Grim

Church of the poisoned mushroom: We entered the woodland passing the corpse of Red Riding Hood. We bowed, touched temples, paid respects. Somebody should have done the right thing but that wouldn't be us. You see we had "other" business. The scent of wolf was everywhere and the creatures of the woodland were sharing testimony and praying for acts of revenge. Of course no god in his right mind would listen to their drivel so it was down to us, the Grimm Brothers to get to the bottom.

She had a reputation but so does everybody, otherwise you must be invisible. Have you never been alive? And wolves, who gives a tinker's cuss if they prosper or die. Barking moon howlers. Turns out there's quite a few unburied bodies around here, nobody likes that. Messy. Makes the flesh creep, things become uncomfortable, you see red. In the end we chose to play down the trashy side of things, the scandal and the appetites. Well, it's a good little tale, a misadventure and better left to the imagination than told straight.

In the end everything dies but remains alive only as a story or a time line. The edges blur quickly between reality and fantasy and as for facts, well they matter even less. Those who saw it with their own eyes tend to be the least reliable, the ones who spin and exaggerate and put their markers down. It's about having skin in the game and we had none, we're just passing through, taking notes, smiling politely at the fat woman, the old man, the nervous children, the crone, the princess and the pedlar as they tell their version fruit,; robbery, murder, warts, sexual violence and all. Common babble but bankable enough.

Interviews and notation, asking the tough questions, getting the wrong answers but not caring. Swearing and saying thank you, avoiding the pay off and the reckoning and don't promise any credit. There's no royalties in it, even if you say you're the King of this dilapidated kingdom and all bow down. We won't care. We've to go back home, spin chairs in the office and work this up into something understandable and entertaining over coffee; your life, your experience, your pain maybe but our added fiction, hard graft and salesmanship make it travel and last.