Tag Archives: model village

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.
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