they're filming midgets
by Robert Lopez




They're filming midgets on the other side of town. No one knows who is doing the filming or why they're doing it on the other side of town, but that's where they're doing it. There's any number of towns within driving distance more suitable for filming midgets, particularly North Adamsville with their town square and the gazebo right in the middle of their town square. Why anyone would film midgets on the other side of town instead of North Adamsville with their perfectly good gazebo is baffling. Some of us drive over to North Adamsville on a Saturday morning and bring our children so we can turn them loose in the gazebo. We usually pack sandwiches and make a day of it. You would think if it's good enough for children it would be good enough for midgets. At least this is what most of us think. We don't have any midgets in our town, at least none we know of. Some of us have gone out looking for midgets and have come up empty every time. None of us has ever seen a midget in real life. We don't think the midgets they're filming are from North Adamsville, either. Every time we've driven over there and let the children loose in the gazebo we've never seen even a single midget, let alone a mess of them like that. We don't even know where you can find midgets like these, like the ones they're filming on the other side of town. Some of us think they come from up north where the snow always falls and the sun never shines. This seems like the kind of place where midgets can grow up and flourish, can be themselves. If it were up to us we would go up there and find the rest of the midgets, the ones the filmmakers left behind, load them up and drive them over to North Adamsville. We'd set 'em down right in the middle of the gazebo and let the cameras roll, make our own film with our own midgets in a big beautiful gazebo where all midgets belong. All of us think this would be a magical sight, something to see. There's probably nothing better than midgets in a gazebo. We don't have a gazebo here in our town, on any sides of it, but there's talk now of building one.





Robert Lopez is the author of the novels, Part of the World and Kamby Bolongo Mean River and a story collection, Asunder. His fiction has appeared in dozens of journals and magazines, including; Bomb, The Threepenny Review, Unsaid, Alaska Quarterly Review, Norton Anthology of Sudden Fiction Latino, etc. He teaches fiction writing at The New School, Pratt Institute, Columbia University and The Solstice MFA Creative Writing Program at Pine Manor College.

 
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