The Rose and the Beast: Tiny

Here's the next installation from The Rose and the Beast!

-Tiny-

By Francesca Lia Block

The woman named her lost babies Berry, Ivy, Oxygen, Pie, Willow, Wish, and Pear, never knowing if they were boys or girls.Each one taught her something about life. Sorrow, Pain, Fortitude, Tenderness, Patience, Courage, Awe, Love. She made eight tiny, symbolic graves in her garden and planted flowers on them all.

The woman sat alone in her garden of memory flowers, rocking a cradle full of iris bulbs, whispering to babies who could not hear her. She felt like the ancient cracking husk of a pomegranate, rattling with dried seeds.

And then she found she was pregnant again.

The doctors were amazed because the fetus was much too small, but this time there was a perfectly normal flickering on the screen like a miniature star.

The woman prayed to the spirits of the lost babies that this one would come out alright.

And it did. Except that the baby was tiny, just about the size of a thumb. Her mother called her Tiny. You are perfect, the mother told her, the baby I always wanted. She was careful to make sure her child did not feel sad because of her small size.

Tiny had to sleep in a cradle made from half a walnut shell and drink out of a thimble. Even dollhouse doll clothes were too big for her, so mostly she ran around naked or clothed in scraps of silk.

Tiny didnt know there was anything wrong with her for a long time. She loved her mother and thought all mothers were big like that. She believed that when she was older she might suddenly grow and one day have a child the size of her own thumb. Her life was happy. She sat on the edge of the flower box filled with red, white, and magenta impatiens and watched the garden bloom. She could see the most infinitesimal movements of the plants as they grew. It was enough to occupy her all day, that and being with her mother. She could gaze at her mother forever as if her mother were a lush and flowering plant towering above all the rest.

Tiny was protected from the outside world in the gated garden full of roses, irises, and azaleas, orange, lemon, and avocado trees, and she didn’t mind. The garden got more radiant and abundant and redolent every day that she watched it and, as her mother said it, blessed it, although she didn't know how she did that really. She had so much going on inside her head- so many things to dream about. She had eight imaginary playmates that came to her and taught her things about life. About how sad life is, but also how full of wonder, and about being strong and letting go and believing that things will bloom again. Tiny was fine in her tiny world. But one day she saw the boy.

He had climbed over the garden fence because he had heard that the woman with the long legs and the cat eyes lived in that shady, fragrant home. She didn't come out much anymore, people said. The tragedy of her life. They didn’t know about her tiny secret.

Tiny saw the boy wandering around the garden, as intrigued by the flowers as she was, it seemed. It was true, he’d never seen a garden like this was before. The blossoms were huge and the fragrance was staggering. He felt drunk.

He was tall and thin with a long face and deep-set eyes with heavy brows. He was not particularly good looking- at least he didn't think so. He felt ungainly tripping on his big big fet as if to escape his body- cumbersome. But to Tiny he was everything she wanted. She stopped caring about the garden and the eight spirit babies who visited her and even about her mother. Suddenly she resented her mother a little, without quite recognizing the emotion since it was so new to her, but felt it because she realized in that instant that she would never be tall and big like that; she was a freak, she knew, and this boy would never love her.

The boy prowled around the garden, dizzy with flowers. He was a poet and was already thinking of words to try to describe what he saw (he couldn’t). He peeked into the windows of the house and saw the woman walking around with her hair up in a turban towel. She was his mother’s age but she had long legs, high cheekbones, and the upward-slanting sun-flecked green eyes of a cat.

Tiny saw him watching. She needed to scream but she just lay there, oozing and broken like a squashed insect.

The boy waited while Tiny’s mother loosened the towel from her head so that her long wet hair shook down. He waited while she let her robe slip from her shoulders. Tiny came closer to him. She could hear his breathing, raspy and deep in his throat, and she could smell something that was better than all the flowers in her garden.

The boy suddenly swung around, sensing, but not seeing anyone. He ran out of the garden.

Tiny thought about him every day and night. She became sullen and would hardly speak or eat. Her mother asked her again and again what was wrong but she wouldn’t say. Her eyes became like slits and she chewed on her lips until they bled. She felt like the dead butterfly she had seen moldering in the dirt.

