#32

She noticed a man that morning walking down the street. She noticed him because he was exceptionally tall. She would guess over seven feet. He had long curly hair and a strong looking nose, almost too big for his face. She would have forgotten all about him if it weren’t for the exceptionally short man she saw later that day waiting in line at the bank. She would guess he was under four feet. He too had long curly hair and a strong nose, and even those his face was proportionally smaller than the man’s face from this morning, the shorter man’s nose was also almost too big for his face. These two men of exceptional heights could have been twins except for the four feet separating them, she thought. And really, that would have been the end of thinking about those two men except that about an hour later, she got into an elevator with a man of unexceptional height. She would guess he was between five and six feet. But this man also had long curly hair and a nose that was nearly too strong for his face. She was amazed at how he resembled the men from earlier in the day. And she would not have thought about them at all after that, really, because there were so many other people to see in a city, except that when she got back home that evening, her daughter was playing with a Russian nesting doll. She had taken all the bodies out and lined them up from big to small and then one by one, put them together from small to big. And it occurred to the woman that perhaps it was wrong to assume these dolls spent their lives tucked inside of each other. Perhaps they were all had different hopes, dreams, agendas, politics, religions. And when they were ready, they clicked their own bottoms into their corresponding tops and ventured out to live their own lives.