A little person is sitting outside my front door, cross-legged on the welcome mat. And when I say little person, I’m not talking about someone with dwarfism, and certainly not anyone from real life—more like from somewhere fantastical. I mean it to say he is miniature, shrunken, smaller than a lawn gnome, about the size of an action figure. Though the more I stare at him, I’m not so sure what he is, if he’s even a person at all. He’s almost like a fat lap dog or a tiny troll but without growths or strange ears or non-human skin colors. His belly is a paunch. One foot is bare. The other still wears a shoe.
I think he’s pouting about the garlic skins fertilizing my plants. Maybe he’s allergic, or vampiric, or it could be that the little man himself is actually a type of fungus, and garlic being antifungal, well, of course he avoids it. His shoe has a hole blown through the toe box, and I can see a toe. It looks swollen and red, entirely too large, like something out of a cartoon.
It must be hard for him to walk because he’s struggling to stand, and now he’s shifting around, lead-footed, dragging along leaves, shuffling in a way that would make anyone nervous. I squint at him, wondering if he’s trying to spell something out, or maybe making an attempt at miniature crop circles. Might be that he’s preparing a kind of incantation because he is singing to himself, some scratchy chattering that only he understands.
I’m a little worried that he’s in pain. I think he hurt his toe, or maybe it doesn’t hurt and just grew like a weed one day, poked out of the shoe like a blooming azalea. It’s entirely possible that the toe isn’t gigantic, it’s just that the rest of him is small.
After a few minutes of pacing, he digs a hole right there barely fifteen feet from my door. With the resulting mound of earth, he makes himself a hovel, adding in little twigs and a few rocks he’s produced from his pockets.
When he’s finished, he whistles, and several cats come meowing and prancing over to him, rubbing their furry heads and bellies along the side of his hovel, standing guard out front. Must be street cats, some trailed away from sad families missing them, not from around here. He chatters at them a bit, and they mew back, content with each other’s company.
He starts braiding the hair of one of the Maine Coons, orange and white fur tufts intertwined. They could be out of some nursery rhyme. Maybe his mother is going to crawl out of a gigantic boot and beat him over the head with a rolling pin. But there is no mother. Only him, the toe, and the cats.
Tired from braiding, he plops himself down, lies there flat on the grass. His belly jiggles a bit when he lands, and an orange tabby starts to knead at it.
It almost looks like he might be trying to sleep, but then he turns and sifts through a pile of leaves, revealing a little bowl with something inside. The something inside looks like pale crescent moons, a dish of toenails.
I wave at the tiny man and ask him, “What is your name? Where did you get all those toenails?”
But he won’t say anything. Some of the cats have collars with their names, though nothing he would have named them. They’re all silly names, the kind that humans assign: Fancy, Salmon, Oreo, Pussycat.
I decide to call the man FancyPussyOreoSalmonCat, that way it addresses the group. When I call out his name, the whole pack of cats look over at me, their eyes glowing yellow and reflective in the too-dark early morning.
All week, it’s been the same, and every morning when I leave, he’s still outside. Everything feels strange since he’s arrived. My house, my surroundings, and certainly, him. Some of my things have gone missing: several hair ties, my favorite brush, my ladle, my grandmother’s gold ring, the remote to the television, even one of my bags of rice. So I’m trying to keep an eye on him, though what I really want is to get his attention. I don’t think he likes sudden movements, but now I’m slowly approaching to say hello, and he doesn’t seem to mind. The cats are purring, languidly lying around with their tails thumping the ground, and he’s cozied up with them.
I give them all one last look as I head for my SUV.
It’s four a.m. and I’m shouting, “I love you, FancyPussyOreoSalmonCat!” from my rolled-down window, backing my vehicle out slowly so as not to startle the felines. I am sure to be very careful, to not upset him, because I want him to be my friend.
He never shows during the day, even when I sit on the porch to watch for him. But this morning, dawn not yet arrived, he pokes a teeny hand out with nails that curl into spirals on only four digits, and waves back at me as I leave for work.
***
To my surprise, when I get home, the hovel is empty. I cannot find the cats anywhere. The evening passes in a dull stretch, and I’m eager to sleep in hopes they return tomorrow. In the middle of the night, I’m startled when he is the one to find me.
I wake to the little man on my shoulders, and he is braiding my hair. He gives me two beautiful French braids tight to the scalp. Even though the left one’s a little sloppy, he did a good job. I would have asked for a waterfall braid, or fishtail, but I don’t think he knows how to do those.
