28 July 2005 | Vol. 5, No. 2

The Smallest Woman in the World

by CRAIG BEAVEN

All anyone can handle behind the partition

is a brief glance; you know immediately

she won't live long: body a fourth

of our bodies, cut off below the chest,

legs hanging like cloth. African, late teens,

how aborted the insides must be.

I laid my dollar down beneath the loudspeaker,

the barker a fake step right up

to be shocked and amazed,

the recording turns endlessly, only 29 inches tall.

Not knowing what to do, having never paid

to stare, I said Hello, and she ducked her head

bracing for the next horrible thing.

In my grade school there was a girl

born without pores, unable

to produce body oil, skin a constant red,

flaking in huge scales. A few brown hairs

grown long with a red bow. People assumed

she was burned as a child.

And the boy in my class who went,

over the course of a semester, totally blind,

by his 16th birthday he was in

a different school, learning to walk with a cane,

read Braille. What of them?

Who decides how much pain

is worth a dollar? When you step back out

the shrieks return from the funhouse,

the Ferris wheel rises up in the dark

and falls again, and the tilt-a-whirl

gives us a single human blur.

When he was taken from school, the teacher

explained the disease, how light was going out

in his eyes, dimming to complete darkness,

the last light just a small, distant hole.

She sits in a red wooden chair, shawl

over her knees. Imagine an adult

crammed into a baby-sized body, everything

that would break off. I wanted to save her,

but there's no such thing.

Although you've paid to look, you must turn away.