We sat in a waiting area, me encircled by the fleshy safety bar of Raf’s thick fingers, held on his thigh. My insides squirmed a little with nerves. Photographs were plastered on the sterile white walls, portraits and headshots in black and white and color. 

The Talent Corp publicist had fielded a request by a designer to shoot me for their new line. Underwear, and probably big enough for me to sit in like a hammock and mimic the bulge – which, I hoped, was not the image they were going for.

An impeccably dressed assistant came out to get us, faltering a second at the sight of me. Trying to maintain a professional smile, he led us into the bright white studio that smelled of chemicals. Strobe umbrellas and circular reflectors were arranged around the room, and other lighting modifiers and diffusers, arranged around some plain white backdrop rolls.

While assistants set up the lights and adjusted the dollies and stands, and the previous model finished up, the photography duo came over and introduced themselves: Keith, the photographer, a man in flannel and a backward cap, and Peta, photo editor and former model herself, also doing make-up today because the make-up girl away. She shuttled between reviewing the laptop at the side of the room, tethered to the camera.

Unlike the assistant, neither showed surprise at my size, though Peta showed especial interest. She asked me to stand full height on Raf’s upturned palm, as I turned around and posed, while she studied me a moment.

"YOU'RE A HEAD TURNER FOR SURE,” she said, and I thought to myself, I definitely turned heads ‘down’ though that’s not what she meant. “BUT NOT A TYPICAL LOOK. YOU’RE ORDINARY AND UNUSUAL. YOU HAVE THE SHAPE BUT NOT THE SIZE. THERE ARE ALL THESE PARADOXES AND I LIKE IT.” She looked at Keith.

“OF COURSE, I DON'T SEE A FUTURE ON THE RUNWAY," she said this as if it was obvious, “NOT WITHOUT ROLLERBLADES.”

She was joking. I think.

She squinted at my chest, an instant later, the blunt probe of her finger came up and brushed over my left pec, as if confusing my tattoo for a smudge. When it reappeared untouched beneath her shifting fingerpad, she looked up over her shoulder for guidance.

“HE’S GOT A LITTLE INK ON HIS CHEST,” she said, the clap of her heels stopping as she spun to face Keith. “WHAT DO YOU THINK, RE-TOUCH?”

Not looking up from fitting a camera lens, Keith replied:

“THE CLIENT’S NOT GOING TO LIKE IT.”

She looked back down to me.

“WE’LL NEED TO AIRBRUSH AWAY YOUR CHEST ART, MY LITTLE POWDERPUFF.” As she said this, her fingerpad circled my pec as if the ridges of her fingerprint were enough to rub the ink off. My nerves jangled at this, for some reason, more than her soft touch, I wondered if Jen would see the finished spread with her name erased.

Moving away from Raf and I, Peta continued, forthrightly:

“YOUR AGENT TOLD YOU THIS WAS A COLLABORATIVE SHOOT?”

“Oh,” I said, glancing around the room as I squeezed my hands behind my back, trying to keep my posture straight. “I didn’t realize.”

I had assumed the other model already in the studio was finishing up a shoot, but now appeared to be waiting patiently to be introduced.

“OH, DON’T BE NERVOUS,” said Peta. “SHE’S AN ABSOLUTE PROFESSIONAL AT THIS, RIGHT KEITH?”

“I’VE WORKED WITH MISS XU BEFORE,” said Keith. “SHE DOESN’T BITE.”

The porcelain-skinned, raven-haired model, called Vianne Xu, was a vision of towering splendor on legs, and my very opposite: possessing the ‘size’ I lacked, and while she didn’t have so much ‘shape’ she had ‘direction’: up.

She glided over and came to a stop before Raf, surveying him up and down with faint interest, seeming to think he was me, or maybe she wasn’t sure whether to greet him or me, or both of us. Then her eyes travelled down to his open hand where I was standing. Her expression didn’t change but froze a moment longer, and there was an almost indiscernible questioning in her eyes, like she was trying to figure out where my motor was housed that made my legs work.

