With many hands - The crazy tale
- Monica
- Jun 8, 2023
- 5 min read
Take several heads, put them together, blend them a bit and… see what comes out!
A crazy tale!
That's right.
What follows is nothing more than an experiment resulting from one of my Creative Writing workshops.
Several storytellers come together to give life to a story, but without confronting each other and knowing nothing.Thus, in addition to writing, a great work of introspective creativity comes into play, precisely because you get inside the mind of another and try to understand its meanings.
That is, it is written multiple hands.
The first, the one who lights the fuse, has the responsibility for the departure, but also the freedom to decide the mood of the story.What is written by those who precede, what will it evoke in those who follow?You will have to continue on that wave, trying to interpret thoughts, but with the freedom to add your own twist. One of the difficulties lies in containing one's ego, adapting to the inputs, without too much mixing up what is at stake.
Think: in building a character or a setting, more heads and more hearts immerse themselves in thoughts that are not their own, and try to build from there. There is no lineup, nothing predefined, the story evolves from person to person, from time to time, with elements that add up and keeping it together is certainly not easy.Here's the challenge!The skein has to unroll and, ours, was really tangled. There were many threads, which in the end we had to pull.
Thank you Patrizia, Simona and Federica, crazy companions!
So we present our story to you. Read it with these assumptions and forgive us for the inevitable mismatches.
... and tomorrow will come
Happy reading!
Chapter 1
The bookshop in the woods
Simona
He was crazy.He was a visionary.Whether it was more one or more of the other was never known, but he was certainly a person out of the ordinary.Some say he had the classic tear-jerking childhood story, that stormy past, envied by bored kids, that shapes you into an artist or a schizophrenic. He was self-effacing and sociopathic, many would argue that it was some form of autism, many others simply called him shy.
Halvor Petersen, Fastrup's bookseller, brilliant soul of the town, always wore black.His Libreria nel Bosco had ended up in the most famous furniture magazines. Tourists reached the city only to visit it and buy one of the books from the shelf that he had named "Readings for the bravest". They were books chosen by him and packed with Japanese silk scarves so that one could not understand what they were until after having bought them. Taking possession of one of these books was equivalent to signing a pact with the bookseller, whereby the reading of the book should never be interrupted until the last word.
The library was developed in many small communicating rooms, the walls were all black and white, sometimes outlining chess pieces, sometimes parallel or spiral lines, sometimes depicting twisted and extravagant symbolic drawings, of which only he knew the true meaning.Everything was meticulously crafted by him.
The beautiful shelves were obtained from a skilful inlay work on the trunks of the secular oaks around which the bookcase was built. Others consisted of swings hung from the same trees. Others, fixed to the walls, consisted of beams of seasoned and aged wood, obtained from trees found already fallen in the woods, due to the violent storms that regularly hit this part of Denmark.
The books were not ordered by subject, but by color, and in the color by shade, so there was the room of yellow books, that of blue, pink, green books and so on.
The upper floor, used as a reading room, was instead a single large and bright room, where you could walk among the foliage of the same trees that held up the books downstairs. The walls, however, were interrupted by huge framed glass windows, which looked out on the oak grove that housed the shop. Some openings in the walls had allowed several families of chimney sweep redstarts to build their nests on the branches of the hall. In spring there was always a great coming and going of birds, which came and went from the hunt for the poor green earthworms, which were offered as a meal to the wide-open beaks of the new little birds.
This grove was also owned by Halvor. Here he had set up several braziers next to tables, wrought iron chairs and bird feeders. He was particularly fond of each
type of bird. Each living room thus obtained was isolated from the others by hydrangea bushes.A hundred meters from the library was an artificial pond, with a myriad of species of ducks, flamingos and other aquatic birds.In an article in a local newspaper, the bookshop in the woods was described as the one and only bookshop that gave books back their soul, renewing the energy of the trees and, enhancing it with the vibrations emanating from the drawings on the walls, also the heart of the books began to throb.
The mayor of the city, Michael Madsen, an eccentric type, constantly in competition with the mayors of neighboring municipalities, occasionally loved to spend the money of the rich municipality on sensational innovation works. He never failed to consult Mr. Petersen to ask for some advice, begging him to paint the walls of the town hall or the local market, but he had always refused despite the generous compensation offered. It had been some years now since Halvor had set foot outside the woods of his bookstore, and he certainly wouldn't have done so to make the presumptuous mayor gloat in his art. Since he never left his property, his errands were taken care of by his sister, Mathilde Petersen.
Halvor and Mathilde were twins. When they were a few days old, they were recovered by a nun, Sister Freja, in the wheel of the exhibits of the Missionary Hospital of Hospitality, which had always given shelter to the needy of the city. It was Sister Freja herself who chose the names of the two children, and for the first years of their lives they were raised by her.
Unfortunately it was not welcomed, neither by the citizens, nor by the sisters, that a nun raised children, who moreover still did not have a surname; which is why Freja decided to entrust the little ones to an atheist family who could not have children of their own, the Petersens, the owners of a small bookshop, who tried with difficulty to educate the dumb citizens who populated Farstrup at the time.
image credits: 1. RalpDesing, 2. Prawng, 3. PeterH-Tama66 from Pixabay
Capitolo 10 - Un volo inaspettato Capitolo 11 - Passo dopo passo, verso la verità Capitolo 12 - Gli occhi parlano Capitolo 13 - La promessa di aiuto
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