The Altar of Petdom
Part 49 of my story! Read the index and content warnings here. Alcohol mentions. This chapter made me angry to write. </3
The heat of July gave way to a wistful August followed by a crisp September. Autumn's grisly fingers crept over the world after that, and in the blink of an eye it was late November, and Joe had been in London for roughly as long as he had known Herman. He had spent all this time waiting for the other shoe to drop where Walter was concerned, and unbeknownst to him, today was going to be the day.
His days started like this: in the wee hours of the morning, he would sit on the velvet pillow in his cage - where Walter had insisted he sleep - and worry about Susie. She only worked one night a week, but even being out at night for that long with uncontrolled seizures was a dangerous thing. Although Joe knew little about epilepsy, even he was well aware that each time she snuck out there was a chance she might never come back.
"I woke up in the back seat of an automobile once." She had told him. "That was when I still dressed as a girl. It's safer to go out as a boy. People think I'm some drunken lout and step right over me."
If all went well, she slipped back in through the window shortly before sunrise, got changed, and went back to bed. She then lay there for exactly thirty minutes until her mother came in to wake her up.
This morning was a morning like any other morning, and so she returned, much to Joe's relief, though when Aggie Wilkins entered the room he dreaded what was about to come next.
There was a hole on the bottom of one of the velvet pillows that Joe had taken great care to keep secret. Any time he heard Aggie's footsteps coming up the stairs he crawled through it and hid inside of the pillow.
"MOOOOOUSIES!" Aggie called into the room. "Can I come play with you?"
Susie shifted uncomfortably in her bed as her mother drew nearer. From the safety of his hiding place inside of the pillow stuffing, Joe listened with dread as Aggie's footsteps neared the mouse cage and pried the door open.
"Hello my little darlings!" Said Aggie. "Oh, aren't you cute? Come here-"
There was scuttling and frantic squeaking as Aggie Wilkins grabbed one of the mice. There was only seconds to spare before the inevitable happened.
"OUCH! You little--"
Joe flinched at the sound of her voice. Curiosity compelled him to crawl closer to the opening in the pillow, and in the morning light he saw her shadow on the wall. She was clutching one of the mice as it squeaked and squirmed.
Susie shot out of the bed at the noise.
"Mother, please! Put her down!" She reached for her mother's wrist, but Aggie slapped her hand away.
The old woman carelessly dropped the mouse back into the cage and then clutched her bleeding hand where the mouse had bit her.
"Rotten things." She sneered. "These mice are supposed to be pets, are they not?"
Susie closed the cage and positioned herself between the mice and her mother.
"It's daytime. They're tired now. Please, let them alone, mother." Susie begged.
Aggie Wilkins crossed her arms and looked down her nose at her.
"I hope your tiny is better behaved. We bought him so you might learn to talk to boys, you know. Ah, where is he...?"
Joe drew back and shrank into the pillow stuffing as the sound of Aggie's heels grew louder. When it stopped, he knew she was looming above the cage in search of him.
"I let him out. He'll come back soon." Susie lied.
"You let him out!?" Her mother exclaimed.
"Yes, mother, he needs his morning exercise." She said quickly.
Aggie let out a pfft sound and grumbled,
"That is no way to treat a pet. He will grow spoiled if you keep doing such a thing."
Joe relaxed when Aggie's footsteps retreated.
"How is courting coming along? Please tell me you’ve found a suitor." Aggie continued.
"No, mother." Said Susie.
Joe crawled closer to the opening in the pillow again and he could see Aggie's back. She was opening up the closet and inspecting it.
"I don't understand why you won't marry that nice doctor. He would take good care of you." Aggie sighed.
"He's far too old for me." Susie argued.
"Oh, please, he's only twenty-nine. A ten-year age difference isn't that large. Why, it would be a good thing for you. He's wealthy. Educated. Established."
Joe saw Susie's shadow on the wall. She was tilting her head the way she did when she was about to say something cheeky.
"You make a good point, mother. Why, if I married him I could start taking Luminal. I might even get it for free." She said.
Aggie gasped theatrically and shut the closet door.
"NO!" She cried. "No, no, no! You know what they say about Luminal! It will damage your fertility. You will never have children!" The old woman fretted.
Joe, who had spent months working at a doctor's office, had never heard of such a thing in his life.
"I’d rather infertility than seizures, but if you insist, I'll just have to marry someone else." Susie said.
Her mother tutted at her as she continued her search of the room.
"How about that Frankie boy, then? He's not rich, but he has two hands. He can work! Handsome, too. Black hair, blue eyes, why, you two would have beautiful children." Said Aggie.
Those words made Joe's stomach turn. He had heard that one before.
"Frankie's hair isn't black, mother," Susie gagged, "he's just dirty."
Aggie Wilkins was nearing the mattress, and Susie hovered nervously over her shoulder as she did so.
