The Miniaturist – Jeremy Scott Munnings

December 3, 2025

Clive was born to a family of two inevitable lovers in Sheboygan. No other two would’ve ever made a match for his mother and father. Clive’s father was charming in the way he could call hordes of pigeons down from their roosts in the horse stables. It caused more than one incident where a horse broke its leg, was shot, and sent to the glue factory. His mother was alluring in the way she could whip together a tuna casserole in less than ten minutes. She could feed a small army with her biscuits and gravy. She learned everything she knew from the recipes on the back of condiment containers.
        The night Clive entered the world, the moon was full and there was a star shower overhead. His mother was set to heavy breathing in the hay barn, so she didn’t notice. His father was too busy whittling balsa in the corner to notice her distress. Clive was cut out like a stillborn lamb from his mother’s womb by the local veterinarian, a family friend of his mother’s, and then brought in from the cold to be raised in the house his mother had won from a Campbell’s Soup sweepstakes.
        Clive was their little animal in every sense of the word. He ate all his meals from a custom slow-feeder trough designed to Clive’s mother’s unique specifications. His mother wouldn’t allow Clive to feed any other way from that day on. She was delighted, so much so that she redecorated the house completely in vintage farmhouse decor. His father had designed it when Clive was five as an anniversary gift for his mother in order to “ease her womanly burdens.” Clive’s mother would say to him, “shit, if I’m going to have to clean up after your messes, might as well treat you like the piggy you are.” Mostly Clive’s father did it so she would stop barking at him to help clean after each of Clive’s feedings. In the end, Clive was given space in the house, along with lots of rusty tools hung on the wall and signs with cute phrases that reminded them to live, laugh, and eat well.
        She’d laugh in between puffs of smoke then say, “shit, not since you stopped sucking on my tits have I been this free,” with the fullness of her gut, all while she’d pull another drag from an ash-burdened Virginia Slim.
        Clive didn’t know why she said these things that made no sense to him, so he would snort and shovel the instant mashed potatoes, sardines, SPAM, Cheez-Whiz, peanut butter, pickled artichoke hearts, and black olives into himself with his dirt-packed hands, if only to please her. The trough’s daily contents shifted depending on the sales ad for the week, what was closest to expiring, and how close it was to the renewal date of his mother’s food stamps.
        Nevertheless, the only person Clive ever wanted to please was her. She was softer than his father. Less prone to yelling. Sometimes she would give him a pet, or ruffle his hair, and he’d feel almost human. Clive’s hands were thick and calloused, with foodstuff left under his nails that made him prone to sucking them as a nervous tic. Despite the lack of taste he had for the slop, he had achieved a caloric density uncommon for a growing boy. Or pig for that matter. It was all fuel for the work he had to do around the property, since no one else would. He fed the other animals. He repaired the fences. He did all of this and maintained a girth unknown to children in his demographic. His mother said he was stacked with fat in all the right places. Perfect for his mother’s little love pinches. They left bruises on Clive’s fat rolls that looked like hickeys from a lamprey. He hated the pinches, but they taught him how to squeal.
        She would joke, “we should’ve been in 4-H, because my oh my, we know how to raise ‘em round here. You’d be my blue ribbon baby, yes you would!”
        Sometimes the pinches were something he looked forward to. He would squeal with delight. Otherwise, the pinches came just the same. One pinch, then one hunk of flesh grabbed and twisted, and then all at once he’d be smothered in his mother’s fat as she reached and clawed for another sweaty piece of his unwashed tummy rolls.
        Clive’s father was an amateur miniaturist. He hadn’t worked a job since he got fired the last time from his role as stock boy at the local grocery. He was caught having soft, intimate missionary sex with the flour sacks.
        He claimed it was all a great misunderstanding, that the moans weren’t necessary, but part of the act.
        “They just had to go and design them to look so damn good, didn’t they?” No one was ever supposed to know about his love for the flour sacks. That was his little special treat. By God, it wasn’t like he was getting any back home. What was the harm? He could wring the neck of that asshole, Ricky, who reported him. He would wring his neck until the blood pooled from his nose. Just like he would with the pigeons that wouldn’t leave the stables.
        “Why couldn’t they look past it since, I mean, no fluids were ever discharged, no harm was really done?” he’d interrogate himself with these questions over and again while resting on his cot that lay next to the ruins of Elturel’s ancient underwater civilization, the Kenoi, his favorite part of his miniature world that he couldn’t get just right.
        Clive’s father stopped going into public shortly following the incident at the grocery. He didn’t accept the blame, he reshaped it to his will. He lived in society like a disabled man, since he managed to score a government check after a short time in the psych ward thanks to his time in an improv group, his mild schizophrenia, and a few slices on his wrists from his X-Acto knife.
