How I Really Got This Tall
by Griffin Larson-Erf, Staff Writer
Over and over again, I’ve heard it. From my aunts and uncles, every time I visit for the holidays; from long-lost babysitters who run into me at the grocery store; even from random strangers who get particularly curious while I’m crossing the street. Always, the question is the same:
“How did you get. So. Tall?”
Fine. You wanna know so bad? I’ll tell you.
It began in Chicago in 1935, when I was fifteen years old and four feet high. I tried everything. I swallowed every bogus pill the dime-store magazines threw at me. I hung upside down from a fire escape, hoping to stretch out my spine. When an unemployed boxer walked by, he mistook me for a discarded punching bag and beat me bloody. While recovering in the hospital, I seized a doctor’s arm and pleaded for special height-correction surgery. He said no, and nothing else worked.
Finally, one day at my after-school job helping mobsters unload crates of illegal booze in a local alley, I opened up to my boss, Lucky Loaferanno. One day when my moping had made my crate-hefting particularly sluggish, he pulled me aside and asked me what was eating at me.
“I’m just so stinking short,” I told him. “This is killing me, Lucky—or it will, if a particularly-heavy downpour doesn’t drown me first.”
Lucky nodded sympathetically. He pulled out a scrap of paper, scribbled something on it with a stubby pencil, and handed the slip to me. “Go talk to her,” he told me, tapping the slip. “She owes me a favor.”
“She” turned out to be the Witch of the Outermost Wetlands, a hallowed figure said to haunt the outer swamps. (As all those who hail from there know, the city of Chicago is ringed by acrid swampland.) That night, I trekked through fly-swarms and shrubbery to reach the witch’s lair, fashioned out of swampgrass in the middle of a pond.
She let me in when I told her Lucky sent me. Hearing my tale of woe, she said little—just rubbed her hands together, crackled slightly, and told me to follow her to the kitchen. There, she threw tongue of frog, eye of newt, and a handful of Trader Joe’s gummy worms into a bubbling cauldron. She stirred it, waiting for the strange lights and noxious odors to cease, and finally spooned some into a vial that she handed to me.
I held the liquid to my lips, fingers trembling with excitement. I brought the vial closer to my mouth… closer…
And then, out of nowhere, came a blaze of gunfire. I hit the dirt—by some miracle, without spilling the vial. The witch, on the other hand, got caught in the blasts. It’s better not to talk about how she looked while falling to the ground.
Someone kicked a hole through the wall, and who should walk in but my boss Lucky’s rival… Lokincenzio “Loki” Lucitano. He saw what I was holding and turned his palm up with a sickening sneer. What choice did I have? I gave him the vial.
After that, I spent three months in Loki Lucitano’s personal dungeon, in his headquarters deeper in the swamp. We had a routine, Loki and I. Every afternoon, after his 2 PM appointment with his mistress, the man would swagger down to my cell. He kept his shirt off; his matted, tangled body hair rose in hills and tufts from his chest. He would dangle the little vial just outside of my reach, letting me lunge for it against my prison bars, and cackle at my torment.
But Loki made a fatal mistake: he kept giving me food. Specifically, he gave me crusts of bread that were as dense as solid rock. One day while Loki was busy dangling the vial, I seized two of the crusts and scraped them together over a particularly gnarly knot of his chest hair. The bread acted just like iron and flint. A tiny spark leaped into the forest on Loki’s flesh, and before you knew it, the man was alight.
While my captor flailed around, trying to extinguish the fire spreading over his chest, I snagged the vial and his keys. As I fiddled with my cell lock, Loki flailed around the dungeon, knocking into every wall in the desperate hope that the stone would smother the flames. Instead, it turned out to be surprisingly flammable.
Even as I hurled myself through swamp shrubbery, I could see the flames rising off the fort. Lucitano’s goons crashed after me, firing their tommy-guns at anything that looked fifteen and small. I learned from their mid-search cursing that their headquarters was ablaze; now they would have to find a new base of operations. Like anyone who checked real estate prices in 1935, they were immensely pissed off.
I was motoring down a muddy path, hoping that the log I had just jumped over wasn’t actually an alligator, when I realized I was still clutching the vial in one hand. To a young man running for his life, longer legs sounded mighty nice. I downed the thing.
Writing this now, I feel like a fool. I didn’t realize it was a full moon that night.
The good news is that now, at the age of nineteen, I’m six-foot-one-and-three-quarters. The bad news is, that potion turned me into a werewolf.
It was bad enough not being able to reach the deli counter. Now that I can, the workers give me such weird looks when I ask for my meat to be extra raw.