"Well if those are your only two options, we'll just have to find you someone better." Aggie said.
She was just about to touch the mattress when the breakfast bell rang, and both Susie and Joe breathed a sigh of relief at the sound. Susie's secret was safe for now.
When Aggie finally left for the dining room, Joe emerged from hiding.
"I don't understand why she doesn't let you have the Luminal." He said.
"Because it's not really about helping me." Said Susie. "Think about it. If they really cared about my safety, they would have put me in a first floor bedroom so I wouldn't have to climb a bunch of stairs to get to breakfast. And if taking my bathroom door really helped, they would have already done it by now."
Joe stepped from the cage into Susie's waiting hands.
"Then what is it really about?" He asked.
"I don't know." She said. "They're scared, I think. Scared of losing control. Why, if I had my way, I would have a nice first floor apartment, with a lady roommate or a neighbour who could check in on me. Maybe someone older who isn't up long into the night. Then I could actually sleep. I'd get lots of rest and take my Luminal and eat right and--and maybe write for the paper. I wouldn't have to worry about-"
"SUUUUUUSIIIIE! HURRY UP! BREAKFAST IS GETTING COLD!"
Aggie's voice rang from downstairs and shook the whole house, causing Susie's hands to flinch. Joe lurched upwards with them.
"Coming, mother!" She shouted.
Susie ventured to the staircase and stopped. She looked down at it as if it was a pool of deep water.
"Whatever the reason is, none of this is doing either of us any good." She sighed.
-
The most demeaning thing Joe had to do in a day was sing the greeting song at breakfast:
"Good morning to you,
Good morning to you,
Good morning dear humans,
Good morning to you."
The marigolds in the window box looked on as he sang, and each day when he was done Walter clapped and opened the gilded cage. Only then did the wait staff serve him breakfast. Joe had expressed dismay at the way the song used the word humans to Walter early on, and the man had assured him that the lyrics were merely a historical vestige from a more unenlightened age in history, and that they said nothing about Joe as a person.
Joe didn't buy it for a second.
"Do you think today will be the day?" Walter asked him.
The giant was reading through the paper as the rest of the family sat down to breakfast.
"Maybe. I mean, it's almost finished." Joe said.
The two were talking about a painting Joe was making for Walter. It was a full-scale production of the thumbnail he had drawn during his first night in London. Joe had been working painstakingly for three months to bring it to life.
London, Ontario didn't have much of an art scene at the moment, but it wasn't stopping Walter Wilkins from attempting to open an art gallery of London's own. Walter was a man of many talents, after all, with a spanning investment portfolio. He owned shares in entertainment companies, movie studios, art dealerships and even pharmaceutical corporations. If it existed, Walter had some sway over it, and so he had set about gathering a bunch of artists together to contribute to the opening of the gallery.
Joe Piccoli was one of those artists.
"Think of how this could benefit miniature-kind!" Walter had said once. "It will help the world to understand that miniatures are not imbeciles. That they are capable as anyone else of art and culture."
Joe was thinking about this very thing as he ate his breakfast and drank his first glass of wine of the day.
He also took this moment to light up his first cigarette.
Joe had only been to one art gallery, and he had not appreciated how the miniature art there had been treated. It had been oversimplified, distorted, and gawked at rather than appreciated for what it was. Joe had only agreed to have his art shown on the condition that an entire gallery wall was dedicated to his most important piece. The rest of the empty space was itself a part of the artwork. It helped suck the viewer into the tiny scene of carnage before them and encourage them to contemplate what was not there, what the world was not showing them, what horrors people were not talking about... or so Joe hoped.
The rest of his art, his various thumbnails and portraits and sketches which he did not consider to be as good, would be displayed on the adjacent wall.
"I have a good feeling today will be the day. Once it's finished, just say the word and we'll host the opening reception." Walter said.
He flipped the paper to the section on stocks.
"Sure thing, Walt." Joe said.
Joe had no idea that by the end of the day he would wish the painting never existed at all.
-
Joe was two wines into the day when he joined Walter downstairs in a room that served exclusively as an art studio. Walter himself wasn't an artist, but as a part-time art dealer, Joe gave him more credit than he would most people. Joe would paint, and meanwhile Walter would sort through the submissions they had received for the gallery.
It was odd, Joe thought, that he was spending much more time with Walter these days than he was Susie. He tried to put it out if his mind and focused instead on painting delicate strands of hair on a nude figure.
"Look at this." Walter said from across the room. "Submitted by Evelyn Tucker, age seventy-one. What do you think of it?"
Joe's ears perked up at the name. He lowered his brush and looked over from where he stood on a side table to see that Walter was holding up one of Ms. Tucker's latest landscape paintings. It was an impressionistic scene of a garden filled with flowers. She had taken great care to highlight where the sunlight hit the petals.
