Little People

According to the 19xx report, Little people were a quarter of an inch tall on average. They were so small that the ‘Just people’ needed to look very carefully to spot them. Little people look exactly like Just people. They don’t eat or sleep very much. They just exist.

Just people did not pay much attention to Little people. They were everywhere, so the Just people regarded them the same way they would cockroaches or ladybugs. However, everything changed when a celebrity, sensationally popular among teenagers, displayed his room on TV one day. It was decorated with hundreds of little bottles filled with Little people. So, the Just people began capturing Little people in little bottles. It was all play without purpose. Little people became more and more invisible, now in Just people’s living space.

Trapped in the bottles, Little people became smaller and smaller, disappearing into the air. Just people loved to watch Little people dissolve, appreciating the puff of light pastel air that would appear in the bottles right as they faded away. The change was so faint that Just people had to open their eyes extra wide to catch it. But it was sweet and warm. It reminded some of the fresh air at dawn. Others likened it to a summer sunset on the beach. But most Just people didn’t think deeply about the small changes of the extinction. They would just put Littlepeople in their bottles and forget about them.

Yeil Kim is a visual artist and short-story author based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Originally from Korea, she studied literature and international relations before working as a documentary writer and public official in the Korean government and NGO sector. After moving to the U.S., she began painting and studying art while raising her daughter. Her recent work features “Box People”—figures trapped within the confines of their own perspectives—while also exploring the possibility of transcending those limits through empathy and creative vision. In addition to her visual work, she writes children’s books and is currently working on a flash fiction project inspired by places in San Francisco.