Tracy wasn’t your average woman, quite the opposite, in fact. Tracy was the tallest woman in the world (quite possibly other worlds, too; but modern science at this point isn’t advanced enough to know for certain – try asking Keith). I don’t think you’re quite grasping how tall Tracy actually is; allow me to phrase it in a way you may understand. Y’know the tallest person you’ve ever seen? Well, imagine them SEVENTY PERCENT TALLER. That’s tall as balls.
Understandably, Tracy was something of a local celebrity; she couldn’t go anywhere without being recognised (this was partly due to her bombastic, spontaneous personality and partly due to the fact that she was tall as balls). Unfortunately, Tracy’s tallness also had its negative points including (but not limited to) debilitating disability to hide, completely incompetent blending in skills and low doorframes.
Low doorframes were the bane of Tracy’s life. One would think that being the tallest woman in the world, Tracy would be well accustomed to her height and all the ducking under things that accompanies it. Well, nope! Were there not a huge fringe covering it, Tracy’s forehead would resemble, umm, something with a lot of bruises on it; a banana, maybe? It’s worth noting the manner in which Tracy hits her head on things. This is what the next paragraph will be devoted to.
Tracy tends to hit her head in one of three ways;
1) Just walking into it – this tends to happen with particularly tall doors and other things just beyond her field of vision.
2) Hitting her crown on the doorframe – this happens when Tracy ducks under a doorframe in the expected fashion, but straightens up while still under the frame. This one hurts. A lot.
3) This, the last and most cruel punishment of Tracy’s unfortunate genetics, is when Tracy ducks under the doorway successfully, navigates through with ineffable efficiency but fails to notice that the ceiling is actually closer to sea level than her head is.
Despite bopping her bounce on a near-hourly bases, Tracy still wore a smile. In fact, there was only a short amount of time in Tracy’s life when she wasn’t smiling; this was after her college and friend, Joe Bloggs, died. What? Well, it’s harder than you think coming up with names. Anyway, this was ten years ago.
Now, Tracy was happily married and looking forward to her retirement in a week’s time. I say ‘retirement’ but it was more ‘compensation’. You see; the company Tracy works for didn’t have chairs or tables in the correct proportions, which, over time, caused several medical complaints. Early retirement and an incredibly generous pension deal for Tracy to keep her yap shut about the inequalities seemed like a good deal to all parties involved.
What exactly was Tracy’s job? She was a journalist; a journalist for a bigwig newspaper. Now, let’s be clear, she worked on a weekly column not on ‘actual’ news. Y’know what? I think it’s time we got to some actual story, what do you think?
Tracy looked at the calendar on her desk; it was ten years exactly since Joe died. She felt pretty sad but kept smiling anyway. Over the course of several hours, Tracy’s thoughts drifted to matters not worth describing. Suddenly, Tracy’s boss pulled her from a deep and meaningless thought cycle;
“Tracy? May I speak to you in my office?” said Tracy’s boss, Hal, who was an alright guy.
“Okay!” replied Tracy, trying to hide the fact that she was worried that this could well be a reconsideration of her ‘retirement’ offer; after all, who retires at thirty five?
“Great!” Hal winked. Most people assumed he had a ‘thing’ for tall ladies.
“Ookay…”
Tracy walked into Hal’s office, a bland but vital expositional sentence.
“Look, I know you’ll be ‘retiring’ at the end of this week…”
Tracy nearly punched him. He did that ‘air quotes’ thing that she despised.
“…but, I just got a very confusing call from our freelance guy…”
“mm-hm?”
“and I think he’s just quit. Well, either that or he’s gonna marry me!”
Tracy was confused because she hadn’t read last week’s story.
“So, do you fancy taking his position after you leave?”
“Well, I’m not sure; I wa-“
“COME ON! This is a perfect job for you!”
Tracy was a taken aback; she had never ever in her life ever heard Hal raise his voice.
“Oh. I’m, I’m really sorry; I didn’t mean-“
“No, it’s okay.”
“…”
“Look, I need to go; I told my husband that I’d meet him for lunch.”
“…”
“Is that okay?”
“You know what? NO. IT ISN’T.”
“Excuse me?”
“You heard just fine.”
“I don’t understand… why not?”
“BECAUSE HE DOESN’T DESERVE YOU, THAT’S WHY”
“WHAT?!”
“OH, COME ON! YOU KNOW I LIKE YOU! IT’S OBVIOUS! And what do you do? You hang around with these jerks that don’t appreciate you!”
“You know nothing about my husband!”
“Well, I know enough! I really thought that after Joe was murdered, you’d try and do better!”
“There wasn’t even anything between Joe and I!”
“What?”
“We were just friends!”
“Oh.”
“I always thought you were an alright guy, and I knew you had a crush on me; but this is ridiculous! You can’t dictate who I’m friends with!”
“I think you’ll find I can.”
“…Wait, did you say that Joe was murdered?”
“NO! Of course I didn’t! That’s ridiculous! Why would I do that?!”
Tracy suddenly felt rather frightened.
It was times like this that Tracy was very grateful to be one of the beta testers for Google Glass (Google it) this would mark the second time today that she was grateful, since that very morning, she was able to record footage of a hot builder taking his top off and play it back in slow motion. Anyway, she recorded the entire conversation and put it online. Luckily, the police were following her on twitter, so they arrived soon enough.
THE END
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