An afternoon among miniatures

I. rationalizations

As a kid I often played with my sister’s dollhouse. It was a tall Victorian affair which had been passed down through the family and hand-built by my great-grandfather. Many dreamy afternoons were spent imagining my life lived among tiny chairs, eating tiny food, perhaps cohabiting this blue mansion together with my tiny wife. We’d rub our naked bodies together on tiny little beds, and eventually she’d defecate some tiny children. (I continued in my belief that babies were expelled via anus until the age of 10 or 11.)

Around this time, I was also exposed to a friend’s magnificent railroad diorama in the basement of his house, which his grandfather had spent years building for him. After seeing this, my father and I became obsessed with building a miniature rail-world of our own. I helped him as he created the tiny towns and weirdly textured landscapes, watched as he painted and glued the idealized American shops. Places like Bob’s Grocery, or Bill’s Auto Shop. Places like Sally’s Diner. I was transfixed by it all, watching as the little train circled endlessly round this idyllic place inhabited by invisible peoples. Yes, and why the complete absence of living forms? Perhaps others have small figurines or dolls which they integrate into these sets, but I don’t think mine ever did. It was like watching an empty stage set, waiting for its lead actor to take the stage. Me? Or perhaps the little people existed there already, and one would need only a shift in consciousness to see them, or to utter the words of a secret spell. All those Otaku hobbyists out there obsessively building civilizations in miniature—are they merely the unwitting dupes of faery folk, enchanted worker bees and slaves to the whims of little men?

In the field of eroticism, there exist a few strains of pornography in which the erotic potential of tiny things is being mined. After all, what man among us has not harbored the impossible dream of a cum-covered faery in phallic embrace? And what woman could possibly turn away the advances of a skilled homunculus lover, ardent spelunker of womenkind’s deepest vaginal cavern systems? In certain spheres, photographs of debased dolls and figurines are exchanged, their plastic bodies partially covered in the semen of a collector-lover. Unrealizable dream, half-realized.

Another thought: In many cultures, magic spells are cast using a miniaturized effigy of some kind. Perhaps as a surrealist experiment, I should create a life-like diorama of the entire capitalist world. Instead of sticking it with pins, I would squat awkwardly above it, squeezing out painful cataclysms of liquefied shits onto the obnoxious poppet world, dispelling it into murky brown nonexistence. Irritable bowel syndrome finally put to good use? And would the revolution triumph then?

II. fabrications

A naked boy stands before the water door. The opening’s transparent form looks like coiling white flesh in the process of evaporation, like the tightly woven muscles of some recently skinned and albino-filamented Gulliver. The boy readies himself for submersion and passage; he takes the step forward.

The thick liquid seeps itself into his ears, his nose, into every orifice. He sees almost nothing now but a thick grey fog. There is a feeling here of breathing deeply and being suffocated simultaneously. A feeling of deep winter frosts. A rusty metal hook reaches down inside his mouth and pulls out unnecessary organs and extraneous bacterium. These organs and microorganisms are then released and float away, slowly turning white and hardening. They look just like classroom chalk. A transgender mosquito swims over to the chalky forms, breaking them up into pieces with his elongated feeding tube and thin legs. As they drift away, the boy begins to cry. An ocean-going hedgehog swims over to him, says, “Everything is going to be ok, so don’t worry!” It expels a train ticket from its gill and places it in the boy’s shivering hands. The sopping wet and barely legible ticket says, “All aboard the organ train! No need for an organ plane! (One admission, expiration at puberty).” The blurred ticket is designed in art nouveau style and accompanied by elaborately decadent swirls and patterns that call to mind 1920s Paris. On the back of the ticket, a charming scene of a magnificently sensual female wasp sporting skimpy yet elegant attire, dancing in a vintage nightclub for an audience of well-dressed, roly-poly businessmen smoking expensive cigars. The boy’s vision changes, drops, dissociates. His left tear duct burns, and from its corner drips out a molten hot silver liquid and some unidentifiable globular forms which look like oversized poppy seeds. The discharge collects into one shining puddle at his feet and is soon retrofitted and reopened as a new hot spring bath by colonies of pushy white maggots. The smoky nightclub scene continues to engulf him as he stares fixedly, beginning to pass into it and through it. His flesh is transferred like a bit of squeezed fruit from one form of perception to another. Though admittedly he loses some healthy fibers in translation, I still stand by my previous statement that a frequent form molting is advisable, healthy and desired. In fact, my daily regiments of organ tissue juicing have made me feel like an absolutely virile porcupine, and who could complain about that? But back to the boy…

