Short Fiction: TALL STORY (Part 1)
Elusive Beauty Standards & Dystopian Dreams. Illustrated by Mikala Monsoon
To celebrate the forthcoming release of my debut novel Another Life, it feels fitting for me to share some fiction here on Substack for the very first time (gulp!).
Tall Story came to me in a dream, almost fully formed. In the dream, I was a very different version of myself living a life that is different from my own in so many ways. My real life family is nothing like the one in this story and the friends are not based on any friends I actually have. However, the ideas this character entertains are inspired by a genuine insecurity I’ve always had about my height (as I imagine the dream itself was!).
Since I first had this dream though, I’ve found myself in the company of a few tall, beautiful women whose elegance and grace have made me feel so much less insecure about my own 176cm frame. And, of course, I’ve always known there are bigger things in the world (and, indeed, my life) to worry about. However, this concept was a lot of fun to explore on the page and allowed me to dive into so many more issues surrounding women’s bodies, beauty standards and why we so often feel the need to make ourselves smaller to accommodate for other people.
I’m incredibly grateful that my decision to share Tall Story on Substack granted me the privileged opportunity to collaborate with the magnificent multi-hyphenate Mikala Monsoon, her illustrations bringing my words to life in the most inventive of ways. When I was first introduced to Mikala, I was struck by her rebelliousness, resourcefulness and creativity. She’s a truly inclusive feminist who constantly sticks two fingers up at capitalism and always sees through the bullshit. I’m often thrilled to meet people whose socio-political ideas perfectly align with my own but, with Mikala, the icing on the cake is her talent for helping me articulate so many thoughts and feelings I’ve struggled to find the words for. This is what makes her such a fantastic editor as well as a brilliant artist. Her illustrations are fun, witty, subversive and clever but totally unpretentious. I feel so lucky to be able to share four pieces inspired by Tall Story - two in this first half and two in the second.
I hope you enjoy reading.
The room smells like disinfectant. As if someone has worked for hours to scrub out a terrible stain. It isn’t much different to every other doctor’s office I’ve ever known and, whilst I’ve never actually seen the inside of a butcher’s abattoir, I suspect it’s not much different to one of those either. Stainless steel surfaces and cupboards catch my warped reflection and I stare back at myself, twisted and hideous.
“How does it work then?” I ask, after the examination. I shuffle my body around so I’m sitting on the edge of the bed. It happens to be raised enough for me to swing my legs and, whilst I enjoy this rare luxury, I look down at my shoes, revelling in the idea that, one day soon, they might appear a little bit closer.
“Do you have a science degree?” Doctor Riley asks, a little patronisingly.
I shake my head, reminded of how I only just scraped a passing grade in high school chemistry.
“There’s no real point in me diving into the details then,” she replies. “I suppose you could say, however, that it does the opposite of what a human growth hormone might do. A human shrink hormone, you could call it.”
She laughs at her own joke and I wonder how many dozens of times she’s told it, even just today. I press my own, unsmiling mouth into a thin, pink line of worry.
“Does it hurt?” I ask.
“A little,” she replies. “But no more than growing pains may have troubled you as a teen. And not nearly as much as it would if you were trying to go the other way.”
The doctor tuts and shakes her head. “The pain some men would put themselves through before this treatment was available to women.”
She inspects her fingernails and then, with a sharp intake of breath, reiterates that there will be no broken bones for me. Just five injections three weeks apart, pills taken at home in between and then a final, corrective surgery to make sure my spine is properly aligned.
“You’re looking at twenty eight weeks in total, including recovery time”, she says, like it’s nothing. Like babies haven’t been conceived, gestated and born in that length of time. Weak and small but often strong enough to survive.
I sigh. Long and hard. Maybe this is all too much.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve always said that if I could push a button and be three or four inches shorter, I’d push it. In a heartbeat. But this is different. Costly. Painful. Lengthy and fraught with risk.
I’ll only admit to myself that I’m terrified though. A tiny whispered voice in my head. A much louder voice drowns it out, repeating the old cliché, over and over again: If anything is worth having, it isn’t ever easy.
My brother meticulously pores over the brochure but says nothing. A steely silence that carries such weight. I already know what he thinks. We’ve argued about it countless times now. He’s begged. Pleaded. Sent me articles and YouTube videos in an attempt to dissuade me from this. Yet, here he is. Knowing that, if he doesn’t give in, I’ll do this on my own. Struggle through without his support. Begrudgingly, he’s choosing kindness over being right because, as it turns out, he loves me more than he hates my choices.
