All visitors to our city wish to see the Oversteegen Miniature Works.
Of course our city has striking skyscrapers, graceful bridges, and beautiful canals, but other great cities also have skyscrapers, bridges, and canals, some of which are lesser, some greater. No other city has the Miniatures District.
There are eighteen miniature workshops in the Miniatures District, not counting Oversteegen’s. Visitors who enter envisioning dollhouses and matchbox cars are at once struck dumb by the landscapes and panoramas, the vignettes and tableaux, the careful engineering of the structures, the veracity of the figures. Often they seem like miniatures themselves, still and speechless in their fascination as they look through the magnifiers and discover how they details unfold, layer upon layer, growing only more convincing the closer you look. And their awe is multiplied when we inform them that every miniature is a perfect mirror of reality.
A street scene, say, created at one of our workshops is not simply an idealized image a street. It is a particular street on a particular day at a particular time, and it must depict every detail of that moment to the utmost accuracy, insofar as the miniaturist is able. Not only are the buildings real buildings, as well as the bus stops, post boxes, and vendors’ stalls, complete with whatever wares they were selling on that day, but the vehicles are the specific cars, bicycles, and trams that were passing at that moment, with the correct license plates, dents, mud, and whatever contents the vehicle was carrying. The pedestrians are real people. If the scene is historical, the miniaturist will look them up in the genealogical archives; if modern, it is standard practice to interview the individuals, not only to determine details of dress, undergarments, the contents of briefcases, and so on that might not be apparent in reference photos, but also to gain insight into the person themselves, their personality, their mood on that day, and what was occupying their mind, so that the centimeter-tall replica might reflect those nuances. On any given day the visitor may watch the miniaturists conducting these interviews, as well as carving pea-sized paving stones, sewing minute clothing, and doing the pinpoint-precise work of assembly.
There is no one employed in the Oversteegen Miniature Works, however. It stands as a museum, still and empty. It has not been an active workshop since Christopher Oversteegen departed.
Visitors to the rest of our city are often surprised that we have no theaters or stadiums of the ordinary scale, no galleries or libraries, save those of historical interest that predate the Miniatures District. But every other art is contained and elevated within the art of miniaturization. The miniature of our Central Library contains all one hundred thousand volumes, each typeset and printed on a microscale press. A visitor may browse the shelves and read any book they choose, word for word, while also being charmed by the skill it took to reproduce them at one-hundredth their true size. Is that not superior to the original in every way?
But let us return to Christopher Oversteegen. Our greatest triumph. Our greatest failure.
He began his training just as the workshops were pioneering the use of micromanipulators in conjunction with the new electron microscope. Miniaturists sang the new tool’s praises as they found that they could now craft the veins in the leaves, the feathers on the birds, the pores in each figure’s skin. Yet the microscope proved to be a double-edged sword. For as it was a tool for examining the miniatures, so also was it a tool for observing the world. It was now possible to scrutinize a scene down to the individual hairs on a fly’s leg. Was it not the duty of the miniaturist to reproduce the scene to that same level of detail?
Such were the discussions among the master miniaturists while Christopher Oversteegen practiced his skills—grinding pigments, warming wax, affixing thousands of blades of grass to the ground one by one.
His first work as a journeyman was an old woman sitting alone at a corner table in a cafe. While not originally intended to be an important part of the scene, she immediately drew attention not only for the carefully rendered textures and creases of her face, the knobby, arthritic hands, the liver spots on her arms, but for the beautiful sensitivity of her body language. The woman, it turned out, had lost her husband the week before. In her slightly bent back, in the faint wetness of her eyes, he conveyed the dawning grief of one just beginning to realize what it means to go through the rest of life alone.
It was a sensation. Though its official title is “49th Street Cafe, 8:02 PM,” the piece is universally known as “Woman Dines Alone.” Any other miniaturist would have considered this a triumphant debut. But Christopher Oversteegen met the praise with frustration. In his mind, the figure was a failure. He sulked in his room for a full month before emerging to present the masters with an audacious proposal.
They were doing everything wrong. They always had been. Crafting figures out of wax and paint. As if such falsehoods could ever depict reality! Did we not cut our stone directly from the foundations of the buildings we depicted? Were houses and shops more to be valued than people? Nonsense. If we wished to depict flesh and bone, flesh and bone we must use.
One can easily imagine the furor caused by such a demand coming from such a callow and unstudied young artisan. But the more thoughtful of the masters took his words into consideration. They concluded that he was right. And so the first fleshworks opened. This required many adaptations. In the first place, fleshworking required different tools and a different kind of expertise. Many surgeons were brought in to assist with bisecting muscle, bone, and dermal tissue from the donors. In the crafting, muscle tissue did not readily adhere to bone, and once shaped, the task of wrapping the figure in skin in such a way that the seams did not show was an arduous one. And then there was the issue of preservation. Fleshed miniatures had to be kept refrigerated just above the freezing point under a nitrogen atmosphere to prevent decomposition, both during the crafting and when on display. Many early vignettes were lost either to rot or to freezing, either of which destroyed the tissue irreparably. But the results were so astonishingly lifelike that all the workshops quickly adopted the technique.
