I got a tiny woman. I don’t know how or why, I just ended up with her.

I don’t mean she’s short. I’m not talking about dating a woman, like, connecting with someone on a hookup site and you show up at the restaurant and you’re waiting and waiting and suddenly this woman, like, four-ten, four-eleven pops out from between a couple people and you realize you never actually saw her height in her bio, so now you gotta deal with this. Not that this is a big thing, it’s cool. It’s not like she’s super into astrology or Q or whatever. I’m just saying that you build these pictures in your head, and reality doesn’t measure up to them, and it’s not technically lying when someone avoided telling you something pretty important, but they’re all “it shouldn’t be important” and they make you feel like an asshole because you’re not into something they want you to be into, and is it manipulative? Maybe, but no matter who you explain it to, you’re just going to sound like an asshole.

Uh. Didn’t mean to go off like that, but welcome to the last four years of my dating career.

What was I saying…

It’s not that she’s a short woman. When I say a tiny woman, I mean really small. Eensy-weensy, like a toy, an action figure. Bigger than a Lego person, smaller than a Barbie. I guess that’s not very specific, but if I said “a little shorter than my dick,” not only wouldn’t that be precise enough for anyone else, it would likely plant a very unpleasant picture in your mind and also make you think I’m an asshole, for whatever reason. And that’s probably accurate. But here, pull out a dollar bill: she’s more than half as long as that. A United States bill, any kind. I don’t really know what an inch looks like and I don’t keep a ruler around and, fuck, this is taking way too long to explain.

But do you get it? I have like a magically, supernaturally tiny woman.

She’s not a roommate, I’ve never seen her before in my life. I keep saying “I have her” because it’s not accurate to say “I live with a tiny woman.” She lives here, yeah, and I’m trying to keep her as safe as I can, but… If a wasp flew into your apartment, would you tell everyone, “Hey, a wasp moved in, a wasp lives here now”? Of course not, not unless you were trying to be cute and funny. That’s a certain sense of humor that’s popular lately, but that’s not me. This tiny woman showed up, and I’m trying to protect her, but the whole thing is kinda weird.

No, weirder than you think. You might think, “sure, I get it, having a tiny, miniature woman around is weird,” but it gets weirder than that, trust me. Fuck it, keep listening, I’ll tell you all about it. Just, please don’t think I’m bragging about taking care of her. I’m not trying to sound all noble, I just think most people would protect something that helpless and vulnerable. But also she’s kind of a freak, so, like, I have to protect her from herself… you’ll see.

All right, so… I don’t even know how to lead into this. I work in a regular office, I’ve got regular friends, I don’t like a lot of drama and I keep my life as boring as possible. I don’t need to make a name for myself, I don’t need to leave a legacy, I’m completely comfortable with people assuming what my pronouns are. If I depart this earth without so much as a flicker in the record of history, that’s fine with me. Not everyone can be a Beyoncé. That’s how I see it, and I wish more people saw it that way. Never bought into this “famous for the sake of being famous” bullshit. Sounds like a mental illness, to me.

Argh. I don’t mean to be offensive, I hardly like to talk about my views at all. What I’m trying to say is that I don’t need to cause a ripple, I don’t need to make a splash. Good enough is good enough for me, so putting in eight hours at my job and watching TV for three hours and getting takeout for dinner is good enough. Like, I’ve tried dating, but it just never seems to work out, so I’m starting to question why I think I need to be with someone anyway. Maybe it’s better that I just… burn myself out, you know? Just buy consumer goods, put in my 40 hours a week, and clock the years until I die. What’s wrong with that?

Just have to get over this needing-a-companion thing I seem stuck on. If I could switch off this loneliness, my life would be cake.

And that’s who I was and where I was at when I woke up about a week ago. I went to bed an average joe putting in his time and waiting to die, trying not to make too big a mess in the meantime, and I woke up with a tiny little woman beside me.

Yeah, seriously. The first time I saw her, she showed up in my bed. After four years of looking for a companion, an activity partner, a cheap and easy fuck, all of a sudden a woman just, poof, appears in my bed. But she’s tiny. I’ve got a light apnea, so I shouldn’t sleep on my back. I try to lie on my side until I pass out, and then roll to my front. I woke up on my chest, my left arm down my side and my right arm bent up around my head, around the pillow. I don’t know what woke me up, I was in the middle of a dream that wasn’t ending, but it went away and I slowly opened my eyes and I just felt like lying there for another minute in case I could fall asleep. It was the weekend, so I could sleep in if I wanted.

