“I love you,” she said. My heart fluttered like a bird.

“I want to marry you,” she said. A flock of sparrows careened inside my ribs.

“I want to have your babies,” she said. Angels shouted hosannas as they did barrel rolls through my lungs.

“I want to have eight babies,” she said. “At the same time. All of them yours.”

I laughed in joy at the hyperbole. “That’s the way love feels!” I said. Her eyes were steeled.

“I want,” she said, “to be on reality television.”

A single starling counted to eight on his feathers and then pecked at my liver.

You’d don’t bring a gun to a knife-fight. It’s one of the unwritten rules of knife-fighting. It just isn’t done.

Learn more in the book “The 30 Unwritten Rules of Knife-Fighting”, which I wrote.

Becoming suddenly interested in the identity of the world’s smallest man, and being short on the resources necessary to undertake a full-scale census of all men, I instead googled “world’s smallest man”. My investigation returned a FOXNEWS.com article from a year ago concerning Edward Nino Hernandez, the world’s smallest man in 2010.

The article is striking for several reasons. First, it is not actually an article. It’s a slideshow, which sort of makes sense. There’s not much to know about the world’s smallest man that you can’t guess. What you really want is to see the world’s smallest man. To marvel at his scale in relation to children and household items. To gawk in wonder at humanity writ small.

Second, there’s a lot of turnover in the title of the world’s smallest man. In October 2010, Khagendra Thapa Magar, turned 18 and became the new “world’s smallest man”. Khagendra was then 5 inches shorter than Edward. He Pingping was 1.5 inches taller than Edward, and held the title previously. The unfortunate thing is that if you’re the world’s second smallest man, no one cares. You’re just a very small person, who used to be famous. And, to be honest, even being the world’s smallest man doesn’t afford you much. While holding the title, Edward’s primary source of income was break-dancing at a department store, and his primary source of fame was getting shot in a Colombian movie. And that’s “shot” as in killed, in a gunfight. Anyway, it’s sad to think of the ego plunge the world’s smallest man experiences when he’s edged out by a smaller man.

But the most provocative thing about the article was the description of how small Edward is. The way I see it, a description of how small someone is should accomplish a few things:

- It should reference an object of the same approximate size as the subject.
- The object referenced should be familiar to us.
- The object referenced should be somewhat standardized.
- Since any object referenced will necessarily imply some kind of symbolic relationship between the object and subject, it’s important that the object not demean the subject.
- And the object should definitely not suggest that the object is something into which the subject may be placed and subsequently carried onto a plane.

The article describes Edward Nino Hernandez, world’s smallest man in 2010, as slightly bigger than a piece of carry-on luggage.