I went into a cubicle to get changed, though not into other clothes, but out of my own, to be replaced only with a pair of briefs. Vianne was advertising clothing, whereas I was playing a tiny man fawning over her to promote the marketing concept that the model was a kind of Goddess.

Then the photography duo began directing us for the shoot:

“WE WANT SOMETHING WITH YOU, VIANNE,” said Peta, “HOLDING JERRY IN YOUR HAND, LIKE THIS—” she demonstrated with palm up, arm brought inwards, close to the chest. “YOU’RE COMFORTABLE WITH THAT?”

Her cool, snakelike eyes held on me, Vianne uttered:

“OF COURSE, IF HE IS COMFORTABLE WITH ME.”

“IF YOU’LL ALLOW ME, JERRY—” She had turned to me with an inquiring stare. There was a professional urgency in her voice, like she didn’t expect me to refuse.

“Err, sure,” I said, uncertain what I was agreeing to.

“UP WE GO, LITTLE MAN.”

Her fingers swept around me without hesitation, pads orientating strategically around my torso to scoop me up off Raf’s hand, fly me through the air, before depositing me on Vianne’s upward facing palm, mimicking the pose Peta had described. The skin was silky and cushioned beneath my bare feet, and slightly cool, like she’d just applied a hand gel.

Peta quickly dusted up and down my front with a make-up brush. I sucked in my breath and shut my eyes . There was something crowding and overwhelming about having one girl pampering my body with products while I could feel the soft plush surface of another girl’s hand under my feet. And Peta’s professional assurance over me was intimidating, like I was a little figure she was keen to prop up in a scene and pose.

The platform of her hand tilted with her motion as she maneuvered under the bright lights, against the white backdrop roll, causing me to stagger and stumble over. The fingers of Vianne’s other hand quickly plucked up my chest, lifting me back onto my feet again without a break in her poise. Her cool touch against my bare skin was startling. I shivered.

The shooting commenced. It wasn’t like acting, which was about motion and fluidity. This was all about holding natural appearance for unnatural lengths of time. Vianne had command of a range of smooth and precise postures, all while riding out the shoot with regal calm and poise.

During a break, a passing assistant offered me a bottlecap filled with water, which gave me something to distract from my nervousness, at least. My hands trembled slightly from holding poses, I tried to drink slowly, taking care not to dribble it on myself. Having cameras pointed at me constantly made it feel like everyone was staring at me, even though they weren’t. On set, my job was to ignore the camera, but here, for certain shots I had to look straight into it.

Also, Peta had no reservations about coming over and physically manipulating my body into the pose she wanted, which meant having my arms and legs moved, or being lifting and placed me multiple times, from Vianne’s hand onto the floor, by her foot, on her shoulder. There were several props that entered the scene; including a champagne flute which I was dropped into while Vianne pretended to sip from.

For everyone here, it was another normal work day. Vianne cruised through as if it was rote and her mind was elsewhere – actually, it seemed, more often than not, uncomfortably, on me. Or at least I sensed her keen gaze on me at odd moments, still with that faint suggestion of questioning.

Sometimes her lingering gaze seemed to be surreptitiously trying to get my attention, as if she was trying to beam psychic messages into my head or playing a game of getting my attention under the radar of the photographers. I didn’t know how to respond, and pretended to ignore it, trying to remain professional-looking, unflappable, bored even.  

I was probably just being too self-conscious and reading too deeply into everything; after all, everyone’s attention was more often on me, because I was the novice.

During a break in shooting, Vianne sauntered up to me, folding her pale gazelle legs into a crouch beside the table I was standing on, where the laptop was, while a delicate, slender hand with glazed fingernails curled around the edge of the table, close to my feet.

“WHAT WAS THE APPEAL IN HAVING A SIZE REDUCTION?” she asked.

I stared at the distant white wall, my brow scrunching, confused.

