"Short Story" - Strong language warning.

[Frank E Gibbard]

All his short life, short so far, as he liked to think of it that is, Martin Rayburn had cause to rue his lack of stature and his lot. Rued being the last boy picked for sports but the first to be picked on by those bullying beasts that haunt all scholastic establishments, the lowest lifeform as he termed them internally but never had the courage to tell them to their detestable faces. Also, he rued of course those ruderies propelled at him by the swinish oiks like "short arse" and "little runt" and even worse the rhyme to the latter noun that he himself would have too much respect for the fairer sex to ever utter. He may be short but unlike those frightful sorts who terrorised him Martin Rayburn was a complete gentleman. He always opened doors and proffered his seat for the ladies but trouble was they sometimes rather patronisingly returned the favour, being short is getting used to regular and diminishing putdowns.

 

Nature had dealt him the hand familiar to people of diminutive stature with all its concomitant disadvantages in life that are so familiar to we bipeds it would be unecessarily long winded at this juncture to spell out exactly to your average representative of one's fellow sentient being what those shortcomings are. Suffice to say Martin was so used to those drawbacks that he considered no two ways about it he had drawn in life one of the the shortest straws especially in those benighted unhappy schooldays. So much for the small matter of his earliest mistreatments by juvenile tyrants who like pushing around their vertically challenged peers, things were to get progressively worse in the long run as a fully grown but still minute adult in the jolly world of work. Yes for some unfortunate folk things never get better, unlike the words of that current song so popular with his children, two strapping still-growing young lads who happened to be (somewhat ironically) of average height for their age.

 

By the the turn of the latest millenium Martin was progressing as might be guessed in characteristically small but regular steps up the commercial ladder and would be having a reasonably happy life but for the unfortunate fact that one of his old school bully tormentors was now a higher ranking colleague at the same company. Thanks to his own prepostorously typical bad luck Brian Mavrioline was having a relatively better time than him to boot, relatively in the sense that he had the collosal good fortune to be the boss's son, the jammy git. After years of wasting his education and an overgenerous allowance from Daddy living it up and gambling on the French Riviera said git finally succumbed to pressure to join the family firm in a position that put him in direct charge of poor Martin.

 

Having terrorised him at school his new manager began to make Martin's office life a constant trial with his continual mocking of him publically for his diminutive size. Coruscating wit - not! - trickled down at him from the unrefined lips of this latterday Swift, remarks such as: "No need for you to get up... Oh, I see you already are," as he smirked at Martin behind his desk were among the hurtful cracks he had to endure from this man. In Brian's case brain size definitely must run in inverse proportion to height he had mused often and noticing with that thought in mind and not a little satisfaction that ironically and serendipitously that Brian was an anagram of brain not that that idiot would have been able to sus that out for himself, of course, not without a diagram to help him that is. Then there were the hurtful supposedly funny practical jokes like posting him in a mail sack through the internal chute to the postroom, now that was not just humiliating but downright dangerous. If Brian was not his his father's only son and heir and blue-eyed boy into the bargain he would not have gotten away with it such antics but he was all of this and then some. And another thing, in all probability it being a private firm this bufoon with the low brain cell count would inherit everything without putting in as much as a tenth of his own input, yes in the crazy cack-handed ways of this maladjusted world this cretin will one day have it all. His personal resignation would coincide with that dreaded day and land on the new boss's desk; he'd cut his bonds and be off pronto he couldn't stand even the thought of that circumstance, not for one miserable second.

 

Martin only suffered and endured all Mavrioline Junior's indignities because of the shackles of a mortgage; he had also been in shackles at last Christmas's office party, patsy to his bete noir yet again and teased by that domanitrix strip-a-gram for staff amusement. On reflection he had in truth half enjoyed her administrations come to think of it but mostly he hated all the horrible infantile man's doings with a passion but a restrained one held in check, a deeply frustrating half cocked passion not dissimilar to how he had felt during the aforementioned bondage incident. It gave him hot sweaty flushes just to think back to that provacative tease, how everybody drunkenly and happily had guffawed. So long as it was not them personally on the receiving end of the banana skin all was OK - schadenfreude rules, not that long ago in pre-political correctness times they even held dwarf throwing contests and these characters think they're big people - really. Jeezus H Christ!

 

Boy, how the vicissitudes of life could get one down, and naturally graduate M. Rayburn (M.A.) at least knew what that means, friend Brian (failed at shooting fish in a barrel) would not even know how to spell the word - damn his useless hide. Being chastised as in the past because of the vulnerability of his tiny frame was bad enough but his business superior was so beneath him in intillect, knowledge of trade, any skill going that it rankled even more that he had the barearsed cheek to consider him Martin as inferior simply because he happened to be short. No way was he the lesser of the two of them when this prick would make your proverbial village hayseed look like Einstein. At least Mrs. Rayburn believed in the truth acknowledged by some reasonable folk that good things do come in small packages and he only cared about her and her opinion in any case more than anyone else and anyone else's in the goddamned world.

(to be continued, there is a lot more which could be a good or bad thing, a threat at least - I found the system wouldn't take the rest) Frank