The first tiny Marilyn squirted from the popped zit of fourteen-year-old Jimmy Dougherty on the morning of the third day of his freshmen year at Ewell High. She burst forth in a glob of white pus, shook herself off, and stood on the edge of the bathroom sink sporting her signature suggestive pout and pose, shaking a shaming finger at Jimmy.
The second tiny Marilyn drooled out of Ray Steers’ sleeping middle-aged mouth the morning after his first date with a woman since his divorce from Isabelle seven years earlier. The second tiny Marilyn dried herself on the printed side of Ray’s sheet, climbed on his nose, let his breath blow up her skirt and smiled an alluring smile for the camera she imagined was zooming in for a close-up.
Tiny Marilyn number three appeared in the corral of little Clark Langland’s Lincoln Log Ponderosa after the tyke sneezed a rapid series of sneezes. This Marilyn stood stroking the hard mane of a fallen plastic toy horse with a tenderness that made Clark sob so hard his father rushed in to see what was wrong. Upon discovering tiny Marilyn number three, Clark’s father lifted her into the palm of his hand and whispered into her tiny ear: “It’s all right, honey, the horse isn’t real.”
That same morning, a line of termite-sized Marilyns streamed out of Marilyn Monroe’s crypt in Pierce Brothers Westwood Village Memorial Park and Mortuary. Their destination? The crypt next door, recently occupied by the body of Hugh Hefner, whom they proceeded to consume voraciously.
To the astonished delight of the Miller family’s Saint Bernard, Arthur, Tiny Marilyn number eight thousand two hundred thirty-six crawled out of little Sadie Miller’s latest boo-boo, sat on the edge of the little girl’s Malibu Barbie bed, pried the lid off the tiny bottle of barbiturates she had in her hand, hurled the pills as far as her tiny Marilyn arm could hurl, and shouted out: “Not this time, baby! Not this time.” Dolled up in a new Barbie outfit, a dark homemade Barbie wig and dark Dolce and Gabbana sunglasses, this Tiny Marilyn escaped through Arthur’s doggie door into the dazzling sunlight of a bright new day.
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Tim Hanson lives in Santa Monica, CA and works as a substitute school teacher. His short story “Broken Bottles” appeared in great weather for MEDIA’s 2014 anthology I Let Go of the Stars in My Hand. His flash fictions, “Smoke ’em if You Got ’em” and “Mercy” appeared in the October 2019 issue of Coffin Bell.
Lead image: “Seventh Year Itch” (via Flickr user Iskra Photo)