He remembered the first time he saw Ms. Tucker back at Withrow park in Toronto. The painting was achingly beautiful to him and filled him with a sense of homesickness for a place that never was.
"Oh, Walter, I think that one’s -"
"Ugly, isn't it?" Walter cut Joe off before he could finish. "Impressionism. Impasto! Such a dated technique!"
Joe's heart sank as Walter tossed it aside as though it were garbage. Then the giant ventured over to the easel Joe was working on. The artwork itself wasn’t very large in comparison to Walter, but the canvas was taller than Joe was.
"It's not nearly as good as your art. Nothing will ever be as good as your art." Walter said.
Joe gulped and nodded. Something about Walter’s constant stream of compliments left him uneasy. He turned his attention back to the canvas.
He didn't understand what it was that set his art apart from Evie's. Joe had used impasto strokes of his own in many of his paintings. In the painting he was working on, the one of the tinies falling from a burning building, he had taken great care to make the figures look dubiously human in a very visceral way using broad brushstrokes. The only thing that truly set his and Evie's works apart was the fact that Evie's painting was a happy one and Joe's was not.
He lowered his brush and stood back to study his work.
"Have you thought of a title?" Asked Walter.
"I don't think I want one." Joe said.
"Oh, please, it has to have a title! It's a gallery requirement!" Said Walter.
Joe really didn't want the work to have a title. The lack of one made a point in and of itself: there were no words to describe the horrors he had seen during the fire at Tiny Town. Who would he be to debase a painting of the scene with a name?
"Walter, I..."
"Walt." Walter corrected him. “If you must be formal, Uncle Walt is fine. We’re family, after all.”
Joe threw up a little bit in his mouth. It was just the wine, he told himself.
"…right. Walt. I think it's better without one. Could we at least call it Untitled or something?" Joe said.
Walter looked at him in disbelief.
"Untitled!? For a work this incredible! Nonsense. Please, I insist, it must have a title." He protested.
Joe sighed and looked back at the canvas. The entire finished painting was only about the size of a postcard to a giant, but somehow, if it were given a title, it would feel much smaller than that, and much less significant, too.
"July 18, 1926. That's the title." Joe finally said.
"Really?" Walter sounded taken aback.
"Yes, Walt. Really." Joe repeated.
"Right, well, you're the artist I suppose." Walter said dismissively. "I'm sure you have your reasons."
Joe hung his head before the canvas. He wished Walter cared to ask what his reasons were. Walter, ever chipper, went back to the spot where he had been sorting gallery submissions.
"I have just one more thing to ask of you Mr. Piccoli, and I do apologize for it." Walter said.
Nothing could have prepared Joe for what was coming next.
"What is it?" Asked Joe.
Walter reached for a wine bottle nearby and went to pour himself a glass.
"I need you to paint clothes on the tinies." He said.
The statement hit Joe like a shoe to the temple. His blood was beginning to boil. It was useless asking questions, Joe knew this, but it didn't stop him from trying.
"What!? Why!?" He exclaimed, though he could already hazard a guess.
Walter looked up from nosing his wine.
"Because if you have nude figures in your painting, people may get the wrong idea. They may think you're trying to sexualize a tragedy." Walter explained.
Joe screwed up his face in pure bewilderment and looked back at the canvas. Sexualize a tragedy? There was nothing remotely sexual about the burning figures Joe had painted, at least not in his mind. If some other soul out there did have lewd thoughts about it, that was nothing Joe could control. The last thing he wanted to do was change his art for the sake of modesty.
"Walt, there's a point to the nude figures." Joe said. "There's a point to everything in the painting. It's not supposed to be indecent, it's supposed to show that they're vulnerable. Hurt. Scared. You can see the burns on some of them, Walt. It's supposed to be alarming to people."
"Yes, well, that's all well and good." Walter said, and he spoke with such disinterest that he may as well have been filing his nails at the same time. "That doesn't change the fact that there are disgusting people out there who may take away the wrong thing from it, Joe. Why, the respectable sorts of the world may argue that you're romanticizing things that ought not to be romanticized."
Romanticizing. How was it possible for Joe, who had lived through the tragedy himself, to romanticize the deaths of his fellow miniatures that he had seen with his own eyes?
"You're a brilliant artist, Mr. Piccoli." Walter continued. "I'm sure you could make clothed figures look just as good as nude ones. You want it to be shown, don't you?"
Joe had never felt so helpless. Even in the snatchers' den he had felt more hope than this. Yes, Joe did want it to be shown. He desperately wanted to show the world how he felt. To get them to think more about people like him. To get them to respect them as people rather than treat them as things.
It seemed that in order to do that, Joe had no other choice but to allow himself to be treated like a thing in some twisted form of sacrifice.
"Okay, Walt. Whatever you say." Joe sighed.
