September202011
Tiny People
Since getting married, every night, Ben checked his pockets thoroughly. His wife was always getting on him for that; she told him she didn’t like it when he put his pants in the hamper without checking because then she had to rewash all the clothes to get rid of the bits of paper-dust that were everywhere. She hated redoing the laundry even more than she hated doing laundry in the first place, which she hated intensely. So, needless to say, Ben did his best to clear his pockets.
But one day, just as he was about to throw away the shreds of receipts and old gum wrappers from the day, his eye fell on the tiniest scrapling. The paper itself was non-descript: white, a strip of computer paper, he assumed. But on it, was a drawing. A stick figure, the kind any child might draw based on what she’d learned in math class—all line segments and circles. He wasn’t sure where it came from. He wasn’t one to draw tiny stick figures on little scraps of paper. He wondered to himself why it was that the paper ended up in his pocket. How could that be possible?
Though not the type to draw tiny figures, Ben was the type to think about the tiniest of things, which is what he would’ve done except that his watch started going off. It was time to go to bed.
When he woke up the next day, the first thought he had was of the tiny drawing. But when he looked for it on his desk, he didn’t find it. For a moment, he was sad. As sad as one can be for a stick figure, but he told himself not to worry. His wife, clean-freak that she was, had probably thrown the little piece of paper away. So he went about the process of getting up and getting ready for work and forgot all about the tiny drawing on the little piece of paper. At least, he forgot about it until he was getting coffee later that morning and he went to pay.
There, among the pocket change and a matchbook (he didn’t smoke, but liked matchbooks) he pulled out of his pocket another small scrap of paper with another tiny man on it, except that this time, the tiny man was a tiny woman. He assumed she was a woman because attached to its small circular head was a triangle, which he assumed was a ribbon. There was also a wisp of a line coming off the circle, which he assumed was hair.
This was odd, the man thought to himself. Odd, indeed. The people in line behind him didn’t think him odd, though. They just wanted their coffee, and they didn’t care why he was holding them up, just that he was. The cashier (who the coffee company called, a Transaction Specialist) with her hand out, was trying to fight her caffeinated annoyance, but she also had just come from yoga, so she was keeping things together nicely. Meanwhile, Ben just stood there, holding the little drawing of the little geometric woman in his palm, still trying to figure out where she came from. And to make things worse, she’d started talking to him.
She seemed a little lost, which made Ben sympathetic since at that moment, he felt a little lost himself. “So who are you looking for, exactly?” he asked, leaving the caffeinated-yogasized Transcation Specialist and the annoyed customers staring at him as he spoke to the little piece of paper in his hands.
“I’m looking for John. He told me to meet him here.”
“Where?”
“Here.”
“In my palm?”
“No. In the club.”
“Where’s the club?”
The drawing seemed like it was trying to move.
“Are you ok?” Ben asked.
“Yes. I’m just trying to show you where the club is. It’s not easy when you’re a stick figure.”
“No. I guess not.”
Ben and the drawing stared at each other (Ben assumed she was staring, though it’s kind of hard to know for sure when a drawing is staring at you.) “Do you mean my pocket?”
“If that’s what you call it. So have you seen him?”
“Who?”
“John.”
“What does he look like?”
“To you? He probably looks a lot like me. But that’s because you 3-D types are little biased. You think we all look the same.”
“Are you talking about the little guy I pulled out of my pocket last night?”
“Maybe. I wasn’t there, so I don’t know who you pulled out of your pocket. A lot of us go there, you know.”
“In my pocket?”
Before the drawing could answer, Ben noticed that the line of coffee-needing people were staring at him as was the Transaction Specialist, who was now losing the battle of equanimity. Ben shoved the tiny drawing back in his pocket and went back to work, trying to forget what he’d seen. It wasn’t easy, though. He’d made contact with the little things in life—the tiniest of beings—and some of them, it seemed, thought of his pocket as a pick-up joint.
On his way back home, he wondered to himself if there were other tiny things that wanted to make themselves known to him. Could insects speak? How about dust? Maybe dust was more than dirt. Like some kind of conscious blob of soft tissue that could speak if someone would just listen. The possibilities were endless, Ben told himself just as he walked by a construction site, under a runaway crane.
What Ben had no way of knowing, because how many people could know this—is that huge things (like cranes) become really jealous—especially of the tiny things. Needless to say, a man paying so much attention to tiny drawings and insects and dust was just too much for this specific crane, who decided, quite on a whim, that this man should become a tiny speck of a person himself.