Once he is fully juiced into the darkened nightclub, the roly-poly businessmen all fall over, mysteriously expiring at the sight of his holy arrival. It is time for the crowning of fresh vegetables and liquids, for today is Micropsia Monday! Everything in the world looks off to the boy. The objects feel subtly deranged from their proper scales and visual weights, as though produced by large hands under a magnifying glass. He wonders, is he the unlucky new inhabitant of some Kaiju town scheduled for immediate demolition? Let’s hope not, this story has just begun. The initial disorientation subsides, and he looks over at the erotically-charged wasp. It is just the two of them in the room now, and he feels like he is the last man on earth. Time to get fruitful, honey! The wasp blows him a kiss and pulls down its lacy dress. It turns toward the wall and gets on all fours, flicking its wings excitedly. With its elongated wasp fingers, it spreads its yellow slit wide. The vagina lips open and close like a fish mouth, convulsing awkwardly in uncontrollable tics. Most wasps of this world are carriers of the genital Tourettes; it can’t be helped. Actually, he is starting to feel his own shaft act in a strange manner too, twisting unnaturally and repeating a long string of unintelligible vocal sounds. Is it contagious? He walks toward the stage, and with his arms and feet he tries spreading the wasp’s hole even wider. He then sees a conveniently placed collection of bejeweled gynecological objects waiting there by the stage and notices the newly installed wall panel explaining its ritualistic use by ancient cults. He puts the mechanisms into place and for now, the convulsing seems under control. He peeks inside but sees only stars and the left arm of the milky way. “Well, maybe I’ll crawl in there when I’m older,” he thinks. “If I crawl in there right now, I might end up on the wrong side of her amorous caterpillar lover or stabbed to death by an obsessed fan club of psychotic pixies, and who could save me then? To be honest the age gap seems a tad inappropriate too, I think I’ll pass this time…”

He thanks her for obliging him so readily and throws a few sticky candies inside as a parting gift. He then removes the ceremonial gynecological tools and the vagina closes itself down with a pout and a sigh. Ugh, cosmic orgasms are so hard won these days, she muses. Everyone is just too busy to fuck. Maybe I’d have better luck living in a universe made of slugs. Some eternally moist pleasure world no longer held together by cold stupid atoms, but with masses of those squirming slimy little beasts leaving cute trails everywhere! It would always be raining there, or at least drizzling, and all salt would be outlawed. I could just sit down and open up my legs anywhere I pleased, just let them work their magic! She blushes. The boy decides to walk outside now, confused by the wasp’s sudden lack of communication with him and the far-away look in her eyes.