He picked up his brush and kept painting.
"More wine, Mr. Piccoli?"
-
His fourth wine and second cigarette of the day began around noon, and this was the time of day where Joe was almost able to be at ease. Aggie left for lunch with her friends at this hour, and Walter retreated to his office to do business. This left him alone with Susie, who was regularly dying of boredom, and during this time she devised all sorts of plans to keep the both of them entertained.
Today she was building a walkway for him in her room out of an old shelf, spare scraps of wood, and some glue.
"I remember these from Castle Hill." Joe said.
For the first time in a very long time he felt excited for something. He had secretly wanted some walkways of his own ever since his visit to Castle Hill, but he had felt too foolish to ask Herman for them. He knew what the giant would say: it would be bad for business and tip off the patients that a tiny was present.
Susie ventured to her desk drawer and pulled out some jars of paint.
"What colour should we paint it?" She asked him.
Joe's eye lingered on the purple one. It was a colour Joe hadn't looked at twice in ages while panting, let alone used. He loved it all the same, however, and if he had to have a walkway in any colour he knew it would be that one.
"Purple." He said.
"That one? Really? They say it's for girls now, you know." She said.
Purple to Joe was an everyone colour, and more than that, it was an expression of pure, unadulterated joy. After months of tolerating the Wilkins household Joe needed that joy more desperately than he needed cigarettes, or alcohol, or air.
What a relief it would be to have a purple walkway. To be able to move around the room as he liked, on something in a colour that he liked. It was a trivial thing that giants and other miniatures alike would laugh at him for being happy about, but to Joe, having a walkway of his own was tantamount to saying I’m here, I exist, and I matter.
"Yeah, well, I don't care about that. It'll match the bedsheets." He said.
Susie smiled and started painting away, but the fun was cut short when a door closed downstairs.
"SUUUUUUSIIIIE! GET DOWN HERE FOR A MINUTE! NORA WANTS TO TALK TO YOU!" Aggie hollered.
Susie rolled her eyes.
"More marriage nonsense. Hold on, Joe. I'll be back in a jiffy."
Susie hopped up and turned down the hall, leaving Joe standing alone on the half-painted walkway. He took his own paintbrush from his pocket and painted in her stead, and he was just trying to decide what colour to make the hand rails when a voice from the doorway distracted him.
"What's this?" Asked Walter.
Something about his tone of voice filled Joe with dread. He turned to Walter and tried to keep himself from grimacing.
"It's a walkway. Susie made it for me. Isn't it neat? Now I can get up and down from the cage to the desk whenever I want." The words tumbled out of his mouth as quickly as they possibly could before Walter voiced his anticipated dissent.
Walter stroked his chin and studied the walkway carefully.
"A purple walkway?" He said.
"Yes, Walt. I like it, don't you?" He said swiftly. "It makes life easier, and more comfortable. And the colour makes me happy."
Walter slid his hands into his pockets and sighed.
"Joe..." he began, "...don't you know better than to treat your size like a toy?"
Joe was lost for words.
"I... what?" He said.
"A purple walkway!" Walter stressed. "It's like something out of a dollhouse! Why, if other giants saw you walking around on that, they might get the wrong idea. They might think you are a toy, and think to play with you. Don't you understand? And the nicer giants who wouldn't manhandle you would hardly find such a thing respectable. Why, even other miniatures would find this in poor taste!"
Joe could feel his heartrate rising. He wished he could run away somewhere, anywhere from here.
"I... yes, Mr. Wilkins-"
"Walt."
Joe cleared his throat and tried again.
"Yes, Walt, I know that. I know that some giants might get the wrong idea, but I can't control how they react to me. If they're gonna treat me like a toy, then they'll find some other reason to do it anyways.” He stammered. “And why is it on me to prove myself respectable!? Why can’t people just treat me with respect no matter what I do?"
Walter towered over him and jabbed a finger down at him as if in condemnation.
"It is on you to be respectful." He said with scorn. "In this house, we respect miniatures. Don't insult yourself with these vapid, stupid little things, Joe. You must treat yourself seriously, my dear boy.”
Joe, who was going on twenty-six years old and not at all a boy, looked at his shoes as Walter lectured him.
“There are far more dignified ways to get around.” Walter said. “You could walk on the ground, or talk to the staff, or have Susie carry you. I will not tolerate nonsense like this in my home. We haven't a single dollhouse on the premises, you know."
There it was – my home. So this wasn't really Joe's home. This was yet another giant home that Joe also happened to exist in. Just like that, Walter's entire façade of decency shattered before his very eyes.
