What shall I do with you? I have been beavering away with my storywalks over the last month or so and have three new tales which are yet to be christened for public consumption, (it won't be too long, but more of that on another blog.) But the most recent, has yet to be linked to place.
I must explain to those who are less familiar with my story walks, that the place where the tale is located is an integral part of the writing process. My most recent, and currently unavailable stories are 'The Twins Tale' at Nutcombe Bottom (fabulous name of a place if every there was one), and 'The Green Thief' at Holford, on the north side of the Quantock hills. Both tales respond to place in some way, and all though I can extract these stories and put them in a book, somehow that's not what the Storywalks were ever about.
When I walk in a place, the story evolves, the pacing changes, the interactions of reader and walker become one, and this tale 'Timber Toes' has just started and I need a home to place it, a bed for it to lie in.
So the question is dear reader, where would you like this tale to be placed?
Timber Toes
There once lived a young boy and his mother in a broken thatch hut which was little more than a bramble covered lean to. But it was dry and they kept each other warm through the winter months and shared the work the best they could. When she had been a child she would run bare foot through the forest and some how it had lodged there for now in later years her feet were turning to wood.
Every night he would massage them and rub life back into them, but they seemed to get harder and stiffer as the days progressed, until she could hardly leave the cottage at all. The boy was a different matter though for he could catch sounds in his hands, and though this seemed like magic or impossible it was neither.
He would bring her the lace work which she was so poorly paid for, and run errands about the home to keep their ship from sinking, and when she was bed ridden he would go out into the forest and catch the sounds of birds singing, or the trickle of the stream for her. He could only catch one sound at a time, and would run, and run, and run with clasped hands until he came home to share it with her. Her eyes would twinkle, and her toes twitch at these fresh sounds from the forest, and so he called her timber toes.
The boys father had been lost to a war which had forgotten it's reason for ever having started. He believed he had a heart made of feathers, but this was not true for one frosty morning as snow flakes landed on his broken body, he looked to see and there was nothing but flesh, bones and blood. The low paper sky and the trees about him felt like ghost parts, and as the sound of the battle rolled away over the ridge he remembered running barefoot with his wife in a forest just like this one. He wished that he had had a chance for his toes to turn to timber too but that was not to be.
