It’s the little details that shows the maker had given up caring.
Kyle Hostage hated his wife, and spent every waking hour in his shed making a ‘model village’. But in an act of painstaking passive-aggressive carpentry, Mr Hostage made sure it was a disappointing, shit village; a simile for his empty life and hollow marriage.
“I could have had an affair, I suppose”, Mr Hostage told us last year. “But you know where you are with tiny, wooden people, even if their faces are lopsided and painted on the wrong side of their heads. Some of them have two faces, actually”, Hostage said. “Especially the small woman I put in our bedroom. I hewed that one from dogwood.”
Opposite, Hostage carved a sad man in a shed, holding binoculars made from tootpaste caps. And on his tiny face he placed miniscule tears, which he’d painstakingly wittled from real ones.The bite marks in the head tell their own story.
“The model village is better than the real one in some ways”, he lied. “You could burn them in a fire without a complex police investigation examining the CCTV footage from the nearest petrol station that I walked to and bought the fuel with cash, to avoid the number plate recognition system. Not that I’ve given it much thought.”
Each model was painted grey, and weathered with coal dust and despair. “I like to swap out 18 different little men in that bedroom over there, and then point the small-me’s eye glasses at it”, he’d revealed.
“Or smash all the wonky windows with tiny bottles or chair legs. It’s very cathartic. Look! This candlestick holder is an exact replica of the one we have in our lounge. Although the real one isn’t heavily dented and matted with hair and blood.”
An Austin A35 on the drive of one house has been carefully modelled on their family car, although in real life, the brakelines haven’t been cut. “That would be dangerous”, Mr Hostage pointed out. “It might cause the car to career into the real shed where that small, awful one I made sits. The one filled with stock cubes with ‘TNT’ scratched on the side.”
Now that Mr Hostage has sadly passed to that great lathe in the sky, Mrs Hostage is hoping to restore the village with the help of her string of lovers. “They’re all good with their hands”, she purred. “I told them, ‘it just needs a bit of touching up’. And a grave adding to the model churchyard, a nice sturdy concrete one so no-one can dig it up. There’s a bitter little man in there with unrealistic optics, and they might test the wood for arsenic.”