"The Littles and the Big Assed Cat"
(Transmitted from Tiny Person Access IP .37.1, a.k.a. `SmallBlog', reposted at Blogspot)
The stories you have heard about me are mostly bullshit, oversimplified and exaggerated tales that my grandpa made up for Henry, who further distorted the facts when he came around to telling John Peterson, who distorted it even more.
They got the facts wrong, they got the science wrong, they misrepresented our culture, and being children's stories, they didn't begin to address the problems of a six inch tall woman growing to a mature adult.
My name is Lucy. I live in the house of a family of giants. I have a prehensile tail, and breasts.
You are reading this thanks to the internet and the Household Wiring Guild.
In exchange for a few months of back breaking labor, I have a personal computer, with a Motorola cel phone screen and tiny buttons custom crafted out of a popsicle stick.
On the internet, we're all the same size.
The family room has an actual flip phone with a keypad, but those buttons are the size of my hand, and everyone can see what I'm typing in huge glowing letters. I wouldn't want to type a journal entry on there that said, say, I don't know, that I had a crush on one of the scavengers, or I was having lady problems...
The HWG rigged an internet conduit from the Time Warner Cable Cable, which probably reads at the station as some kind of hiccup in the line. We use cords because Wi-Fi makes a sound our tiny ears can actually hear.
Forget what the author said, my home is not in the attic, but rather in a barely noticeable dirt cave carved into the basement wall. It looks like an animal burrow, a little misshapen coal mine, because our existence has to remain a secret.
We've had three planned cave-ins since I was a child. The pylons are rigged to go down in a Moment's notice.
For heat, we have a wide variety of options. The light from an Easy Bake Oven, the heater element from an electric blanket for starters. A cel phone can be both a bed warmer and a floor warmer.
For summer cooling, our big meeting places use computer cooling fans. For the rest of us, we have pocket mini fans that have been made even more `mini' with special tools.
My bedroom is a little dirt hole. Sometimes a worm or an insect crawls through my wall, but that's okay. We have to eat.
The books have it wrong. Only a tenth of our food supply comes from Upstairs. I regularly dine on cockroaches, grubs and shrews. With the right spices (stolen from Upstairs, or reclaimed from the garbage), it almost tastes like fried chicken.
Our furniture is all lightweight, fashioned out of seldom used items. My bed is a repurposed wicker basket, the mattress shaped from a Nerf football and an insulated glove. Gloves make a damn good sleeping bag once you sew it together and pull out the finger dividers.
I have the Artisan's Guild and the Ladies Guild to thank for that. And my wicker dresser. I use empty pill containers to store everything else.
The Ladies Guild also makes my dresses. You doubtless have read much about us wearing doll clothing, but you don't actually see that stuff very often, and when you do, it feels like burlap against your skin. The people who do wear them, wear them with a handmade slip underneath, or a sown in liner.
Today I'm wearing a stylishly distressed denim dress held up with shoelace straps fed through a large brass button, which Mom had to adjust recently due to me not being flat chested anymore.
For a chair, I have a spool of thread padded with the thumb from a glove.
My plastic dollhouse desk is crawling with dust mites. Since I am so small, I can actually see them. They are the same size a wood tick would be to you, and just as disgusting. Some people put them in small aquariums and make them do tricks for pieces of dead skin. Others try to grind them to a pulp and eat them, but there isn't much meat you can get out of something that small.
In our burrows, they're not as abundant as they would be in, say, the attic, but they still are a constant nuisance. We have even developed sprays for them. One of my people has an atomizer full of the stuff, but I still have to swat them.
We use the same websites as you do, with some exceptions. Our people's websites are never .coms. We use the IP numbers to access a back door version of the site that allows us into other pages.
We have our own version of Facebook, set up by tiny people living within the corporate headquarters. They have copied the programming code and repackaged it for us.
We're not at the point of making quality `selfies' or video yet, but we're working on it. The wealthy have access to the professional cameras that can photograph ants, but the rest of us, who don't want to barter all our valuables for pictures, end up looking blurry in the viewfinders of inferior cameras, so we mostly don't bother.
Mom calls me to dinner. She's cooked up a long worm that's wider than my fist. In big people terms, I'd compare it to eating a fat python.
We sit around a table made from VHS videocassette tapes and a flattened soda can.
As I watch the Lord of the Rings on a black and white Gameboy screen, Mom sets a steaming measuring cup full of cooked worm on the bottom part of the table's faded Surge logo.
In the corner is our version of the Easy Bake Oven, a brick and pinewood derby car weights suspended over a pair of refurbished automotive light bulbs, where more of the Dirt Serpent bubbled.
I, Mom and Dad pulled up spools, and Mom cut into the worm with a knife one of our neighbors crafted from folding and refolding a heated Pepsi can.
Dad whittled the other instruments out of wood, the forks, the spoons. They're good, but not good enough to barter with, not when we have to compete with the Winds.
The Wind family has this stupid slogan they always put on our monitor as they try to sell wooden flutes. "No woodwind is as good as Wind's wood."
Oh. I forgot to mention we have a TV station.
It's not as good as big people TV, but we have one. It broadcasts on `low power' shortwave, and it operates much the same as your television...if you were living in 1930.
We have literal `teleplays' where small people perform in a small stage in a burrow, interrupted by someone in a different burrow advertising their wares, or the actors themselves ruining the performance for a commercial spot.
We also have an emergency broadcast station, which sends out bursts of static in Morse code patterns to warn us of various dangers, such as flooding, careless pest control guys, or a big assed cat.