He opens the door and almost gets himself crushed under the wheels of a speeding passenger train. The hair follicles on his body fly off in the ensuing gust of wind, and he now stands before us as bald as a newborn babe (and still naked, too). “Whatever,” he thinks, “I don’t care a fig about those damn follicles. I’ve always hated the feel of the slimy shampoo on my head anyhow. Conditioner on the other hand…well, perhaps I’ll miss that substance a little. Overall, I think I just prefer a thicker consistency in my liquids.”
It is a nice spring day outside so the boy decides to take a stroll. He tips his imaginary hat to the well-dressed moles, moths, and butterflies as they pass. Such a pleasant little city! They trade a few “good days” and “what nice weather todays” to each other. Carefree young marsupial children ring bells and ride past him on a few thick, awkwardly constructed bicycles. It must be admitted that the hands of the creator giants are often too large and clumsy to build on such small scales convincingly. Suddenly a large mantis with an overstuffed leather suitcase and top hat runs down the street and rudely bumps into the boy, accidentally severing his left arm with his sharp forelegs. And the bastard doesn’t even apologize! The arm is lodged in the gutter now, it turns an ugly grey and starts growing maggots and dandelions. Well, that’s a complete loss. An orange syrupy substance drips down from his fresh wound. Faeries soon rush to his side, hidden until now inside discarded fruit peels, dead flowers, and the ear canal of one very surprised opossum. Some only as tall as a pinky finger, while others have ballooned to the size of a toddler or full-grown human. They have long, bloodied teeth and uncommonly enlarged genitals from which he can see a slow ooze of discharge, left to a slow drip like a faucet in winter. A few have the now rather tired and cliché (to us) butterfly wing look, but the more creative of faeries brandish wings inspired by the beautiful damselfly or the industrious honey bee. Without a doubt, the oddest are those sporting the antique yet still rather flashy airplane wings. This new category of airplane Fae being split more-or-less evenly between the biplane and the triplane varieties. A few of the creatures have no wings at all, or just a few stunted and pathetic salamander tails attempting to grow out in the gaps between their toes. A parasitic cloud of ghost scholar energies passes through the boy and he finds himself beginning an abrupt ponder. “Perhaps these are the original models on which all subsequent tiny folklore creatures are based? Had some intrepid Neanderthal scout already passed through this world in the distant past and taken notes? Were these the “Adam Kadmon” of shobijin, the primordial Fae?” His deep thoughts continued to run themselves in little circles until the parasitic ghost scholar energy was satiated, leaving him then to drift on down the road in search of fresh prey.

The little creatures are congregating desperately around the rim of the orange molasses puddle. They suck it up through their hollow fangs, acting as though they hadn’t eaten for days. A few smaller ones fly up to the boy’s open wound, sniffing at it excitedly. These unpleasant fellows waste no time at all and burrow deep inside his body. He screams out, “Ugh, fuck a duck!” His hip jerks side to side like he is trying out a new dance routine and failing miserably. The Fae soon reach his intestines, and he can tell without a shadow of a doubt that they have all his fleshly tummy tubes in between their strong little legs and are squeezing down hard. Everything inside him is feeling so tight now, he hunches over and screams like a tortured pig. He has never felt pain like this and he is so frightened and so scared, he can’t even speak or think anymore; he wants it to stop so desperately. Grasping at anything, he thinks for a moment about praying to God or Kali for relief, but his fingernail seethes with rage at the suggestion and coolly tells him, “I don’t eat that bread.” Oh no, and the intestine has popped! Out comes the shit wave! It flushes itself out rapidly through repurposed blood vessels and drops itself from the arm hole. Though I can see now that this sly young bowel movement had time enough for a few unscheduled stops along the way and has smeared large amounts of himself onto the skylights and topiaries of the extravagant mcmansions owned by a few of the more well-to-do organ groupings. The muffled, whiny voice of a blackened lung is heard crying, “This is scandalous, utterly contemptible! Where are my bronchioli housekeepers? I want a bubble bath! Bodily waste should not, it cannot exist!” This satisfyingly juvenile prank on the part of the excrement was his last statement to the world, before glorious suicide by harsh impact with unyielding concrete slab. His unmoving brown form sits there on the cold sidewalk, looking pancaked and very, very dead. And yet, even in death he is defiant—if you look closely, you will see his fecal tongue sticks out at the world still, stuck forever in a playfully insubordinate death grimace. I have no doubt that future revolutionaries and criminals will one day make pilgrimage to this fecal holy of holies, that they will stand in awe and offer gifts of ripe fruits and salty tears to the divinely dissident brown stain on the sidewalk. Of course, this is assuming that there will be any future at all, and that we won’t have all devolved into caterpillar men with no legs by then. (I wouldn’t mind really, but it makes it very hard to travel long distances, you know?)