Some asshole was running his mower at 8:30 (I checked my phone) and I guess that’s fine, but fuck me if I wanted to sleep in. It would’ve been too much work to get up and close the windows and shut the blinds, so I got ready to get up. The arm up over my head? I slid that down by my side because it was losing circulation, and my elbow bumped over something. That was weird enough, but it screamed. A shrill little chirp like a small, furry mammal might emit. Squirrel, chipmunk… vole… something like that. And the combination of hearing that and feeling a solid, foreign lump under my arm woke me the fuck up with a quickness. I’m like, what the fuck was that? I’m instantly awake, I jerked back and only barely caught myself from falling off the edge of the bed (I have the whole bed to myself but I still sleep on one side, who knows why), but I was ready to leap out of bed and face off with whatever that was.

What it was, was a teeny-tiny little woman. She didn’t seem very put out by my massive arm rolling over her, she just looked a little rumpled like someone with long hair does when they wake up. She was on my pillow, I have no idea how long. Could’ve been six hours, could’ve been the instant I woke up. She doesn’t speak English, so I still don’t know a week later. But there she was, grinning up at me like a happy dog.

Hold up. Obviously she’s not an animal, she’s a human being (even if she’s fucking tiny). Just, like, you know, how golden retrievers seem to smile endlessly, how some dogs just grin and it looks like the very definition of happiness. That’s all I’m thinking of. She was just grinning and grinning up at me like a little ray of sunshine, like I’d done something really clever that meant a lot to her. But I didn’t: I woke up, noticed I’d been drooling, rolled my head away and decided to get up, almost crushed her under my bicep, and she’s smiling at me like…

Well. I’ve never had a woman smile at me like that, for any reason. I don’t know what to liken it to except pure sunshine.

So I’m lying there on my side, completely naked (I sleep naked in the summer, AC’s too expensive), and I tucked my sheets down over my belly and crotch, but the way she’s smiling at me, I kinda felt like she’d already seen everything. Or else she doesn’t care. She’s just beaming up at me like she’s excited to be there. And that makes no sense to me, because if I was confronted with something that much larger than me, like, more than a dinosaur, I think I’d be terrified. Right? If there’s a gigantic person right next to me, I’m going to be worried about getting crushed under this limb or that one, or maybe they eat people, which I guess is weird but we’ve had a lot of programming in our popular media about what giants do, or… just what anyone would do if they thought they saw a bug. A giant woman would probably scream and run out of the bed, and a giant man would probably crush it with his hand or look for something to crush it with, depending on whether he voted Republican or Democrat.

But I just lay there, gawking at her. I’m naked, she’s naked. Like, almost immediately I saw it was human, skin like mine, two arms, two legs. But she’s also got nice little breasts. She’s lying on her side, on my pillow, and she swept her hair back to grin up at me like she wanted something from me. It’s strange to say that she had a lot of hair, or that she had nice breasts, but everything was proportional. It’s like my vision shrank whenever she did something, and for a second I saw things from her perspective. Does that make sense? So when she swept her hair back, it kind of looked like an effort. And when I say she was curvy, I mean that if she were standing in my bedroom around five-something tall, she would’ve been very curvy. You could see all that, but I was also highly conscious of the fact that she was just a few inches tall and I could’ve crushed her in my fist. Which I would never do! Or I could’ve rolled over her in my sleep, so she’s lucky to be alive.

Rather than looking panicked at nearly getting crushed, though, she’s just grinning up at me like she won a raffle. Yeah, like she won a prize, something she really wanted. And I couldn’t guess what that could be, because it’s just me in the bed. My sheets are cheap and need to be washed, I haven’t hung anything on the walls, the room kinda stinks like old laundry and farting all night, but you wouldn’t know that from looking at her. She looks like she won something. I don’t know what she thinks she won.

I tried talking with her. I didn’t legit expect her to answer “what the fuck are you,” but I did ask things like “who are you” and “are you okay” and “what happened to you.” The tiny woman didn’t answer anything. She grinned up at me, mostly. Once, she screamed, but not out of terror or anything. Just like she’s smiling and smiling, and then she closed her eyes and screamed, and she went back to smiling. I froze, because I was worried that I’d done something to scare her, but I was literally frozen in place like a statue. I hadn’t moved or come close to her or anything. I just kept asking her dumb questions that she wouldn’t or couldn’t answer, until I felt stupid. “All right, you can’t talk to me, but I’ve got to get on with my day. Do you need anything?” She didn’t say. “Like, food or water or something?” She just grinned at me. “Did I hurt you? When I brushed over you? That was an accident, I didn’t know you were there.”

You’re not going to believe this. The tiny woman flopped to her back and spread her little legs, and one hand grabbed her boob and the other went between her legs, and I swear to fucking god she started masturbating. Never stopped staring at me, just rolled to her back and started jabbing between her thighs.

I’m like, okay, this is too weird. Tiny little woman just appears in my bed, she’s super happy to see me, and then she starts flicking the bean right on my pillow. What the fuck?