“I basically just woke up like this.”

She smiled faintly.

“YOU HAVE A SENSE OF HUMOR. REFRESHING.”

My hands drifted to an imaginary pair of hip pockets, but because I had no pants on, they settled on my hips, akimbo.

“Humor’s good. At my size, I can’t afford to make people angry.”

I was joking but she didn’t react. Her gaze held on me. It turned out she was staring at my chest.

“THAT’S A SUPERBLY TINY TATTOO,” she remarked, as her fingers lifted slowly from the table edge. “THERE’S A LITTLE PIECE OF WRITING. MAY I…TAKE A CLOSER LOOK?”

“Sure,” I said, sounding much more confident than I felt.

Her hand hovered in front of me as her little finger extended, and delicately outlined the underside of each of my pecs, and feather soft, trailed over my abdomen, so fluidly it was hard to tell if it wasn’t accidental.

“LIKE WHAT YOU SEE?” she said suddenly, her almond shaped eyes piercing into mine.

My heart thudded.

“Uhhh…I…”

She gestured to the laptop screen, showing a grid of the stills we’d just been shooting.

“WHAT WE DO IN HERE,” she clarified. “DO YOU HAVE ANY AMBITIONS OF FOLLOWING THIS THROUGH LONG-TERM?”

“This is totally new to me and, to be honest, I think I feel more at home with moving images.”

Nevertheless, she gave me her number, and in return, I gave her mine, tearing off a scrap of paper.

Then Peta slid into the chair behind the table, sliding up against the table.

“WE’RE TAKING A SHORT HIATUS,” she explained.

“How’s it looking so far?” I asked.

“IF YOU LIKE, TAKE A LOOK AT MY PORTFOLIO FOR A SENSE OF END PROCESS. NOT SURE IF I HAVE A DISTINCT VISUAL STYLE COMING THROUGH. SEE FOR YOURSELF.”

And she was already clicking away into various directories and sub-folders. I wandered over to the side of the laptop, the display extending out like a movie projection screen at a drive-in cinema, with the LCD flashing and scrolling through blown up photos, one after the other.

There were a lot of photos and they snapped past rapidly, before I barely knew what I was looking at. At my size, the pictures were too big to see in full detail; my eyes flicked over portions. Even a fraction of their real life size, the girls in the images were still taller than me. I was too embarrassed to ask Peta to slow it down, and she wasn’t paying much notice of my reaction, muttering to herself as she navigated the folder, seeming to search for particular images, clicking through reams, occasionally pausing on a shot.

“It’s good,” I said, unsure how to critique photography, struggling to identify themes across the pictures I could compliment: lighting, angles. Virtually all the girls had smoky bedroom eyes but I couldn’t compliment that.

Then, across the screen flashed one pair of fuck-me eyes that hit too close to home.

A breathless sound leapt out of my throat, as if ripped out by force, and the scrolling came to a halt, on a photo of a woman in boho style and head sash, draped over a park bench with the sun flaring the outline of her hair gold.

“Uh...back two slides,” I said, trying to affect professional nonchalance.

Two mouse clicks later, the scroll stopped on a black and white photo of a young woman in a trailing ruffled black dress, on a marble tiled landing, backgrounded by white Turkish Mosque spires like white rockets, which gave the scene a chess-like vibe, as If she was playing the black queen in a real-life game. The grayscale made the woman’s dead-straight hair look jet black and her skin ivory, though in real life it was dark brown, and skin olive. Her dark, smoldering eyes stared down the camera, one of her waxed eyebrows slitted.

Peta was silent, her finger tapping the touchpad, as if waiting for a question on technique.

“I think I know her,” I muttered, embarrassed for my reaction and secretly wishing she’d resume scrolling. But she didn’t. Worse, I could now sense Vianne somewhere behind me, her great invisible presence almost palpable on my tiny form. She must have been watching over Peta’s shoulder.

