Day 370

Ornamental gardens are beautiful.
The plethora of plants and streams that run between them seem like miniature landscapes.
One such place was at my local art centre, an eight by ten foot piece.

It was meant to be a scaled down version of a nearby field but... embellished.
The river that ran through it never existed and was pitch black for some reason.
I swear I saw fish in it, or at least things that looked like fish.

The miniature figures were said to act out scenes as well.
Apparently they were motorised but that still didn't explain their facial expressions.
It didn't explain how they would "kill" each other either.

So many times they've been seen tearing others to shreds and yet more appear in their place.
The peace of the diorama is quite often accompanied by their tiny bodies in states of decay.
Minute corpses floating down the river, choking others and worse.

Nobody wants to explain to their children why the tiny people stopped moving.
They even bleed.
Last time I went they'd formed a mob around the designated "mayor" figure.

He was chased into the tall lavender "forest" and I swear I heard quiet screams.
By the time I'd looked around the rest of the centre and come back he was dead.
Strung up on one of the outer plants.

A friend who worked there said that the staff were at their wits end trying to stop this.
The figures couldn't be reasoned with and couldn't be removed as they somehow just came back.
He said things were getting dire for the others there.

One woke up to a dozen or so of the people on his night stand.
They'd picked up a kitchen knife and were aiming it at him.
He grabbed them, receiving multiple small wounds, and tossed them into his bin.

The next day he found them back in the diorama following him in that same cluster as he moved
about the room.
He quit soon after and nobody's heard from him since.