Tiny knew it was time to leave and so she  packed up some berries, her bed lines, her thimble, and a silver needle in a knapsack and began her journey away from the garden and from the mother she would never be.

If you were Tiny’s size you would find that a few blocks can take a long time to traverse. There were many dangers. The bird that swooped down and tried to eat her for lunch. The toad that fell in love with her and tried to carry her away to be its wife. The cat that thought she was a toy to bat around in its claws. With her silver needle and her quick little body, Tiny was able to get away. She was no longer a slow dreamer watching the flowers grow. She was a warrior now. Warriors need something to fight for, though, besides their lives, because otherwise their lives will not be worth it. Tiny thought she was fighting for the boy’s love, but after a while she wondered what that meant and how did she think she could never achieve it? Small as she was- the size of one of his fingers- nothing like her mother, with nothing to give except a way to watch gardens, some knowledge imparted by eight spirit babies, now gone, and deftness with a silver needle.

The boy was walking home from school trying to find words to describe the way he was feeling. Alone, awkward, alienated, isolated, crazy. He hated all those words. He wondered why he considered himself a poet. Pretentious as hell. He thought everything he wrote was terrible, actually. He had tried to write about the garden, and the woman in the window, and the strange feeling he had had, as if he were being watched, breathed upon by something that chilled his nape and made him want to cry.

Tiny found him that day. She was half starved. She had been scratched and bitten. Her dress was in tatters. Not one night had she slept well- there was no safe garden, no walnut cradle,no lullaby mother. She was too old for those things anyway, she told herself. Tinys do not deserve safety. If they are to prove themselves, they must suffer and die or suffer and survive.

But then she saw the boy, and love seeped into her body as if she had sucked it from a honeysuckle blossom. She knew he was trying to make up poems. She knew so much about him already. She realized that she was nothing without his desire for poetry, just as she was nothing without her mother’s desire for a child. She was their creation; no wonder she had to have them.

This made her feel strangely brave and she leaped as far as could, landing precariously on his arm. His jacket smelled of smoke and basketball and libraries and the grass he had rolled in, trying to recall what it was like when he was a little boy and not so… whatever it was that he was all the time. Sad, depressed, angst-ridden. He didn’t even have the right words for anything.

Tiny jumped from his scratchy sleeve into his pocket, where it was warm and musty smelling. There was a pack of cigarettes, a gnawed pencil stub, some grains of sand, a piece of spearmint gum in case he ever met who he was waiting for. She explored, discovering new things about him. How he worried about lung cancer but couldn’t stop smoking. How he always lay on the beach in his clothes, wishing the ocean would take him away, he didn’t care where. How he was waiting for his muse, his poetry in the shape of a girl.

And so Tiny aited also, and when he came to his apartment building and went inside, and closed the door of his room that was piled with books replacing tables and chairs and had black-and-white posters from Italian movies on the walls (all the women were so big like Tiny’s mother), and had a rumpled bed with sheets like maps- that was when she climbed out of his pocket and stood in front of him. Now she was truly a warrior because he was a million times more dangerous to her than toads, cats, or birds.

Oh, shit, he said. What the fuck.

I’m Tiny, she said.

You can say that again.

I’m Tiny.

He laughed. Man! he said. You are awe-inspiring, O Muse.

I’ve been trying to find you, she said.

Well, Tiny Muse, I’m certainly glad that you have.

He got down on his knees before her- she was perched on a stack of books of Beat poetry- and stared at every part of her perfect little body. He felt a bit perverse about it, but he didn’t care because she seemed to be enjoying his gaze. He knew that he would never be without the right words again as long as she was with him, but he thought he should officially ask her anyway.

Will you help me to find the words, O Muse? he asked.

She looked him up and down, looked around the room.

Can I sleep in your bed? she answered.

He grinned at her and reached for the piece of gum in his pocket.

Suddenly he was translucent, perfect, the size she was.
The prince of the flowers.

Finally got it up! The next story will be Glass, which is based on Cinderella.