"I don't know."
"Well, it surprised the heck out of me. I decided early on that I wouldn't let my size keep me from leading a normal life."
"Have you," Marta asked. "Have you led a normal life."
His eyes became fixed on the road ahead, his lips tightly clamped. "No."
"I would have thought that if you wanted something badly enough...."
"I did think that, but I was wrong. You see, we aren't really normal. Oh, my feelings are normal enough, my hunger, thirst, painall functioning perfectly. But they don't let us act normal."
"They?"
"Everyone else." He sighed. "Don't get me wrong, they can't help the way they act and feel. We are different. All my regular customers recognize the difference, and then we go from there.
"By the way," Marta asked in a lighter tone, "What business are you in?"
"I own and run a bar in downtown Spokane."
She pictured him sitting behind a hidden cage counting the receipts for the night. He laughed at her silence.
"Don't you think I'm tall enough to pour drinks and stand behind the bar?" Her face reddened embarrassed and he softened his tone. "I had the bar designed with a special platform behind it so I would be on an even level with the customers. It's quite a friendly atmosphere. You'll like it a lot."
She looked at him wildly. "What makes you think I'm going to work there with you?"
He smiled. "I spend twelve hours a day in the bar. What kind of marriage could we have if we never saw each other? Besides, it's a chance to meet people everyday; new and interesting people. It's a great way to live."
A great way to live.
Marta truly had never thought much about living. The question had never made itself apparent before. Much less any particular way to live. The panic she felt came from the thought that she had been hasty in leaving her parents so suddenly. Who would protect her now? The little man sitting next to her?
"We have an advantage over regular people, you know." The statement came out of the blue and Marta missed his meaning.
"What is that?" she asked. "I mean, about an advantage?"
"Well, we have less choices to make than others." He smiled, "Really, the only choice we have to make is whether we want to accept what is available to us."
"Isn't that the same for everyone?"
He smiled. She was smarter than he had hoped. "The choice is the same, but ordinary people think they have more options. Ours are more clearly defined. For example, I almost didn't answer your parents' ad. I had a bad experience once; I put an ad in some newspapers. The answers I received were unbelievable. I almost wrote back to one woman, but she was working in a circus."
"Oh, she wrote to you, too?
His laughter came so easily, filling the car so completely, that she was forced to join in. Sharing the one laugh did more than a month of courting and they were married that next Tuesday in the bar.
One newspaper photographer caught a close-up of her wedding band. The ring was nice, but what captured the attention of the nation was the tiny, wonderful fingers that were slender as fine blown glass.
In fact, Marta received so much attention, some of Rich's friends thought he might become disenchanted with her for stealing the limelight. After all, he sure as heck loved company. But, there amidst the gaiety and partying, a small, rounded face looked on, momentarily unnoticed. The face was watching the group toasting his new wife, and while one had to look closely, the tears were there, for everyone to see, had they bothered to look closely.
The photographer won several awards with the photo of Marta's ring hand. But there was a second one, and when the photographer developed the picture in his darkroom, he knew he had captured something very special. He enlarged it, blocking it carefully to center the little face as accurately as possible. He experimented with various chemical washes to bring out the tears as much as possible. Then he matted it, and put it in a simple frame and hung it in his private workroom where no one ever saw it, not even the proprietors of The Midget Club.
If you ever wonder whether or not a photographer is an artist, ask him to show you the pictures he's never shown to anyone else. If he hesitates before claiming he has no such pictures, you'll know right away you're dealing with an artist.
And the little couple? No doubt they lived happily ever after, happier than most. As he used to say, if theirs had been a marriage of convenience, he would have opened a store and called it Seven-Eleven!
And her laughter still sounds like tinkling crystal.
Soldier's Gap is a non-traditional mystery with literary elements. The high school principal is brutally murdered, but Deputy Sheriff Dave Jenkins's search for meaning and love is a much more significant theme.
"Murder isn't usually this fun
Pieces of Eight is an eclectic collection of eight imaginative novellas/short stories. Themes represented in the work are science fiction, paranormal, psychological drama, humor, murder/revenge and astrological fulfillment. Pieces of Eight is the com
3 WAY MIRROR is about a lost identity as experienced by a twenty-eight-year old who thinks he's Charles Randall, until strange events suggest otherwise.