        That is not to say that he was not busy. He spent years of his life in the sweating, dimly lit, mildewed basement tinkering away with his miniature creations. There were people of all shapes and sorts, some the world had never seen before. There were monsters of grotesque proportions and cravings. There were castles with dragons wrapped around them and mountains full of gold. There were tableaus of great glory and horrifying acts of despair all throughout the 650 square foot room.
        You could spend years living inside Clive’s father’s creation, but only if you were HO scale, of course. To everyone else, it would look like an obsession, like mania, to Clive’s father, it was Paradise. No one ever had to look upon the face of heaven except him. His creation was solely his. Clive’s father loomed over his creation and he saw that it was perfect. No god or government could tell him how to live his goddamn life, no sir, and especially so when it came to Elturel. When Atharax the Destroyer, the leading villain in the land of Elturel, comes to fulfill his namesake on its denizens, it will be a reckoning unlike the worlds above or below had ever seen. Clive’s father thought he might just need to film this one. He was going so far as figuring out the technicalities of pyrotechnics in a basement that hadn’t seen an inspector for the past century. He was always tinkering, moving one miniature around to fit his shifting will and then placing it back after hours of contemplation.
        After his father had retreated completely to the basement. Clive went down to the basement doorway only on holidays. He was the one who would have to tell his father to come eat with the family. On any other day, his father’s meals were delivered by Clive’s mother through a slit in the door, like those that people have for their mail. But, holidays were a big deal to Clive’s mother.
        “You know, the holidays are just supposed to mean something. Why can’t anybody understand that?”
        That meant that everyone should eat like a family. Including Clive, who got a special trough for Christmas dinner, which was decorated with a string of multicolor lights and bright shining tinsel in red and green.
        Clive’s father never spoke to the family. He was a thin man, with a thin man’s clothing, complete with an old button up shirt that was yellowed, pants that were stained, and broken glasses that did nothing to hide his bulging pupils. They were so extended he had to wear special frames. On top of those he wore his jeweler’s loupes that connected to the glasse’s frames and gave him the ability to paint the expressions and details on all of his miniatures. All of the moans, the groans, the moments of death overtaking life, these he would paint with his loupes.
        It was Christmas and Clive was six weeks away from his 12th birthday. Clive kept note of the years gone by. He was waiting for the day he could leave the farm and earn his own money. Perhaps move to the city and eat an an automat. Eat with fork and knife. The tines of the fork carried significant weight in his mind. They reminded him of the farm and its pitchforks, but they also carried mystique. Why did some forks have different numbers of tines? Why are some smaller than others? Does it make the food taste better or worse to eat it with a fork? Do you still get to suck on your fingers after if you eat with a fork?
        It was Christmas and that meant that both Clive’s birthday and the celebration of the birth of Christ were combined into one big production number by his mother. Clive was becoming a man. He was bigger than his father and at the very least present in her daily life. She needed to show him some love. So she put on a pink dress with a poodle embroidered on it and danced around in roller skates all over the kitchen to entertain him, to see if he would get out of this state he’s been in. She was beginning to get worried that he was going to run off, that some government scuzz would come through and tell her how to parent her own broodling.
        The dress had fit better back in the 50’s when her mother wore it. It was so badly worn at the seams that they were splitting and you could see the sides bulging out from his mother’s breasts and muffin top and all the associated stretch marks that came with them. But her mother’s roller skates still worked well with minimal effort. She wouldn’t take them off as she cooked in preparation for the feast. The racket from the skates on the wooden floor drove Clive’s father homicidal with rage, unlike any rage he had felt since he was fired. Unlike any he’d felt towards someone except for that goddamn Ricky. This was a destructive rage, oh and he knew it. Couldn’t she see how important this was to him? What his work truly meant? She was right over the goddamn fortress area of Elturel and he had been working ceaseless nights over the correct goddamn color of grout for the castle’s parapet and dammit she would have to pay. He never loved her anyhow. Only her shape.
        Clive went to knock on the door to the basement. No response. Not until he heard a single bang like a door slamming shut. The loudest bang he had ever heard. It sounded like a firecracker, but louder and hotter and closer. The sound had its own heat. He immediately was filled with worry. He thought his mother had fallen. He thought something had happened to his father. He panicked and not until then had he felt the wet jutting stream of blood vomiting itself up from his distended stomach. A gun barrel was sticking out of the communal slit in the door. His father had shot him in an attempt to kill his wife. His father had shot the animal that was his only son who had made the trip down to the basement door to make his mother happy and to stop her pinching.
        Clive was buried out back with the rest of the animals. His mother cried in her pink dress, now covered in mud and blood. She cried, shovel in hand, because she didn’t know who to invite to the funeral or what to serve. Besides, all her good cutlery got sold when Clive’s father got caught fucking flour. She cried for being alone. She cried because Clive’s father was not present. She cried and the trough sat abandoned in the kitchen, blinking mutely in angelic whites and soft reds and greens.