The Staircase - an image and some words.

Each staircase leads to untold stories.

The building is being demolished and I have fiddled with the image, magickly, only a hint remains.

In another place, a wolf padded through the dark forest and climbed up to stand atop a rough cliff. She howled to the moonless cloudy sky. Across a shallow valley, in a comfortable room in a castle, a prince heard the wolf.

He was surprised to understand the wolf, to hear her urgency, to be told of the treasure that waiting impatiently for him in the forest. He understood because the wolf was his mother.

In disguise he left, against the wishes and orders of the queen, who was not his mother but pretended to be so.

This is a story that was told to the children in a room at the top of the staircase, a room that is now a memory, an unbounded space in the air. Only the echoes of the story remain.

The weary tread of the old woman, up from the kitchen and last to bed, beat a melancholy rhythm, the weary steps of those trapped in a history they do not choose nor write. We can only search for traces of resonance and truth, hints, try to tell honest tales to our own children.

The queen in fact was a witch, an evil one, who kept the prince a prisoner in his own castle. She too heard the wolf and understood the challenge to her authority, the danger of her disception being unmasked, and the priceless virtue that the prince was seeking.

From high in the castle she flew through black night, below the clouds and above the forest. The she-wolf turned from the cliff and quickly moved, ghostlike, to meet her son in the valley.

Clues are all that remain, clues of different stories. We can look at pictures and trust what they tell us, but the spells of the manipulators are subtle and the old truths are rapidly disappearing.

Each staircase leads to untold stories.