"Where's Tom?" I asked mother as she set a slice of worm into the bottle cap that served as my plate.
"He's out with Monique," she said.
Not all little people are white. Monique is a small, cute thing, with coffee brown skin. I tolerate her well enough, but seeing her and my brother kissing makes me gag. I guess I'm just jealous.
I groaned. "Where did they go this time?"
"Quadrant 117A," Dad said.
That translates as "The flower garden by the back porch."
Every family serves as survey team at least once a year, updating sectors of the house and back yard, notifying teams of new puddles, food sources, or potential dangers. These are input into a computer that the HWG put together from a thumb drive someone large had misplaced, pieces of blank CD's, discarded computer parts and a Tiger Electronics handheld Double Dragon game. The modified system accepts cartridges full of map data.
We live and die by those numbers, so we tend to memorize them quickly.
Surveying by the roses.
I rolled my eyes.
Tom and Monique had been close. Very close.
They had been `surveying' for a couple weeks now.
Our people don't go on dates. There is no Olive Garden, no Red Lobster. It's a common joke that if a male and female small person go out on a voluntary survey, one will wind up pregnant in six months. When the male is the timid one, there are even jokes about the male getting morning sickness and the like.
"All right," I said. "Let's eat."
Mom and Dad put on their kippots, literally crafted from napkins.
Okay, okay. They're really handkerchiefs.
Yes, we're Jewish, but you probably wouldn't recognize our version of Torah.
For example, in Exodus, there isn't as much focus on Moses, and the small people were not slaves to the Egyptians, or small Egyptians, for that matter.
However, the tiny Israelites did go to war against the small Egyptians.
They had the same plagues happening around the Nile, but our tiny prophet said it was due to all the idolatry in the land, rather than the slavery, for even some of his fellow tiny Israelites had practiced worshiping Egyptian gods.
Our kosher laws are slightly different, too.
Anyways, us tiny people face death every day, whether by food poisoning or a lawn mower. For this reason, praying is very popular among our people, even those who claim no religious affiliation.
Se we had our little Jewish prayer and ate.
Mom really knows how to prepare Dirt Snake. She collects the salt from discarded bags of unpopped popcorn, crumbs from Chex Mix or Doritos, and some other stuff, and she works her magic.
Your people's children are lucky to be able to turn their nose up at food. There's no way for us to conveniently drive up to a grocery store and buy Kraft Macaroni and Cheese or order a large pepperoni from Pizza Hut. We don't have Jimmy Johns, Chinese delivery, or anything equivalent. A few entrepreneurial types have made attempts at delivery, but the food is never consistent, and the barter system makes it a daunting task, for the value of trade goods is always dependent on the owner's opinion.
And so, you eat what's put in front of you, and pray it tastes good, and you don't have to eat the leftovers for the next three weeks.
To find a worm this big...it was like thanksgiving.
Of course, anything is better than Huevos La Cucaracha, as much as you might pretend it is caviar.
We ate silently, watching the movie, which someone had posted on Youtube. Seeing Frodo in that cave with the spider...that's our kind of horror movie.
To giants, several spiders are harmless, but not to us. When ants and spiders grow to the size of lemons, or even toy dogs, that venom becomes a serious threat. We have a guy whose full time job is checking for spiders.
So yeah, edge of our seat.
Our movie was suddenly interrupted by a rhythmic burst of static.
Dad shut off the movie and listened to the short and long bursts.
If you want to survive in my world, Morse Code becomes your second language.
It was a wild animal alert. The neighbor's cat, who we named Yellow Death, had entered Quadrant 130, just a few yards away from where my brother was.
We all froze, staring at the miniature radio in horror. There were no further details, only a repeat of the same message.
We have internet, but no cel phones or walkie talkies. What we have are rather primitive devices that each have drawbacks in the field.
One device is called an LED Pack, which is basically a receiver with a large LED light stuck to it. When you're trying to hide from predators, this is not something you want to carry around with you, but we have a lookout on the roof with a two way communications unit: LED for the incoming signals, and a static burst system for the outbound.
The other we call a Fuzz Pack, which is just a Morse code receiver. This also can give your position away. We're still working on one with an earpiece.
For the Moment, we only had the Rule of the Field: "Keep one eye on the roof at all times." A small bit of broken mirror could be used to read the blinking dot.
Dad said a prayer, and we glumly stared at the radio, fearing the worst.
And then we see a brown faced tiny person in a green summer dress rushing into the burrow, tears rolling down her cheeks.
"Mr. Little!" she cried in a blubbering sob. "It's, it's Tom. He's...He's..."
More words came out, but I couldn't understand any of it, because she was crying too much.
"Oh honey!" Mom said, putting an arm around her, attempting to console her. "What happened," she said a little too forcefully.
"Cat," Monique blurted. "The cat!"
And she cried on Mom's chest.
Not too long after, I see a man in a black uniform stepping into our home.
It's "Cobra." We call him that because his uniform was taken from a G.I. Joe doll. When he first started his duties, people made fun of him, but now he's become a messenger of death. Honestly, not his fault. He just happens to run relay between Emergency Services and the families.
"Frank and Helen Little?" he said.
"Yes?" Dad said with a wavering voice.
"That's me," Mom said a little timidly.
"I'm afraid there's been an incident in the back yard. I'm going to need you to come with me to the infirmary."
"Oh God," Mother said, wiping her teary eyes. "I always knew this day would come, but I didn't know it would be today."
Dad placed a comforting hand on her shoulder.
I tried to fight them back, but the tears kept flowing down my face.