Short

There are a vast number of things I don’t know about DNA. Oceans of them. Obviously I could Google and find out, but who has that kind of time?

Which is a problem when you plan on insinuating something about DNA that might be pivotal in a reader buying into a premise.

For starters, is there a ‘little person’ gene? How do we end up with midgets in the first place?

A perplexing question, but only the tip of a very odd iceberg.

You see, originally I was going to write a story about a midget vampire.

Brilliant right?

Nobody has written on the topic and the possible directions you could take such a story are almost infinite.

In my case, I decided to write about a very bitter little person who decided that vampirism is exactly the kind of affliction that could allow midgets to get back at the rest of humanity. In his head, he sees creating an army of midget vampires that will eventually take over the world. Treating the ‘tall’ as nothing more than cattle to feed on.

Try as I might to make this sound ominous though, the first thing you probably did was chortle to yourself as you imagined a dwarf vampire trying to bite someone’s neck.

Would they have to walk around carrying a chair? If it were ever made into a movie would I have to look into acquiring the rights to the Benny Hill music that played whenever he (Benny Hill) was chasing around buxom blondes in a field?

And obviously it would be in bad taste to make it a full-blown, no-holds-barred funny story. Plus, it would be too damn easy. Anyone can write about very short vampires and the trouble they would have terrorizing anyone. They have to pull up the aforementioned chair just to not see themselves in the bathroom mirror for fuck’s sake.

So I thought to myself “What about werewolves?” Midget werewolves.

That’s where the DNA thing comes in. Every time I think about a midget who catches a touch of lycanthropy I can’t help but imagine them as adorable.

Now hear me out, I know that when you think of little people the last word that pops into your head is adorable. But now think of that same little person completely covered in hair. Those big eyes looking up at you. Their little wet nose glistening in the fullmoonlight.

And go fuck yourself autocorrect, fullmoonlight is an awesome word.

Whenever I display such casual brilliance I wonder to myself if I’m wasting such a talent talking about midgets werewolves. If Dan Brown or Nicholas Sparks had dropped the word fullmoonlight into one of their stories, the folks at Merriam-Webster would have fallen all over themselves to hustle it into their next dictionary.

When I drop it?

What is it they say about a tree falling in the forest if there is nobody there to read it?

Let’s be honest, nobody at PBS is going to interview me and ask “The literary public demands to know, how did you come up with fullmoonlight?” for fear I would look straight into the camera and reply “Ummm… I was trying to make a midget werewolf seem adorable.”

Be that as it may, I have to provide new content for this website. The reading public demands it. Fight through writer’s block, flagrant disinterest and common decency and come up with a story. In the end I have to ask myself “So, is it a vampire or a werewolf?” and then listen when the logician inside me answers “Yes.”