“Neither do we,” Dutch said. “But we still turn.”
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
Stella hitchhiked to the city. She found a room above a laundromat and a job at a library reshelving books. The children’s section was at her eye level. For the first time in her life, she didn’t have to look up at anyone. She started reading to kids on Saturday mornings—not as a stunt, not as a pity act, but as a small woman with a big voice and a deep love for stories where the smallest creature saves the day. “Neither do we,” Dutch said
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
A local reporter caught wind of her. The headline read: Former Carnival Performer Brings Magic to Library Story Hour . No mention of her height. No mention of “midget.” Just Stella.
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.