You

You were walking on a beach with a human on your hand, a small human being the size of a small shoe, and the little man had kept his balance on the hand by gripping it firmly with its arms and legs, such as would a parrot on a shoulder. The man had a scraggly beard and a squeaky voice. Overall I felt that he was very unpleasant and would have warned you about him, if only you could have heard me.

But you were in the story and, after locking the man in a bird cage for the night, you returned to your bed where you either slept or pretended to sleep while listening to the small man, for roughly 8 hours.

Then you made breakfast, among other things.

You were always thinking about something. You were thinking without end and your thoughts began to pile and layer, sometimes loosening, sometimes growing branches, but overall getting more and more complicated by the hour. Sometimes, you were thinking about a math problem, and when you thought about the math problem you sipped a margarita in silence upon the back patio of your house which overlooked a wooded area.

At night the small man would speak to himself. At first it seemed no more than gibberish, but once in awhile I picked up a word of English, usually ‘shoe’ or ‘shoo.’

The man can sometimes feel quite bored, as he is locked inside the cage for at least half of every day and there is not much inside the cage for him to play with or eat and possibly for this reason has tried to become a comedian and also had begun to invent a new language based on beeping noises, the latter of which sometimes annoy you enough that you let him out to play in the sandbox in the backyard that unfortunately for him is thoroughly fenced in with bamboo, and through the cracks in the bamboo he will often look upon the cat who also lives at the house while doing his beeping, or practicing his jokes, or putting himself on the ground and rolling around.

You are a she, I know that much. Also, that you have good teeth and short hair. You keep your hair short for various reasons, the biggest of which is that you like to cook and exercise. Also you think the hair to be more attractive when it’s short, probably because of it rampant whirliness.

One day the man has managed to escape, but you catch him fairly easy, as he easy to outrun and also because the man is not very clever, although he is clever enough to have escaped, at least for a little while. Still, you are forgiving and you decline to punish the man, that is unless you count the brief spanking you give to him with your pinkie finger, which the man surely wouldn’t.

The man does not know the time nor the hour. He has no sense of time and this is probably his greatest deficiency, aside from the smallness. Once the man had had a wife, but she had slipped away from him. She had slipped and slid down a chute, is what she did, and down the chute she quickly went, the chute inclined at a mean angle of say 30°, the chute sometimes very steep, sometimes not very steep at all, but always steep enough to keep propelling her downward despite all her efforts, the chute also very slippery in some sense as it was endowned with running water. Basically the chute was a water slide as you might see at water park but with a dark side, the dark side being that the chute went on for far too long and its terminal was an obliette.

The man is awake at 6am. He has just woken. He had no dreams that he could recall. He jumped up as he is want to do in the mornings out of bed and looked about. Was he really still enclosed? He was, he pondered. He was bitter and getting round about the waist. At least he wasn’t starving. That was good.

Here was the sun. The sun had a character to it, he felt, as he beheld the strange colors of its emeregence. It was the only friend he had and he thought about maybe he could worship it. He would have to learn the sun language.

The man ate of the food the woman had left for him while he was asleep then lapped at the milky fluid inside his little water dish.

He didn’t wish enough, he often felt. He felt at the bars of the cage and tried to imagine his escape. He was perhaps not very clever, as he had little inkling of how to plot an escape. He was like an animal with simple needs yet within him a desire for something more. The roar of a tiger. He had not heard her coming up on his cage.

“So you’re still alive in there?” she said, eating her plum.

The man looked at her big eyes, bright and colorful, thought about their colors. One was slightly greener than the other. And around the green an eggshell or ghostwhite color that held within what seemed to be veins. The veins had branched out like lightening from the corners of her eyes and were blood red. The veins made her look angry, and he was afraid that she was going to punish him or surprise him sometime that day.

The man beeped a little at her, but they only made her frown, so he became very quiet.

“I thought about finding you a friend,” she continued. She now had eaten almost the entire plum and was licking and chewing around the pit. “But where possibly could I find another as you are. So tiny.”

Being called tiny made the man feel dizzy. The world spun around him.