Short Man On The Tall Mountain

Have you ever seen Short Man? 

His name says a lot about him. He's a little shorter than Regular-Sized Man, and quite a bit shorter than Great-Big-Gigundous Man.

But the Short Man is taller than Little-Tiny Man and huge when he's put next to Teensy-Eensy-Weensy Man. 

Suffice to say, if you had them all standing in a row from shortest to biggest, Short Man would actually have to go right in the middle. 

Which is all beside the point. Size isn't that important, really. You're only as big as your heart is warm. 

This might sound strange to anyone who knows him now, but Short Man wasn't always good at things. Or, he didn't think he was. He was good at something, just not what you might expect. 

When he was just a Short Boy, he used to go up to the top of the Tall Mountain to play with the clouds. His favorite thing was making shapes in them with his breath - sort of like when you breathe into a freezer, or stand outside in winter and pretend to be a dragon. Except Short Man could breathe a whole dragon if he wanted to, wings and everything. 

But it wasn't quite the same as making a real dragon. The clouds always drifted away, and never did anything but clump together and rain on things. That wasn't what Short was supposed to do. He  was supposed to make real things. Things that moved, and breathed on their own. The Man family had always made those kinds of things. No one could remember a time when they didn't, not even Older-Than-Dirt Man. Short was expected to learn to make things too.