It was not really about respecting miniatures, Joe knew, for if Mr. Wilkins truly respected them he would not be speaking to Joe as he was. It was about preserving the comfort of the giants in a world where there existed stringent ideas about how miniatures ought to be and how they ought to behave. Ensnared by their perceptions, Joe was left at an impasse. If he treated his existence as something gravely serious and grim as Mr. Wilkins suggested, then he risked inspiring fear in the giants who considered him a pest and vermin. If he took a lighter approach, in which he humanized himself and surrounded himself with simple joys - like his purple walkway - he risked being considered undignified and disrespectful by the giants who insisted they cared so very much about respecting his dignity.
Finally it dawned on Joe what this was really about: it was really about controlling his behaviour, just as Walter and Aggie controlled Susie’s behaviour. It was about cleaving him down into something more simplistic and more inhuman than he was in order to make him into a twisted spectacle who existed more for the pleasure of the giants than for his own. About forcing him to conform to an image that the giants had decided for him at the cost of his very real and very human right to joy. And that joy, Joe knew, was joy that he had fought hard for with gritted teeth and bloodied knuckles. To allow Mr. Wilkins to rob him of it seemed downright sinful.
"Walt," Joe began, masking his festering irritation, "I'm not trying to argue with you. I don't even want to fight. I just want to live in a way that makes me comfortable. I know what some giants and tinies might say about it, but I'm not those people, I'm me. You said this was my house too when we met. Shouldn't it be my business?"
"Nonsense!" The giant said with his nose in the air. "Miniaturism," he began, using a term he had doubtlessly invented, "is a serious condition! Why, there are real miniatures out there who don't lead such a cushy life as you do and I won't stand for you disrespecting them by treating yourself like some cheap dollhouse accessory!"
Joe couldn't quite parse what Walt meant by real miniatures at first. What was Joe, then, in the eyes of Mr. Wilkins? A fake miniature? Then it dawned on him: Walter was talking about wild tinies. Wild tinies like the very sort Joe had been for a period of over ten years. An experience that he had no way of proving to Walter that he had actually endured. There was nothing more dehumanizing than being robbed of the reality of his own experiences, and as he stood before Walter he felt less human than he had ever felt before.
He looked from Walter to the walkway, and soon found that he couldn't even find the strength to argue. Even if he tried, he knew he wouldn't win. It didn't matter how long Joe had lived in the wild. It didn't matter that he himself had been assaulted, trapped, and tormented by giants and miniatures in equal measure. It didn't even matter that he had arrived at the Wilkins house covered in bruises.
Walter's comfort was what mattered. Walter's superficial righteousness was what mattered. Walter's ability to speak over Joe was what mattered - not Joe's own comfort. He could have any colour of walkway he wanted, as long as it was no walkway at all. He could live any way he liked to, as long as he framed his so-called condition in a way that was palatably miserable to the giants.
If anyone was treating miniaturism like a toy, Joe reasoned, it was Walter Wilkins.
He set the paintbrush down.
"Okay, Walt. I'll do that. I'll walk on the ground or have Susie carry me instead." Joe said.
He didn't even make eye contact with him. He was too angry to.
"Thank you. Take this silly thing down, will you?" Walter spat with disdain, as though Joe had personally insulted him.
As Walter carried on down the hall, all Joe could think was,
I knew it.
As the red flag billowed freely in the wind, he could tell that it was only a matter of time before he ended up trapped again. He could only hope that he finished his magnum opus before it happened.
-
"He won't let you have your own walkway!?" Susie exclaimed.
Joe shook his head and gripped his hands behind his back. He feared if he didn't clutch them together he might punch something.
"He says we're not allowed to have any dollhouse stuff in the house. Out of respect for miniatures... whatever that means." Joe replied.
To his surprise, Susie snorted and then began laughing. She pried the walkway from the wall and set it on the desk.
"Oh, uncle Walt is definitely lying about that. There's a dollhouse up in the attic. I used to play with it every time I visited at Christmas." She said.
"Really!?" He exclaimed.
Joe lowered his head and looked both ways before adding,
"Can you show it to me?"
Curiosity was burning inside of him now. He needed to see it for himself. He needed visual proof that Walter was lying.
"Well... Walt might be in his office, and it's not safe for me to go up there." Said Susie. "But then again, it's not safe for me to go downstairs, either..."
"Don't worry about it." Joe said. "If you show me where the attic is I'll find my own way up."
He hopped onto her hand and soon they were off down the halls.
-
They had been lucky. Walter had stepped out of his office for lunch, and Susie had easily been able to pull the hatch to the attic open. Joe had then clambered up the string on the hatch and swung his way up through the opening.
When Joe arrived in the attic, he was met with something that was a little bit like a scene out of a fairytale. As his footprints traced through the layer of dust on the attic floor a ray of sunlight filled the room. It bathed everything in a mystical light, and right in the center of that circle of light was the largest dollhouse Joe had ever seen. It was blue and white and beautiful, and as he approached it he saw that every shingle on the roof and every paper flower in the window planters had been carefully considered by the creator. It looked more like the work of a miniature than that of a giant.
