BIG (from the munich tales)

BIG
By Michael Kroetch

Little Henry´s heart was not in the right place. It´s how he was born. The doctors were all very worried at frist. None had ever known of a child with a heart located in its shoulder. Henry was written up in medical journals all around the world and everyone expected he would not live beyond a few days, or a few weeks at most. But he did. He lived and lived beyond all their expectations and fears and even outlived all his brothers and sisters. But he never got very big. He stayed pretty much the same size all his life. It didn’t bother him being small. He was used to it the way a dog might be that has fleas. It came with the territory of being who he was—a tiny miracle. That´s what the newspaper´s headline had in big print the day of his birth and what his mother continued to call him until she died. He rather liked being a miracle and being special and could never understand it when people tried to make fun of him for being what he was. If they laughed at him, he would always do the one thing he knew would stop them cold in their tracks. He did his dance. It didn´t have a name, but probably should have because everyone who saw him do it was overcome by its cleverness and style. It was a dance he´d done so long he didn´t even remember a time when it was not a part of who he was and how he had made his way through the world. But it always had the same magical effect on people who saw it—it made it so they loved little Henry. Couldn´t help themselves, really. It was something about the upbeat way his feet moved and the rhythms of his dance and how he´d twirl and smile as he did it. Always they would clap afterward, even if they were not the sort who usually clapped or had already seen him do it a dozen times before. These things didn´t matter a bit. All that mattered was that Henry had stood before them and had danced. Their hands moved unbidden into applause. Henry was not a proud man either. He did not dance for money or to impress people. For him it was a way of expressing his joy at being alive and being a tiny miracle with a life that was not supposed to happen. The woman who fell in love with him and had his children was not as small as he was. She was almost as large as everyone else, but she did not care about size. What she saw in Henry was the same thing the doctors had first seen and been so astonished by—his unusual heart, only for her his was not the heart of a small man but one ten times the size of any other man she´d ever met. For her, Henry was almost too large for her to feel worthy being next to. Or so she told him. At which he had just laughed and told her she was crazy and kissed her gently.