“MODELLING IS A SMALL CIRCLE WITH SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION,” Peta said, sounding unsurprised. “OR LESS. IN SAYING THAT, THE SUBJECT’S NAME ELUDES ME. BUT I RECALL WE SHOT THIS THREE YEARS AGO, AND BLACK AND WHITE WAS THE BIG THING. IT’S ONE OF THOSE COMBINATIONS THAT JUST KEEPS COMING BACK.”

“DARKNESS IS NEVER PASSE,” Vianne’s voice murmured directly above my head.

Peta swiveled her chair to follow the photographer as he was striding past, having returned inside from making some calls.

“KEITH, DO YOU RECALL THIS ONE?”

He paused to glance at the laptop screen.

“OH…” he said with recognition, as if that was enough.

Then he beckoned at me. Raf took me and followed him around outside, to the back patio of the building, with an unenviable view of a truck parked along the loading bay road, the sky blocked out by the featureless grainy plaster slab of the next door building, with snaking aluminum ductwork leading up to the rooftop HVAC units.

“SMOKE?” he said, slipping out a cigarette.

Raf and I refused. Keith eyes me for a second, and then turned the cigarette around between his fingers.

“MAKES SENSE,” he decided. Then shrugged. “GUESS YOU COULD STILL BLOW THIS THING LIKE A BAMBOO HOOKAH OR SOMETHING.”

Even if I did smoke, my mouth was too dry for it right now.

“Are there any vending machines around here?” I asked, thinking of Kolade.

Keith scanned the sky.

“WE GOT MINERAL WATER IN THE FRIDGE. AND THERE’S A 7-ELEVEN A COUPLE OF BLOCKS AWAY.”

Raf could already guess my train of thought.

“YOU’LL BE BUZZING AFTER MIDNIGHT!”

It was late. He was right. The surprise of seeing the photo had me responding with snap second nervous impulse.

“Never mind.”

Keith took another drag.

“YEAH, I REMEMBER,” he drawled, “A ‘FEW WORDS’ KINDA GAL. WHIP-SMART THOUGH. OR, SEEMED IT." A small smoky stream issued from between his teeth and he gave a grim smile. "THE COPS WERE SMARTER…”

“Oh...um…”

“HEAR WHAT HAPPENED TO HER? – BANG,” he mimed a heavy door slamming, which I probably would not have picked up if I hadn’t already known.

“Yeah…”"

“IMPRESSIVE PORTFOLIO COMING ALONG. VIANNE KNEW HER WELL," he jerked his head back to the studio door behind him. "ASK HER.” He dropped the cigarette into a drainage ditch running alongside the road, then, contemplating the smoking ash, shook his head. “NOW SHE DONE FUCKED IT UP.”

I swallowed, then said:

“What did you hear?”

He said flatly:

“HEARD SHE WAS KEEPING A MALE SLAVE IN A SEX DUNGEON IN HER BEDROOM.” His brow raised without a hint of surprise. “WELCOME TO ST PALMA: STRANGER THINGS HAVE HAPPENED. SHE JUST GOT CAUGHT.”

Working my tongue through my dry mouth, I went on:

“Did they say who the guy was?”

“NOPE,” he said under his breath. “WHOLE THING WAS HUSHED AND PUBLIC RECORD GAVE HIM A PSEUDONYM. AS YOU’D WANT, IF YOU WERE THAT SORRY SHMUCK...”

“So, how do you know about it?” I said a little more loudly than was necessary.

“LET’S JUST SAY SOMEONE BLABBED VICTORIA’S SECRET.”

Without another word, he swung around and ducked back inside the studio. After they were finished with Vianne, they got another couple of shots with me solo before finishing.

“THAT MODEL WAS MAKING THE MOVES ON MY MAN!”

Raf grinned when we left the studio.

I shook my head.

“She was just networking.”

“YOU’RE A TINY CHICK MAGNET! ZAP!” He cackled, giving me a poke me in the ribs.

“Whatever you say.”