He gripped the golden doorknob and to his delight the front door opened without resistance. He ventured through bedrooms and kitchens and bathrooms and parlours, all of them perfectly scaled to his size. It was nothing like living among the giants, but nothing like any borrower's den either, or even Tiny Town for that matter. This home, with its glistening wallpaper and fine upholstering, had been painstakingly made with love.
This wasn't just a dollhouse to Joe. This was something else. This was art.
He went through every single room, up every single staircase and down every single hallway, until he reached the back door. Counting them, there were exactly thirty-one rooms in total, and Joe didn’t want to leave a single one of them.
Curiosity eventually drove him outside. Reluctantly he exited the back door and circled the premises, still stricken with wonder, until something out of the corner of his eye stopped him.
It was writing along the foundation that looked almost like graffiti. He stooped down to get a closer look, and what he saw blew his mind.
Designed and built by architect L. Burroton, 1912 read the black paint along the foundation.
Lorraine really had lived here, too. In a dollhouse no less. Seeing her name filled Joe with a sense of renewed hope. She had escaped Walter. So could Susie - so could he.
Frantic knocking on the attic hatch distracted him from his thoughts. He sprinted over to it and climbed into the crack of light where Susie was holding it open.
"Walt's coming back to his office." She whispered.
He leapt into her hand and she pushed the hatch shut. Walter's footsteps echoed through the hallway all the while, and Susie kept low and hid around the corner as he sat back down and placed a call to a business partner.
When she crept past the open doorway Joe wasn’t paying attention at first. Then something Walter said stood out to him.
"I'll need something ghostwritten for me. A speech and an artist's statement. Something along the lines of... the art of Mr. Piccoli draws great attention to the plight of the miniatures, reminding us all of how hopeless their fight for autonomy really is... only worded more tactfully."
Susie stopped and crouched by the radiator just outside of the office door.
"He’s talking about you." She gasped.
Joe held up a hand to shush her and kept listening.
"Yes, make it sound nice and marketable, but keep the underlying message intact. Oh yes, they are imbeciles my good man. Truly incapable of governing themselves. Tiny Town taught us that much! I'm sure the reception tomorrow will do well to convince the public of that. They'll look at that painting and think, so this is what happens when we let the tinies get out of control."
Walter threw back his head and laughed at whatever the ghostwriter said in response. Susie looked down at Joe, her eyes wide with panic.
"Hopefully tomorrow if I can get the little idiot to finish the damn thing. It's taken him months. I don't know what the problem is. Yes... yes, very good. I look forward to receiving it."
Susie darted down the hall to her room at the sound of the receiver falling. Meanwhile Joe sat comatose in her hands and wished he had another wine.
"Did you hear that?" She said to him. "Did you hear what he's going to do?"
Joe stared at his knees.
"Yeah. I heard." He replied.
"Joe, you can't let him do that!" She said. "Why, if I were you, I'd take some black paint and just--throw it all over the canvas, or tear it up or something. Are you listening, Joe?"
He was trying to. There were too many things going on inside of his head at once to focus.
"...if I do that, what do you think he'll do to me?" He finally asked her.
Back inside the relative safety of the doorless bedroom, Susie coaxed Joe into stepping from her hands onto the desk and then sat down on her bed to face him.
"I don't know, Joe. It's scary. You're right. But if we don't do something, he'll just make it worse, won't he?"
"I hope not, Susie." Said Joe. "I really hope not."
-
"So, did you have an artist's statement in mind?" Asked Walter.
By Joe's sixth wine and fourth cigarette of the day, he was back to painting with Walter. His stomach twisted and turned as he thought about what Walter had said earlier. Had Joe not been born a borrower he would have ran his mouth right then and there, but even with six wines in him he knew better than that. His old instincts kicked in, the old leash of self-control pulled tight around his mind, and he shut down instead.
Disdainfully he painted the final stroke on the last clothed figure, then turned to his other works which were still drying.
"I don't know." He lied. "Something about being nice to miniatures and treating 'em like people.”
He carefully examined the fake smile that spread across Walter's face.
"Excellent! See, you remembered what I told you about respect! If you don't know what to say I could provide one for you." Said Walter.
The irony of that statement.
Joe had never understood how deeply he could hate someone before that moment. Still, he bit his tongue until it bled and kept ghostly quiet. He turned to his other works instead and tried to decide if any of them were even worth working on.
There was a re-do of his sad circus elephant, a series of self-portraits in various sizes that became more abstracted the smaller they got, and a painting of a giant - who looked a little too much like Herman for comfort - wading through a swamp at twilight.
None of them inspired him.
"Once it's done being shown in the gallery, I'll send it off to the printing press." Walt added.
Joe hadn’t thought it possible for his face to fall any further, yet somehow it did.
"...printing press?"
