Within Close Range: Tiny Terrors

I save every penny I can to buy things for my very first household: a two-story, six room, pale yellow Colonial with black shutters, rose-filled window boxes, and a square footage of about three.

Placing my tiny, new items in their tiny, proper places, house proud and satisfied, I head downstairs to the laundry room for dusting rags. 

I’m only gone a few minutes.

But as I come around the front facade of my beautiful home – thinking of fake-watering my fake flowers –  I’m shocked and horrified.

The tiny patriarch of my miniature clan is not where I left him, sitting on the living room sofa, with a wee book in his lap. 

Daughter is still at the piano where I left her, but slumped over. 

Arms splayed across the keys.

I find Father directly above, in the four poster bed, pant-less and laying rather indelicately on top of Mother; while in the bathroom, next door, Baby has been stuffed – diapers up – in the porcelain toilet with the long chain pull. 

Fearful, my eyes move to Grandmother’s room next door, slightly disappointed to find nothing – no one.

Maybe Grandmother is safe.

But the thought is fleeting when in the kitchen below, I find her.

Sweet, old, grey-haired Grandmother (with the tiny bun I carefully brush with the tip of my finger), has been shoved in the oven of the cast iron stove – wood burning, mind you, but with the same gruesome effect. 

The soles of her sensible shoes searing into my memory.

But where’s Son? 

He’s not in the fridge, under the sofa, or in the clawfoot tub. 

There’s only one place left… 

Slowly raising the balsa-shingled roof (which Jim was forced to cut and glue as punishment for his last dollhouse infraction) of my pale yellow, Colonial house with black shutters and rose-filled windows boxes, I can’t see him anywhere.

Then I spy the tiny trunk in the corner…