My name is Harriet Urn. Yes Urn; like the thing you put your rich Grandmother’s ashes in. I hate my name. Not only because my name associates me with dead people, but because Harriet is such an ancient name. We live in the twenty-first century folks! For goodness sakes you would think that the least my parents could do is name me something modern! Apparently being named after the thing that holds my grandmother’s ashes was not enough; they had to name me after my grandmother too!
Anyway, for the first three years of my life I was in the 110th percentile of height. It is hard enough to learn how to walk when you are a normal child, but imagine a child that looks like a newborn colt learning to walk! That was me. But something strange happened when I was three years old. I stopped growing!
That was just fine with me because, the way I figured it, I could use a few years to figure out were my hands and feet were. Well, I had more than a few years. I am now thirty years old and still three and a half feet tall. I never let it bother me much because six foot six women don’t exactly attract the men. However I came to find out that men don’t exactly fall for three and a half foot overweight women either. My one condolence was that at least I didn’t look like a giraffe.
Right now however, I would have given almost anything to have longer and faster legs to escape the man who was chasing me.
It had been a normal day at the supermarket until he started following me.
“What’s you name?” he kept asking in an annoying voice.
I did my best to ignore him, but he kept following me and tapping my shoulder. Hoping that he would leave me when he heard my horrid name, I said, “Harriet”.
“Hawiet,” he said with a stupid voice and a laugh, “a bewtiful name for a bewtiful woman.”
Horrified I attempted to put as much distance between us as possible, a very hard thing for a three and a half foot person to do. When he pursued me, mumbling something about my “bewty”, I shouted, “Bug off!”
Before I knew it he collapsed bawling in the middle of the store. Great, I thought, now everyone is looking at the woman who made the retarded man cry in the middle of the produce section. In an attempt to redeem my image, I went over to comfort him.
“It’s alright. I’m sorry.”
“Really?” he whimpered.
“Yes, really.” I lied.
Thinking I had fixed the problem, I started to walk away, but he reached out, caught my arm, pulled me back, and kissed me on the cheek! That was the final straw. I slapped him, left my groceries, and ran out of the store. I didn’t care what people thought of me, I just wanted to escape that man.
I glanced back and saw him chasing me.
“Hawiet! Come back Hawiet!”
It must have been an odd sight to see a crying retarded man chase an overweight midget as she waddled for all she was worth to her car, because I saw quite a few onlookers. I finally made it to my car and left him crying in the parking-lot, but I didn’t care; he was gone.
