model village

In a long-winded lie, you tell me of the time you built a bookshelf

out of paper, folding along the edges of the news to create furniture

structurally unsafe for the substantial publications you collect,

the weighty encyclopedias bowing your crisp white 160gsm.

Interested, others listen to the conversation and you run with it,

eager to impress. Your carbon library becomes a model village;

a bank built from bond paper, the primary school tucked beside the library.

I did it just like this, you say, tracing the bakery with its spitball buns.

The cathedral towers over the roads and houses, coloured paper windows and

one slim steeple like a candlewick. You make cars from metallic paper, cows

from the spill of an ink pot. The mayor is sworn in with a gold foil sash, and there’s a

ceremonial ribbon-cutting when the pancake house - crepe, of course - opens.

Your calligraphic flourishes become more involved. Strange landmarks spring up;

hole-punched craters in the quarry, the twisted rope of a tree grown from gravel, witchy.

And then there's the stone like a breezeblock gazebo, carved with runes, which upon

a full moon would emit a glow that frightened the villagers. A paper-doll pickney is found

fluttering on the hillside and rumours of curses rip through the streets.

The townsfolk storm the castle with tiny matchsticks, finding the courtyard blank.

It was starting to get out of hand, you explain. Paranoia licked the town like a flame

to a page. Tensions became strained, and no-one was buying buns from the bakery.

To control your flimsy creation, the town was doused with water. You watched the

sagging supports reduce to pulp and paste, before throwing the whole thing away.

You bask in the glory of a well-told fiction, your captive audience awed by your ability to

sustain the fabrication. A pause. So did you make a bookshelf out of paper or not? one asks,

because it’s easy to forget where the lie actually starts. Set fire to my white ikea shelves

and watch them crackle. Tell everyone who asks that it was just a rumour that unravelled.