“It’s your body,” he said a few days ago, finally acquiescing with a sigh big enough to fill a room. And how could he not give in? Barely an inch of his skin has been spared by the tattoo gun, his ears and left eyebrow punctured with piercings too. On his eighteenth birthday, he’d dyed his hair purple and teased it into a mohawk.
“It’s a phase,” our mortified mother had said, as we washed dishes together late one night. “We just have to pray he’ll grow out of it.”
I’d reached into the sink and planted a sphere of soap bubbles on her nose in an attempt to cheer her up. She giggled, swatting me away as if I were an oversized fly. Spindly legs and soft body.
“She’d hate this,” my brother says, eyeballing me from where he’s sitting in the corner of the office. Dr. Riley pretends to be busy with some paperwork as the tension builds around her.
“Come on, man,” I reply, exasperated. “You said you were done giving me a hard time about it. That you weren’t gonna say anything else”.
“I’m the eldest. It’s my job to advocate for what would have been her wishes. And to look out for you.”
“Mom was short,” I retort, my words clattering into the end of his sentence. “It’s easy to judge other people for wanting what you have when you have the privilege of actually having it.”
Riley tells me I can book in for my first treatment and, at the desk outside her office, the receptionist hands me an envelope with an invoice inside. The cost of each treatment sends my stomach acid swirling and I fear I’ll run out of money before the entire process is complete. She explains that I’ll pay for the spinal surgery first: “Seems like we’re doing things backwards, I know, but it’s the most important part. And we can only do it once. The risk of complications is too high otherwise.”
Each injection and every course of pills will be paid for, one by one. If funds dry up, I’ll simply receive less injections and lose less height.
I start to wonder if only shrinking an inch or two would be worth the cost of my tall girl identity. A gradual slide into average-sized mediocrity. Not quite tall but still not petite. Neither here nor where I want to be.
On a scrap of paper, I work out how many shifts I’d have to do at my shitty day job to ensure this doesn’t happen. Then, I message my friend Sally and tell her I’ll have to pull out of our planned trip abroad. My much needed yearly break will have to wait.
Outside, my brother leans against the wall of the building, taking long desperate drags from the last desperate dregs of his cigarette. I think of how his lungs will rattle when he’s older. Of what he’s done to his body over the years, all for the sake of something he thought looked cool when he was thirteen. Who is he to judge me?
I double down.
“I’m starting treatment on the fifteenth,” I say, grinning like I mean it.
He makes a sound somewhere between a snort and a sniff.
“’Course you are,” he says bitterly, throwing the butt of his cancer stick to the ground and crushing it underfoot.
We head to the car, blazing sun beating down on us. The stench of the nearby hotdog stand follows us into my brother’s SUV and lingers amongst the silence as we exit the parking lot and drive down the road.
When night comes, I attempt to sleep and fail miserably, instead choosing to clear the top most shelf in my bedroom. It’ll be harder to reach soon, I think.
First, I stumble across some old concert tickets and I think of all the gigs I won’t be tall enough to see after this, a sea of bodies blocking my view. It’s a thought I soon dismiss, however, when I realise the treatment will enable me to instead become the girl random music fans decide to put on their shoulders. Offered the best seat in the house as a reward for being small. The cute girl. The fun girl. The girl caught on giant screens, arms held high, mouthing along to every song.
The lyrics to one of my favorite tunes echoes through my thoughts: “I’m sick… of wasting time... wanting what’s not mine.”1 And although I know the artist is singing about embracing our bodies exactly as they are, I force her lyrics to work for me, telling myself that life is short and, if I want it enough, I can be too.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve always said that if I could push a button and be three or four inches shorter, I’d push it. In a heartbeat. But this is different. Costly. Painful. Lengthy and fraught with risk.
As my top shelf clear out continues, I find old journals telling tales of teenage rejection at the hands of boys whose eyes I’d had to lower mine to gaze into. One of them had kissed me in the back of his car one night, his hair crispy with gel and the bits he’d missed when shaving bristling on his chin. There had been a rawness to it. A clumsy energy. Too much tongue and body parts squeezed almost to bruising. The taste of cheap beer and French fries colliding with my two-hour old bubblegum. I’d wanted more of it. Not because I’d enjoyed it but because, somehow, it had made me feel visible. Like I counted for something.
The next day he’d told everyone that nothing had happened. That he didn’t date “giraffes”.
A box containing my old ballet shoes sparks the memory of my dance teacher telling me I’d never make prima ballerina.
“Men don’t want to dance around a girl who’s taller than them,” she’d said. “Quit while you’re ahead.”
