I rolled over and looked at the clock on my phone. Five minutes to 4. Knowing there was no getting back to sleep, I slipped out of bed. The dog groaned, stretched, and filled in the spot as if to confirm there was no going back to dreaming. I chuckled glumly to myself at that thought. There hadn’t been a return to dreaming in what felt like forever. I went downstairs, looked at my laptop, and decided a walk sounded more appealing. I quietly locked the front door behind me, stretched, and set off with no destination in mind. 

I strode past dark house after dark house, wrapping the pre-dawn silence of a small town around me like a favorite flannel shirt. As I passed the alley behind a row of businesses, a faint sound broke my reverie and I turned back around. There was movement that I might have just dismissed as a rat or a raccoon, but there was also faint grunting and what I could swear was cursing. I looked a little closer and was startled to hear “hey little help?” from much lower than made any sense. 

I looked down and there was a tiny creature starting up at me with exasperation plastered across his face. He pointed at the tattered cardboard box and said, “I need what’s in this.” Half convinced that I was, in fact, back in my bed and dreaming this,  I emptied the contents of the box onto the brick pavement while wondering if this was what a complete mental break felt like. The little dude grabbed what he wanted and started to walk away, which was just unacceptable. I had questions. 

“Hey!” I said. “What are you going to do with that?” (I didn’t say I had good questions).
“I’m building something,” he replied. 
“Do you have like a workshop or something?” 
“No.”
“Do… you want to use mine?”  Now, that may sound like an insane thing for someone to offer to a complete stranger, especially one that clearly isn’t human and may not even exist. But this was the weirdest thing that’s happened to me in years and I was fully invested in seeing this through. 
“Take me there,” the creature ordered. Rude little bugger, but I’ve dealt with worse.


I opened the door between the warehouse and the shop and the tiny scavenger’s eyes lit up. “Yes, yes,” he muttered, darting around the space to see what all I had. A couple of tool cases stacked against the assembly table let him reach the top, and he hopped up and laid out the materials he had brought. I rolled my stool to the table and we started work. “My name is Ranunculus. Ranunculus Jones,” he said. “What’s yours?”

That was almost a year ago. In the months since our meeting, we’ve worked on all kinds of projects together. Ranunculus Jones helped me rediscover my passion for creating things. In our workshop, we design and build whatever we can imagine. That’s why we started this business, so that we can design and build whatever YOU can imagine.