I saw another tiny person today. What I call a tiny person is a mature, fully-grown person (not a child) who stands between 3 ½ feet and 4 ½ feet tall; they are proportionate in the relationships between their limbs, torso, and head. They might be “proportionate dwarfs,” which, according to Wikipedia is a case in which “both the limbs and torso are unusually small. Intelligence is usually normal, and most people with it have a nearly normal life expectancy.”
I started seeing tiny people in Vancouver and Burnaby a few years ago, usually when driving. I’ve estimated their size by noting their height in relation to a sign or a walk-signal button at a pedestrian-controlled intersection as they’ve passed by said object. Sometimes I’ve gone back to the lamp-post or bus-stop, taking with me a tape measure to obtain a more accurate approximation of their height.
The people I’ve noticed have always had Asian ethnic features: black hair, dark skin, mongoloid eyes.
Every time I see one I think: damn, why didn’t I bring my camera this time? I usually carry a small camera with me everywhere I go because I enjoy photographing things and then improving the photos, later, on the computer.
I should put a tape measure in the car and leave it there too.
Some day perhaps I’ll be bold enough to stop the car and speak to one of these people. I’d like to know where they came from, or where their family is from. I’d really like to know why they are so small. Did their parents work in a factory, perhaps in China or Indonesia, where they were exposed to some mutagen? Would be hard to broach that subject though.
I always think of the extinct species of humanoid creatures known as Homo floresiensis, who lived in Indonesia somewhere between 190,000 and 50,000 years ago. Could the tiny people I’m seeing be people or creatures from that time? Living secretly among us?
Or perhaps, they are the result of an experiment in evolution, like a science fiction short story I once read about a wealthy billionaire who used his immense wealth to manipulate the environment (via rezoning land and changing the amount of living space people could live in) thereby causing the human species to reproduce in smaller and smaller sizes. Can’t recall the author or the title of that story. And CoPilot is no help identifying the story.