The boy feels much better now. How refreshing it is to walk this bright city, to feel so buoyant and so emptied! He yells, “I feel like a fluffy pink cloud!” to no one in particular, raising a few grumpy amphibian eyebrows. He realizes suddenly that his last bowl movement was over a week and a half ago. No wonder he’d felt so weighted down! Those little people were really quite skilled doctors, he muses. No doubt they are all extremely well trained in the budding science of Intestology and the fashionable ideologies of Fecalism and Urinophagy, which are so popular among the Pre-K and Elementary School children this year. (And of which the boy currently knew absolutely nothing. “A Very Simple, Extremely Straightforward Introduction to Fecalism by TJ Offal” was still collecting dust on his bathroom shelf. After a page or two of the jargon-heavy writing, our hero had started to feel it just a bit too stuffy and confusing for his tastes.) Many teachers had banned the well-meaning TJ Offal’s books from schools, the book-collecting mania being so strong this year that outbreaks of violence and child book gangs were becoming commonplace. The nationwide shortage of toilet paper caused by Offal’s teachings had put everyone on edge, too.

The boy’s thoughts then moved away from the problem of TJ Offal and drifted about for a while, landing on nothing in particular. He reached the end of the sidewalk presently, walked up to the nice overlook and saw the river below. The river was a deep black and had a strangely unnatural, undulating movement to it. He felt disturbed by its presence, but was not sure why. Next to him was a coin operated telescope for sightseeing. He dropped a few coins in and took a closer look. As he peeked in he began to feel sickened. His mind and even body rejected it. He started to gag and grabbed at his chest painfully, almost covering his telescope in a steamy brown blanket of a previous meal. The river was not made up by water at all, but by billions of eternally fucking, eternally spawning millipedes. All types were present and accounted for, their bodies claustrophobically smushed into one another. It was impossible to know with any certainty where one millipede ended and the next began. They were all sizes imaginable, too. Some stretched the length of the city, while others were as short as a baby garden snake or snail. The colors of the bodies, however, were always only that same oppressive black lighticide which the boy had first seen and been so repulsed by. Was this Insectkind’s taunting reflection of our deepest spiritual void?—cruel detritivore pleasures gained in shoving our pudgy, hairy man faces into the rotten cesspools of our own absence of meanings? Perhaps, triumphantly shouting, “No longer shall we consent to be squished, neither by foot nor by flyswatter, you soft bellied swine!” Insects aren’t affected by our “meaning of life” questions, and they don’t understand Nietzsche at all. But I guess they know enough to hit us where it hurts.

Well, a bit of time passes by, and the motionless boy is slowly becoming desensitized to the crawling horrors. Maybe he even loves them a little, maybe he longs for squirmy piles of them to crawl up from deep in his throat and spill out over his wet lips in sweetly bashful insectoid first kisses, to live out the first ever human-millipede love affair? Or perhaps this is just another case of our swashbuckling hero’s trial by torture—painful at first, but leading to an inevitable sense relief and renewed journeying? His intestine certainly seems fine now, anyway.

A strange physical compulsion suddenly fills his body, which his reluctant mind still rejects. His defiant hands pull the body up over the railings and drop him down into the swarm below.

