The Archive of Alternate Endings

What is story if not the safe harbor for our most disturbing imaginings?

This is his first encounter with the real, and he needs to meet it gently.

what gets committed to the page, what gets translated into the code of letters and locked in the coffin of a book, becomes truth while everything else dissolves into the abyss of history lost.

this is how the best stories are told, with enough space to make them say several things at once.

Every tale that lasts is real, even if it’s not true.

Instead of permitting the stories to bend and fold with each new teller, the scripts are like coffins that calcify the tales.

Like a fairy tale, she softens the horror so that it can be fully faced.

There is an archive of alternate endings, she tells him, and every one ends differently than this.

In order to record a tale, something must always be lost. Some things must be left unsaid and disguised. The art of storytelling, his brother said, is all about where and how to leave the voids.