The small person is a girl. Her name is Josephine.
Everyone calls her Josie, or Jo.
"Everyone" is simply her mother, Rose.
Josie laughs brightly and cries quietly, rarely. She does not see everything, but she sees clearly, and that's all that really matters. She knows exactly what is beautiful, because nobody has told her that she is wrong yet.
Her birthday is on January eighth, 1913. It is currently April twelfth, 1919. Her mother, Rose, sweeps about in a hurricane, shifting through the house and room as inconsistently as wind, cold and then warm, drifting and speeding. She picks things up and places them back where they sat before, and Josie watches her with curious eyes. Rose looks back at those eyes, blue as the sky and the sea and everything in between, and moves faster. Rose remembers other eyes like that, and how they saw through her skin and into her mind and heart and knew everything they needed to know without her speaking, despite her denial.
She misses him.
It's been nearly seven years and every detail of his face is traced into her heart, and every smile that shines from her daughter brings him back into the world, for a single, fleeting moment.
Her daughter, Josephine.
Josephine sat quiet through nights, hearing Rose cry in the dark, pained that the person she loved most in the world was so pained herself.
She spent so many nights like this that her eyes became quiet and sad, and Rose hurt more to see her pain mirrored in Josephine.
She spent days with her mother, and Rose tickled her and laughed with her until the sadness melted out of what remained of Jack's eyes, and the memories of the nights slid into the back of Josephine's mind.