The fall proceeds in gentle slow-motion effect. Minutes pass and the entire city holds its breath. Finally, the chubby pink butt cheek impacts with millipede swarm, exploding impressively in a marvelous tactility-form of an enraged, abandoned mattress melted and grafted onto the fading memories of a suck at mother’s breast. He thinks of hot swiss cheese and swoons. He is carried along with the black mass, and a heaving insect wave soon pushes him down below. He expects immediate suffocation here but finds himself breathing normally. At deeper levels, the atmosphere starts to feel very hot and humid too, like a sticky summer evening in the south. Eventually, his submerged body is expelled via spiraling millipede orifice into a dark and cavernous air pocket inside the mass of insects. King Millipede sits there on his metallic throne, surrounded by undulating walls and centipede concubines. He points his staff at the boy and cries, “Hesava amin! Delock in! Aregos delay ar spongecocoon?” The boy’s skin hardens and turns a deep black, he is completely encased in it. Worker ants climb inside his ear hole and whisper mischievously, telling him that this magnificent new armor is a disease-cocoon with which he may later storm heaven, that it is a mystical bacteriophage evolved from interiors of inky blackness in order to infect divine flesh with sexually transmitted disease. The angels shall drown in oceans of their own genital discharge, the ants exclaim, and a syphilis-mad God will devour his own infected papules and mucous membranes! The boy agrees to King Millipede’s plan, it seems like a pretty amusing joke to him. In fact, he’s always loved a good prank. He waves goodbye, then jumps back into the moving millipede wall and is carried on down the canal, tickled all the while by tiny millipede arms and giggling uncontrollably. A fork in the path of the river soon comes up, and a cresting wave deposits him back onto solid ground.

He stands up and shakes his body off, dispelling clouds of the black dust and soot which had gathered on his body during his long swim in the black river. He soon succeeds in drying himself and takes a look at the new surroundings. A massive golden superstructure is now standing before him, dwarfing the surrounding shops and apartments with bombastic luminescence. Built in an overblown greek revival style, he wonders if this is the city hall or a courthouse of this place? There is an ancient-looking sign posted near the front entrance to the left of the stairs. He walks over to it, hoping to discover this majestic building’s true name, but the label merely reads, “Bill’s Auto Shop.” Bemused by this new development, he shrugs his shoulders and begins his curious ascent up the immaculate marble staircase.

On reaching the second step, he is suddenly picked up and raised into the sky by a wrinkled old human hand about thirty times his size. The air rushes by; he feels disoriented and panicked. He worries vainly about his sudden heart palpitations and rubs together two very sweaty hands. He tries some breathing exercises and counts the passing birds, he even tries his hand at a little cloud-bursting. The anxiety soon fades away but he feels so very sad now. He misses that rapidly shrinking miniaturist world of the city below. It had felt like a new home, a promising new fresh start for him, and the animals were all so very nice down there. (Well, except for that rude mantis!)

He is sucked up past the pink clouds, past the planets and the stars and the old hardening multiverse clusters. Majestic forms shrink to nothingness below his rising feet. Abruptly he finds himself inside a room with drab grey walls and a cobweb problem. It seems to be someone’s musty basement. He hears a model train making its noisy rounds from somewhere behind him, but can’t quite place it. He breathes a sigh of relief now, this certainly isn’t heaven, and that wrinkled hand certainly isn’t God. For a brief moment he’d been worried that he’d been “found out” by that flaccid ol’ demiurge, and wouldn’t get a chance to try out his fancy new bacteriophage…

The big hand puts the kid’s loose skin flaps in between his dirty oil-stained fingernails and holds him up to eye level. Such a familiar face! The boy wonders what his Grandpa is doing here, and why is he so gigantic? Grandpa’s weathered face is now completely covering the boy’s visual field. A parasitic cloud of drifting ghost artist energies suddenly passes through the boy’s right nipple and he exclaims, “What lovely planetary landscapes, what amazing textures! Those deeply dredged Martian wrinkle canals and delightfully puffy old flesh mountains…no doubt about it, this is a face with some serious character!” This is all very odd for a boy like him to suddenly utter, but doddering old Grandpa doesn’t notice a thing. The boy then tells Grandpa all about his exciting new adventures inside the miniaturist realm, though it is a bit murky as to how much of the narrative Grandpa is really able to process. His eyes seem a bit foggy, maybe he is thinking of other things?

Grandpa suddenly looks down at him and bellows, “Welcome to the microscopic life, kiddo!”

The boy goes deaf.