Midget Stella [upd] Info

Stella looked at the painted horses, their eyes wild and vacant. “They don’t go anywhere.”

Her stage was a plywood platform painted to look like a mushroom. Her costume was a velvet acorn cap and a pair of leaf-shaped slippers. Every night, she sang a plaintive version of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” while a man in a wolf suit pretended to chase her around a fake tree. The crowd laughed. They always laughed. Not with her. At the spectacle of a small woman fleeing a hairy giant. midget stella

The only person who didn’t laugh was Dutch, the carousel operator. Dutch had a missing thumb and a quiet way of looking at people like they were more than their worst parts. One night, after a particularly cruel heckler called her a “broken toy,” Stella sat on the steps of the carousel, hugging her knees. Stella looked at the painted horses, their eyes

She framed the article and hung it next to Dutch’s wooden horse. Years later, when a little girl with brittle bones and a heavy brace on her leg asked Stella why she was so small, Stella knelt—which put them eye to eye—and said, “Because the world needed someone to see things from down here. The view’s better. You see the cracks in the pavement before you fall in.” Every night, she sang a plaintive version of

Stella smiled. She curtsied. She collected her fifty dollars and walked back to her trailer, where she washed the green face paint off and stared at the real person in the mirror.