Tinyweek

ne morning as Tinyman struggled to keep his Tiny mind focused on whether or not he had remembered to unplug the toaster the previous night, he felt his bed quiver, as if somebody were trying to shake him awake. How troubling, he thought, but at least it's not the largest earthquake to strike California's Napa Valley region in recent memory, and pulled the covers tighter over his tiny head. He longed to fall back into the relatively carefree slumber of his recurring dream of submarine parts being discovered high in the mountains by drug inspectors. Instead, the hustle and bustle of world leaders and protestors gathered for the U.N. millenium summit on the street below was knifing into the soft butter of his consciousness like, appropriately enough, a hot knife into soft butter, and his efforts to catch some Z's were about as conclusive as the research effort by an independent panel into the causes of Gulf War Syndrome.

With immense strength and resolve he uprighted himself and padded over to the refrigerator, whose handle he grasped with the same ambivalence Castro might feel shaking hands with Clinton and, after swallowing the lump in his throat, pulled it towards him with steely determination. At long last his tiny efforts overcame the titan force of the rubberized magnets sealing the door shut and it flew open, throwing him across the kitchen. Inside the refrigerator was a dazzling array of chilled items, including the famed Tinyman pickle juice, the restorative power of which has only just been recognized by atheletes throughout the world. After eating the last pickle in a jar he could never bring himself to discard the jar or juice, and he thanked himself for it now, since it kept so well, alleviating the need for frequent and harrowing trips to the local supermarket. Tinyman's herculean powers of observation noted that the pickle juice had begun to freeze, and comparing it to the past freeze-thaw records for his pickle juice noted that it was consistent with a 150-year global warming trend, and even with the catastrophic cooling event of approximately 1,500 years ago, which he had deduced by careful examination of pickle-rings in his pickle archives.

Then the doorbell rang.

Tinyman clamped his hands over his ears in agony and braced himself for what would be an effort of almost Olympic proportions: traversing the uncharted space between his kitchen and the front door. Obstacles such as end-tables and cats threatened him at every turn. But he put his tiny shoulder to the wheel and hoofed it over to the door, straining on his tiptoes to look through the little fish-eye viewer.

A man in black stood in the hallway tapping his feet and eyeing his watch. In his hand Tinyman could make out a contract for an independent investigation of the Carnivore internet wiretapping device, with Tinyman's name pre-printed in the "name: print" box. In his other hand he held a rubber stamp. Tinyman tiptoed back into the room, hoping that the agent hadn't heard him knock the end-table and lamp over onto his cat on the way to the door.

As he crept back into bed he began to wonder if he should call his doctor, who after all could now legally recommend some marijuana to him to relieve some of his stress; he was really living on a high-wire these days! Why just the other day he had yelled something mean about a New York Times reporter to his friend, realizing only too late that he just needed to take a chill pill and let some things slide for a change. But maybe it was those male birth control pills he was testing.