He stared ahead, dumbfounded.
"It's a big machine that they use to reproduce art." Walter explained. "I signed you on to a contract with some friends at Canada Post. They want your painting mass produced as a postcard."
When this news hit him the strength drained from every single muscle in Joe's body.
"I... yes, Walt, I know what a printing press is. We borrowers have books and stuff of our own. I--I just... I--I--"
The paint brush slid out of Joe's hand and landed by his feet.
Walter chuckled affectionately.
"You're excited, aren't you? You ought to be! Your art deserves to be enjoyed by the masses, wouldn't you say?"
Joe looked from Walter to the painting, utterly sickened with what was happening.
"No, Walt, I wouldn't say that. I don't want my art put into a machine! I didn't intend for that, I-I mean look here!"
Joe strode to the side of the canvas and hovered a finger over the fine brush strokes on a woman's broken string of pearls.
"A machine's not gonna be able to reproduce that. If you print it out from a machine, you won't even be able to see their faces! And--and that's not even getting into why I painted it in the first place!"
He turned to look up at Walter. The man's eyes were boring into him and they looked empty as a pair of black holes. His eyes started wandering from Walter to the easel to the black paint on his palette. He wanted to destroy the painting right then and there.
He moved for the paint brush.
"THAT'S ENOUGH!" Walter cried.
Joe jumped and stumbled over backwards as Walter thumped his fist on the table. The giant leaned over him like a vulture.
"Do you know how privileged you are to even be able to produce art like this?” Walter asked him. “Not everybody can paint like you, you know. More still cannot afford to come all the way out to the gallery to see the real thing. Don't those people deserve art too? To keep this work locked up in a gallery is to be a proponent of the de-culturing of America and I won't hear it!"
"But-but this is Canada..." Joe stuttered.
"Same difference." Walter snarled, and threw back the last of his wine. "Your work is going into the gallery tomorrow and then it's off to the printmaker's. End of story."
Before Joe could even process what was happening Walter grabbed him and threw him back in the gilded cage, then latched the door. With his heart hammering in terror, all Joe could do as he was marched back upstairs to Susie's room was sit and think.
The machine itself wasn't the problem. Bringing art to the masses wasn't, either. It was the disrespect of Joe's personal wishes that was the issue at hand; the degradation of his personal autonomy. Walter had not asked before agreeing to put Joe's work through a printing press, and in doing so he had robbed him of his right to say no. He had done it quite thoughtlessly, too, for Joe's art wasn't a privilege that society had bestowed upon him, it was the end result of years of hard work and study. Throughout those years he had learned important principles for creating small-scale art that no piece of giant machinery could replicate well. Further, he had put heart and soul and meaning into the painting that could not be fully understood when divorced from its intended context.
Joe’s painting, on a fundamental level, was a work about dehumanization. It showed the consequences of what happened when people were reduced to things. The empty wall with the single, tiny, gruesome painting on it said something in a way that a mass-produced postcard could not. To put it on such a thing at all would be gauche by Joe’s standards. Now even Joe's art had been reduced to a thing, a commodity, something to be bought and sold just as he himself was.
Art had been the only thing that had kept him going in the cold of the cage, and now he had been stripped of even that.
"Light's out, Susie." Said Walt as he hung Joe's cage on the stand by the desk.
Susie looked up from her writing. She didn't break eye contact with Walter as her hands slipped the paper she was writing on underneath a blank sheet.
"Yes, uncle Walt." She said.
Walter flicked out the light and left, and when Susie's eyes fell on Joe he could already sense that she knew something had happened. It was plainly obvious from the way he sat there and shook. He felt like he had nothing. Like he was nothing. The only thing that brought him some semblance of joy had been stripped away from him and twisted into something it ought not to be. His head fell into his hands. How deeply he regretted ever coming to this place or putting pencil to paper. He wished he could run the entire painting out of existence, yet all he had done when he had the chance to was paint clothes on the tinies as Walter had insisted.
"Joe? Are you okay?" She whispered to him.
He looked up at her as she unlatched the cage.
"Walter’s putting my paintings in the gallery tomorrow." Joe said.
It was all Susie needed to know.
“Oh Joe, I’m so sorry.” She said.
She turned towards the mattress.
Joe sighed. He wasn't looking forward to being taken into that gallery tomorrow.
"Susie I... I think you're right. I think we need to destroy that painting." He said. "Walt said we're setting up the reception tomorrow morning. That should be a good time to do it. Could you help me?"
"Of course." She said. "But... what happens if he gets mad at us?"
Joe hadn't thought that far, though by now it was hard to care.
"I don't know." He admitted. "Does it matter at this point? You’re right. He shouldn't be allowed to treat us this way."
Susie ran her fingers over the suit jacket that she held bundled in her arms.
