"Excuse me." Sarah said, covering her mouth's unexpected belch. "Sorry, something I ate. As I was saying, no, I haven't seen your friend, but I'll be happy to help you look for him."

Sarah wore her favorite cork soled sandals, her favorite sunflower print sundress, her favorite straw hat, and her favorite disarming smile.

"Where did you last see him?" She asked.

Sarah did her very best to make herself look as non threatening as possible, hands behind her back so her bright yellow fingernails were out of sight, her bright yellow toenails pointed slightly inward toward their opposite, giving her an awkward, but approachable, stance. And her smile was wide but sealed to show no teeth.

"And what is he wearing?" She followed up.

The tiny man in front of her, who couldn't have been taller than Sarah's pinky finger was long, nervously shouted an answer. Describing the modest pale blue attire his friend wore, outlining the path the two of them had taken from behind where Sarah stood, the shrunken man seemed to shy a little further from her with every word.

"Tell you what, I'll look over here…" Sarah said, pointing to where she'd found someone who'd perfectly matched the tiny man's description. "And you look over there."

Sarah watched as the little man turned around and began to call out for his missing friend by name. She waited a moment until he was out of sight, searching behind an opaque black bag of trash. When the shrunken man was completely obscured by refuse, Sarah turned herself back around and took the three steps back to where she had encountered the described, missing, tiny man.

It didn't take Sarah long to find the shredded, unrecognizable scraps of stained, light blue fabric she had carelessly discarded only moments earlier. It took her a few moments of crouching and discretely pinching slightly damp frayed patches of what had been a shirt and pair of pants, but she was satisfied it had all been recovered, all the while still calling out for the man that she knew to be digesting in her gut. She quickly made sure that the tiny man was still out of sight before dropping it into a trash can, and standing up. She quickly walked back to where she had left the latest shrunken man, and found him still searching through relatively mountainous mounds of refuse.

“Hey, I don’t think he’s around here…” Sarah lied. “He may not have been able to hear you, but there’s no way he couldn’t hear me.”

Sarah leaned over, she loved to watch shrunken people panic when she did that. She brushed her hair over her ear with one hand, and offered the other to the shrunken man, not to take, but to climb onto.

“How about you come with me?” Sarah offered. “I can get you home, you can take a nice hot shower and bath, eat some food, and sleep in, well maybe not a real bed, but the best one I can make out of clean bath towels, or something?”

Sarah fought the urge to just snatch the little man up, but didn’t fight the spreading grin as he began to awkwardly climb onto her fingers, and then into her hand. She slowly stood up, and even more slowly closed her fingers around the tiny man in her hand, until his movements were entirely restricted by her digits.

“There we go…” Sarah said. “I’ve got you.”

Sarah smiled wide, her teeth gleaming even from under the hat, as she set off for her home, knowing full well how the night would end.