Visitors are often repelled by flesh miniatures, considering them cruel. This, too, is a lack of understanding—all flesh donations are extracted under anesthesia in sanitary conditions. There is no resident of the city who would not be honored to give such a small portion of themselves in exchange for immortality in the form of a miniature. The white bandage on a recently vivisected arm or, occasionally, the missing finger or toe is a badge of honor.
Christopher Oversteegen was at this time still working under the supervision of a master, but his work in this period is nothing short of genius. His figures seem to leap from the scene. “View from the Church Tower, April 12,” “Auto Accident at Third and Main,” “The Diver”—these are the crowning jewels of their workshops, displayed with special pride of place. If you’ve seen them for yourself, then you understand why we still hold him in such high regard, despite all that happened later.
For, when he opened his own workshop, he was still convinced that something was missing.
He proved to be a tight-lipped master. He allowed no visitors in his workshop. Rumors flew wild about what his first scene would be, and they grew to a fever pitch when he announced just two words: “Central Park.” The park is one of the most beautiful spots in the city, and depicting it is the crowning achievement of many miniaturists. What would Christopher Oversteegen’s depiction be like? What portion of the park would he choose? Would it be historical or modern?
On the day of its unveiling, the crowds that gathered to catch a glimpse of it numbered in the hundreds of thousands.
When the piece was unveiled, the crowd fell silent.
The piece was a mockery. Everything was wrong. Trees were taller, shorter, some missing altogether, crowned with abstract scraps of torn paper instead of carefully cut leaves. The grass was lurid lizard-green, the water brightened with dye. The lampposts had been rearranged, and several additional hanging lights corresponded to no real light source at all. And the people! Some were modern, some historical, garments thrown together haphazardly with no regard for accuracy. Their crude faces, splashed with vaguely painted smiles and scowls, resembled no one.
The other masters demanded an explanation. Christopher was defiant. The entirety of the Miniatures District was a useless affectation, he told them, a failed enterprise. The ever-more-refined microscopes and tools only revealed layer upon layer of new falsehoods. There was no veracity to the miniatures and never would be. All he had done was show us this truth.
These were the ravings of a madman. We hoped it would pass and his miniatures would return to their former brilliance. But his works only grew more grotesque. He placed figures far too large and far too small within the same scene. He crafted animals out of wood, trees out of steel. People were misproportioned, their limbs reduced to smooth curves, their faces left blank. He replaced water with gelatinous resins crafted into uncanny waves. Every time, the reception grew more hostile, and every time, he doubled down on his adamance that we simply did not understand. At last the other masters held an emergency meeting and, after hours of heated debate, they issued an ultimatum: He must return to traditional miniatures or he would be stripped of his title and his workshop closed.
The next morning, Christopher Oversteegen was gone. He had taken nothing with him. His workshop was left as it had been the previous day, with his latest piece still unfinished: A self-portrait in miniature, crafted of nothing but hardened paint, its half-finished face already showing the rage and frustration that had consumed him.
Some hoped that he was only taking a holiday and would reappear, his mind restored, and his most stalwart supporters still believe. Months passed, then years. Perhaps it was we who failed him. We could not offer him the tools he needed to capture his vision, leaving him trapped in a world where he could not truly express himself.
The art of miniaturization has advanced since his disappearance. When the 85th Street Bridge collapsed two years ago, it was decided that, instead of building a new bridge, we would instead craft a miniature of the bridge, perfect in every way. When someone wishes to cross, they submit a form specifying their transit time, mode of transportation, outfit, and so on, and a miniature of them or their vehicle is placed on the bridge, to cross at the appointed time.
And now one of our best workshops is preparing an even greater innovation. They are pioneering a vignette that is set in neither past nor present, but at a future time. This vignette, finally, will contain no mistakes, for the people depicted will show up at the appointed time, wearing the correct clothes and carrying out the correct actions.
For we have finally unlocked the secret of Christopher Oversteegen’s strange visions. If they did not depict past or present, must they not depict the future? And can we not create that future, strange as it appears? We are going to attempt it. We are measuring the wooden animals. We are counting the torn-paper leaves.
Christopher Oversteegen may yet return. And when he does, we will at last have built a city worthy of him.
Gwen C. Katz‘s work has appeared in magazines like Cast of Wonders, Glittership, and We’re Here: The Best Queer Speculative Fiction 2020.
