Free The Little Giant of Aberdeen County by Tiffany Baker

the paper underneath my buttocks and thighs crinkled. I tried to pull my thin cotton gown together around my midsection, but the fabric resisted, gaping open like a laughing mouth all the way down the back of me. Embarrassed, I put my hands in my lap and waited. Across the room, the door flew open.
    Above the thick black rims of his glasses, Dr. Robert Morgan had the complicated eyebrows of a fairy-tale huntsman. I stared at his eyes—watery, bloodshot around their edges, but gentle—and decided I didn’t mind. That man in the stories was always kind. He saved Snow White from the evil Queen. He rescued Red Riding Hood from the moist jaws of the Wolf. If a huntsman brandished his ax, I knew, you should stay still and let him do his work. Dr. Morgan lifted the hinged metal cover of his clipboard and peered at the papers underneath it, as if peeking at a script to remind himself how to start a conversation. He paced over to the little counter and balanced the clipboard on its edge. I waited to see if it would fall, but it didn’t.
    “Hello, Truly.” He stretched one of his long-fingered hands in my general direction. “We haven’t met in a very long time. Since you were born, in fact. You’ve grown up quite a lot since then.”
    I ducked my head. “Mrs. Pickerton says I’m growing too much. She said I’m even too big to wear the devil’s britches. She makes my school clothes.” I could feel my cheeks flush scarlet, which made them mottle and blotch. When Serena Jane blushed, it just made her more beautiful.
    Dr. Morgan wiggled his stethoscope into his ears and lifted the disk. “Mrs. Pickerton is an old nanny goat,” he said, and pressed the circle to my chest. He listened as I took careful breaths, but after a few minutes, his smile turned into a slight frown. He moved the disk of the stethoscope down a few inches. “Interesting,” he said, snapping the earpieces back down around his collarbone. “I’d like to weigh you.” He led me over to the upright scale in the corner and showed me how the metal balance slid back and forth on its incremental metal bar, smallest to biggest. I pinched my gown together behind me and stepped on the scale. The balance stopped halfway.
    “Very good,” Dr. Morgan said again, scribbling something on the clipboard. “Just stay there, please. I’m going to measure you.” He slid another steel bar along a vertical ruler until it rested flat against my head. “Uh-huh,” he said, squinting and scribbling. “Interesting,” he repeated. I liked the way he said it, chopping up the syllables— in-te-rest-ing —so that I felt like a puzzle he was slotting together in his mind.
    I was used to plenty of people staring at me, but no one had ever paid such deliberate attention to me before. My father saw me only through the haze of his evening beers. Serena Jane mostly ignored me. Brenda Dyerson, busy with a hundred things in her falling-down house, kept me pinned firmly in her peripheral vision, along with Amelia, who was always so close to me that we could touch hands without blinking but who never said a word, just smiled from time to time, offering me her broken toys when she was done playing with them. And while it was true that Mrs. Pickerton focused on certain bits of me with the ferocity of an enraged wolverine, they only ever seemed to be the bad bits. Until then, no one had ever bothered to scrutinize the whole mass of me, connecting neckbone to backbone, shinbone to anklebone, in an entire picture. I felt as if I were a rare and beautiful insect being inspected through a magnifying glass. Maybe , I thought, Dr. Morgan will give me a name for what makes me different . Maybe if he could classify me, I would know what to make of myself and know what to say when people gawped at me as if I were the prize exhibit in the county fair. My heart beat a little faster with anticipation.
    I climbed back on the table and let Dr. Morgan whack me in the knees and elbows with a small,