"...I wrote a letter." She said. "To Harry. I think I have enough to pay for a room in Toronto so I'm going to see if he can take us to one. I'm going to sneak out tonight and put it in the mail slot at the post office. You won't be upset, will you? I didn’t tell him you’re here."
Joe, to his surprise, found that he wasn't upset. If anything he was hopeful. He didn't trust Harry, but now he trusted Walter even less. Both giants were devils he knew by this point, and although Joe was notoriously unlucky at betting, he knew where to place his odds.
"Susie, right now I'll take help from a trained monkey." He said.
That got a laugh out of her from inside the bathroom.
"I'm sure he's more capable than that." She assured him.
When she emerged, she folded the letter on the desk into an envelope and scribbled down Harry's address, then opened the window and pulled out the screen. Carefully she tucked the letter into her inside pocket, then sat on the ledge and swung her legs into the outside world.
"Good luck." Joe whispered. "Don't get ca-
Joe had barely uttered the word caught when an angry voice bellowed from the doorway.
"SUUUUUUSAAAAAN GERALDIIIIIINE WILKIIIIIIINS!" Boomed an enraged Aggie, "WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU'RE DOING!?"
With the flick of a switch the room was doused in light.
This kicked off a showdown that rivaled that of any cowboy movie.
Susie glared at her mother.
Susie’s mother glared back at her.
Joe sat caged between them with his heart frozen in terror and his eyes locked with Susie’s.
"Susie. Run." He said.
When Susie met her mother’s gaze, her face didn't even twitch.
"You can go ahead and take away my bathroom door, mother. I won't need it anyways." She said.
Susie had barely finished speaking when Aggie barreled towards her.
"SUSIE, RUN!" Joe shouted.
He leapt against the bars as the floor shook under Aggie's footsteps.
A split second before Aggie could catch her Susie disappeared out the window. Aggie, clad only in a bathrobe and slippers, pounded her fists on the window sill and then turned to Joe.
"You." She snarled. "YOU did this. This is YOUR fault!"
Joe slid down to the cage floor and backed up against the bars as Aggie stomped straight in his direction.
Her hand shot towards the door of the cage, only for another hand to stop it.
"Now now, Aggie, what's all this?" Said Walter. "What's going on?"
He latched the cage shut.
"She's gone! Susie's gone!" Aggie whined. "Call the police! Call the poliiiiiiiice!"
"Easy now, easy. We'll call them right away. I'll take care of everything." Walter patted her on the back, and guided her out of the doorway.
His expression grew blank when he returned to the side of Joe’s cage.
"You. Explain yourself. Right now." He ordered.
Joe rose up and stared the giant down. He didn't make a peep. Seeing this, Walter leaned down to his level and his tone lightened as if he were speaking to a small child.
"Now Joe, you're not in trouble. All you need to do is tell me where Susie went." He said.
Joe watched, disgusted, as Walter pulled something rectangular from his pocket.
"Here, I'll give you some chocolate if you tell me. What do you say?"
Joe would do no such thing, for the snatchers' lair had taught him well. He returned Walter's blank stare and slouched against the bars of the cage with as much attitude as he could muster.
Walter chuckled.
"Fine, then. I can wait. Been a while since I had to use this…"
From his pocket Walter produced a little golden chain with a cuff and some pliers. The second Walter opened the cage to put it on him Joe tried to bolt, but with the speed and precision of a falcon Walter snatched Joe up, then clamped the cuff around his leg. To Joe’s horror he heard a clicking sound, as though it had locked into place. When it was good and tight Walter threw him back inside and wound the chain through the cage bars, then attached it to the ring at the top. To add insult to injury he then produced a little golden lock to go with it, shut the cage door, and locked Joe inside.
The giant watched in delight with a vacant smile on his face as Joe tried to get to the door, only to be stopped by the chain.
"Wouldn't want you to go running off now, would we?" He laughed. "I'll let you out when you're good and ready to talk to me."
With everything said and done, the giant turned his attention back to Aggie, who was storming around in the background and mobilizing every servant in the house to go on the hunt for Susie. Walter switched the light off and that was that.
As Joe sat chained to the gilded cage, he found to his surprise that his dignity was still sitting there with him. It remained in spite of every attempt Walter had made to strip him of it and burned inside him like a candle in a stretch of deep darkness. That was the night when Joe realized that his dignity was not something that could be sacrificed, not really - it was a self-defined subjective truth like justice or passion or love, something that came part and parcel with Joe's very sense of subjectivity.
Tomorrow he would take that dignity and stand tall before the altar of petdom. He would go to that reception. He would cordially greet all the guests hoping to gawk at him like a sideshow curiosity. He would listen to Walter's insulting speech.
Then, when the time was right, he would take that little candle inside him and use it to burn the whole thing down.
All he had to do was find a way to reach those hinges.
Read the next part here (lmao finally)!