There is a mirror across my bedside table and I can see only the very top of his pointed hat reflecting back at me, as if even my mirror is saying it can’t prove he’s real. His hands are now delicately combing my flyaways, and he leaps from my shoulders in a rush, too low for the mirror to reflect, hat vanishing out of its sight.
FancyPussyOreoSalmonCat is now sitting in my lap. I look into his face, those expansive eyes. We gaze at each other for a few seconds of weird silence, and it’s almost a tender experience. For a brief moment, I think of him like a baby, an animal, some innocent and tired thing, just looking for a place to belong. But that feeling soon subsides, and is replaced by something much darker, something quite vile, something not right.
He gets down from my lap, jumps off my bed in a soft thud to the carpet, and starts looking around my bedroom—climbing and digging through drawers, knocking things off the dresser. I just observe and do not stop him, only because it’s no major damage, and because I want to see what he wants, what he’s going to do next. He turns to me and chatters, then leads me toward the hallway, heaving gurgled breaths as he attempts to quicken his pace, his feet making hard taps with each step. We get to my kitchen, which somehow looks even more trashed than my bedroom.
I realize that he is the one who has been stealing my rice, because rice is everywhere in a miniature range of mountains all over the floor. I ask him if he is hungry, and is he trying to tell me something?
A sort of grunt sound comes out of his mouth. He nods in a way that makes me think he might actually be laughing, but his head looks unnatural, and it hurts to watch.
Then he leaps at me, shrieking like he’s on fire, and he starts gnawing at my foot, going straight for the toes. He bites a few clean off. Red splatters out of my stubs and drips all over the floor.
He tries to grip at my thumbs because he wants to take them next.
I scream and kick him across the room. His head hits a corner and he’s a bit dazed, but only barely, because he’s still able to walk. He grumbles and pushes himself through a crack in the wall, as casually as folding his way through a set of curtains. I can hear him pattering around behind the dry wall, grunting and huff-puffing, digging his way outside with that nasty foot. I stumble to find him, trailing prints of my own bloody bare feet across the tiles to the front door.
That son of a bitch, I think, grinding my teeth as I limp outside. He scuttles toward the asphalt, but it’s not like before. It’s something sad and drawn out, escapist, like a cockroach evading a boot, and he’s in a frantic panic, looking for somewhere to hide. I examine him in all his cowardice, thinking he can get away with violence after I’ve been nothing but kind, like he can just flee after what he’s done.
I crawl into my vehicle, illuminate the street with my headlights.
His little eyeballs bulge and the look on his face goes squirrelly as his chattering gets louder. I stomp my mutilated foot on the gas.
He tries to hobble out of the way, but I steer toward him, gaining speed, feel him thud and crunch underneath my tires. I yank the gearshift into reverse, press the pedal, throw it in drive, and do it again. I roll down the window and hear nothing.
When I step out, there is no blood. FancyPussyOreoSalmonCat is just a smear on the road, most of him something like rolled out pizza dough or gum stamped under a shoe, minus his feet sticking out. It reminds me of a witch under an invisible house. The toe is unharmed and looks more despicable on its own.
I scan the whole yard and driveway for appendages, any missing bits of man, until finally there is something. It’s not him, though. It’s the cats.
They are hissing and yowling, going totally berserk, crouching with their fur and tails all puffed up huge like Christmas trees. They surround him in an instant, and their noses wiggle, sniffing at the air around his flattened mass.
One takes hold of his mighty toe, bites down hard, snaps it off the bone, and runs off with it. The others follow. That first one—I think it’s Oreo—has a meaty chunk and is eating it, and the rest pounce on the slab of his remains. They shake their heads, the way predators do when shaking a thing to death, and the cats begin to feast, sniffing at the body and hunting for any leftover bits of him on the ground. They start purring up a symphony, faces and whiskers a slopping mess.
“Good kitties,” I tell them in a voice so quiet they don’t notice.
The moon is glowing down in a soft pastel over their fur, but this time their eyes don’t reflect light—they are just black circles.
I am going to miss FancyPussyOreoSalmonCat, I think, almost with regret, as I watch them eat every last bit of him. Then I go inside for my bag and come right back out to drive my bleeding feet to the hospital.
My heart is thrumming in my ears as I close and lock my front door. I’m a little nervous to face the street, only to find there is nothing there. I tell myself that it’s late, that I am injured, that in the dark it’s hard to see. No shadows loom, no movement, no signs of anything unusual in the bleary night. I stare at the empty road where I left him. Even his hovel is gone, disappeared in the fog with the felines. There is just my drive, my plants, the ordinary look of the neighbor’s house across from mine.
Inside, a Russian Blue sits in their living room windowsill. A tiny hand reaches through the curtains to scratch the top of its head.