And I had. Almost losing my love for acting along the way too.
The parts I’ve lost because of being too tall are too numerous to count. All the times casting have decided I’d look odd playing opposite the diminutive lead actor they’ve already booked. Or worried that, like a discordant note in a symphony, I’d stick out in the family they require a daughter for. But, despite the rejections, I love acting too much to let go of it the way I gave up on dance. This treatment will finally allow me the best possible shot at the career I’ve waited so long for and I’m certain that makes it worth the risk.
Amongst a stack of old documents, I stumble across a photo of my mother, taken when she was in her twenties. All doe eyes and bushy brows. The suggestion of a smile. As our time together grows smaller and smaller in my rear view mirror, I’ve never felt further away from her than I do now.
My mother was a quiet person. So different to me. She was organised and contemplative. But her death felt like chaos, the pain of its suddenness echoing through all the years that have followed since.
I search through another shoe box and find some white tack, tearing off a few pieces before sticking Mom to the wall near my bed.
Control what you can control, said an article I’d found when I’d Googled “how to deal with grief” shortly after she died. I’ll buy a frame later this week, I decide. Make my mother’s new home a permanent fixture.
My nervous system contracts like a hand clenching into a fist as the sound of my cell phone’s ring pierces through the silence.
Sally.
Shit.
She calls three times before she finally gives up and sends me a message in all caps.
“NO VACATION? WTF?!!! COFFEE TOMORROW?”
She follows up with a softer, lower-case but no less demanding message: “you have to.”
I reply with a yes, figuring I at least owe her that much. All this will, hopefully, be far easier to explain in person.
“This is fucking absurd,” Sally laughs, disdainfully. “Like... it’s a joke, right? You have to be joking.”
I just look at her and it’s enough for her to realise that I’m serious.
“You’re barely an inch taller than I am,” she says. “And I think being tall rocks.”
“That’s because you look like a Scandinavian supermodel,” I reply.
Sally tries, unsuccessfully, to hide how pleased she is by this comment.
I explain to her that it’s for work. Tell her that the casting world’s narrow idea of who and what roles a mixed-race woman can play have already been enough of a stumbling block for me. I don’t need my height getting in the way too.
“Would you change your race then?” she asks. “If you could?”
I scowl at this damaging suggestion. Of course I wouldn’t. My heritage isn’t just about how I look. It’s family. It’s history. It’s culture and community. Something that’s woven into the fabric of who I am. Built into the everyday. My size is an entirely different thing. Even if it is something that, so far, I’ve been just as powerless to change.
None of this seems to connect with her, however, and it dawns on me that she’ll never fully understand the intersectionality of all this. That she has the privilege of moving through the world in a very different way to me. That Sally can afford to be freakishly tall. She’ll never be labelled “aggressive” just for having an opinion. Or seen as a threat for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Eventually, I tell her that it’s “just something I need to do. For me” and she decides, with a heavy sigh, that that is “fair enough.”
Half an hour later though, as I ready myself to leave, she starts to say something about “the male gaze” and I flinch.
She’s been with her boyfriend Steve since high school. When they met, he was an all-star quarterback on the football team and she was a cheerleader. Even then, he towered above everyone, a striking six foot five. He’s short a few brain cells on account of the repeated knocks to the head he sustained during his playing days but at least Sally can wear sky high heels on date night without him complaining. I remind her of this. Remind her she’s lucky to not have to worry so much about “the male gaze”. She does her best not to smile smugly and issues a reluctant half nod of agreement.
“Just think about what I’ve said, will you?” she says, as she hugs me goodbye. “You’re beautiful, sweetheart. You don’t need to do this.”
Except I don’t feel beautiful. And, as I walk away, I contemplate how strange it is that there is something buried so deep inside me the words of my loved ones can’t seem to reach it. A sickly something that came to be without my consent, creeping through me like second-hand smoke, staining the walls magnolia cream.
The damage is done, I realise. Decades of conditioning easily crushing the compliments of friends.
Thank you for reading Part 1 of Tall Story. I’ll be dropping the second part tomorrow, so keep an eye on your inbox.
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If you’re interested in reading more of my writing about elusive beauty standards and women’s bodies, you might like to check out this piece, in which I discuss Imane Khelif and the Trad Wives movement:
You can pre-order my debut novel Another Life here. It’s officially out on the 19th.
With love,
xK
Impeccable!!! Now going in for part 2! Glad they are both out! 🙌
So glad you decided to do this!
Knowing you and seeing the hints of your story in this piece made it all the more sweet to read 🥹