This Friday, I feature a website so simple in its genius, it’s simply genius. Leave A Story, founded by a Swedish graphic designer, is exactly that: You leave a story, the artist draws to it. So, when I handed over “Fly” a few weeks ago, I was soon gifted with an imaginative, whimsical, spot-on rendering of this tiny tale come to graphic life. Curious? Keep reading …
FLY
To be different in the town of Redistuo was to be an outsider, abolished from any place inside the shared opinion of the people and declared unworthy to belong. John was such a shunned man, though his name be plain enough and ambition to contradict small. It was the idea of what he wanted to do that cast him out toward the fraying parts of Redistuo, to a hill billowing above jagged hemlock and pine.
For years, John was one of them, eating their chestnut soup and drinking their mulled wine. He laughed when something was said to be funny and cried when told to be sad. But with every smile or mendacious tear, a part of John disappeared to a place long forbidden, until so much of him existed there it would be impossible to return again. Here he learned to breathe in and out the air of the unknown, as if this was the only way to survive. And maybe it was.
“What do you want?” Five sets of spectacled eyes had asked, squinting behind glares of glass while John fidgeted in a sun-dipped stool, a half-child of shadow and light sitting beneath the largest window of Redistuo Town Hall. Even in his yet-rooted mind he knew they inquired not because they cared but because they needed to gauge how much of a danger he might turn out to be.
“I want to fly,” he’d said – the worst answer of them all – and so was sent to a hill far away.
John didn’t dare visit the flat, pineless town of Redistuo until three years later, on the eleventh hour of the twentieth day in March, which presented itself as clearer and warmer than most. Never mind that it was the last day in winter or that a certain almost-spring sharpness had settled on the land; Redistuo was alive with Friday shoppers and John needed a net.
He walked along a long and narrow stretch of cobblestone named Vintner Alley, staying close to the shade of awninged storefronts and readjusting the hood around his head to remain undetectably alone.
Continue reading here.
