When I went to college, I didn't want to live in the dorm and didn't want to get into a fraternity, so I found a room to rent in a very old house in town. My landlord was an older woman who basically left me alone, other than supper time when she made my dinner. I spent most my evenings alone in my room studying. The old lady was a bit eccentric, talking about fairies, dwarfs, leprechauns and other miniature people from folklore. I'm not sure if she actually believed in them or not, but being a man of the 21st century, I knew such things were fantasy and didn't exist.
Over the next few months, I noticed a few odd things happening in my room. Little things turning up missing and bits of food, barely noticeable to most, also vanishing. I figured the house had mice, so I bought a few traps and set them out. Then late one evening while studying, I heard a rustling sound coming from the waste basket. I thought a mouse had fallen in and couldn't get out. Walking over to the waste basket to take to the trash can outside and dump it, I looked in, expecting to see a mouse, but not expecting to see what I saw:
It was a tiny girl. She was about five inches tall and wearing torn pieces of cloth fabricated into clothing. Her eyes were full of fear as she looked up at my towering form. I started to reach into the basket, and she screamed and cowered as if expecting she was about to meet a horrific fate. I stopped and pulled my hand back. Then I slowly and gently tipped the basket onto its side and backed away to sit on my bed. She slowly crawled to the top of the basket, not lying flat on the floor and looked at me. She looked left and right, then jumped up and ran under the bed. I looked under the bed with a flashlight and saw a small hole in the baseboard, the size of a mouse hole.
After that, I started leaving gifts on the floor. Bits of food, pieces of cloth, the smallest needle and thread I could find, and tiny little buttons. Each morning the items I left were gone and something left behind, like an old coin or stamp. Then I got an idea and ordered some high-end doll clothes for a 1/12 scale doll. Again, these disappeared over night. This continued on for a couple weeks. I never tried to look for her or look into the mouse hole, we just simply exchanged "gifts". One stormy evening, I sat down at my desk to study and out of the corner of my eye, I saw movement. I looked over and saw the tiny girl step out from behind a beer can that I had forgot to throw in the trash last night. She was wearing one of the outfits I had left out, shorts and a midriff cut off shirt. She reminded me of a tiny Laura Croft !!!
She introduced herself to me as Arianna. She was what people in the old world called a "borrower". Her kind lived inside the walls and beneath the floors of houses, surviving on what they could scavenge from the giant people they called "beans". She walked across the desk and sat down on my wallet. We talked for hours. Her family was wiped out in a flood from a thunderstorm. She had barely survived, her father pushing her up out of the rising water to an escape hole before being swept away by the torrent of water. She found this house and with only the old lady living there with no dogs or cats, she thought it would be the perfect place to live for now.
We got around to talking about my classes and it turned out, she was highly self-educated from reading books she had found in the basement and attic. She was able to tutor me in some of the classes that I was struggling with and my grades dramatically improved. (One of my professors questioned these increases in my grades, thinking I found a way to cheat. Naturally, I couldn't tell him about Arianna or he would think I was lying or nuts) Other times, we would watch videos or television programs on my laptop, including a few episodes of "Land of the Giants", which gave her the shivers.
One winter evening, we were studying and she had eaten some of the old lady's dinner I smuggled up to my room. She was wearing a sexy little schoolgirl outfit I had bought for her. She abruptly stood up and said she was bored with studying and wanted to take a break. I closed the book I was reading and said "Okay, what do you want to do?"
She stood there for a moment, then looked over at the roll of scotch tape on the desk. She looked back at me with a devilish grin and said, "How about we reenact some of the scenes from that television show from the other night", referring to the pilot episode of "Land of the Giants". I taped her down on the desk as she feigned to scream and struggle, but it wasn't a pencil eraser or scalpel I examined her with.......
Our "relationship" changed that evening. We took a lot more breaks from studying after that.
