In the City of Bridges, an old woman arrives with too little money and one impossible request. What she asks for next changes the price of everything.
Once upon a time, a girl lived alone in the City of Bridges.
One day, an elderly woman knocked on her door. She was short and stooped, wearing a brown coat and a faded scarf over her white hair. She looked like a grandmother who should have been feeding pigeons in a park, not standing at the door of a woman who cut down trees for money.
She asked,
“Are you the woman who cuts down trees for money?”
“Who told you that?”
The old woman gave her a name, the girl recognized, so she let her in.
The woman lowered herself with difficulty onto the metal chair, then took several folded and crumpled banknotes from her handbag and placed them on the table.
“What is this?”
“I want you to cut down a tree. Its roots killed my son.”
She told her where the tree had taken root.
The girl knew it.
It was enormous, old, and heavy with branches, growing in gardens most people could never reach. Whenever someone approached it with an axe, it appeared behind another wall. If they came closer, it crossed a city. Then a country. Then a bridge no one knew the end of.
The girl looked at the money.
“This is not enough to pay for one swing of the axe. And I usually use three swings.”
The old woman gathered the money.
“Is it enough to buy an axe from you?”
“Axes are cheap. Yes.”
“Then sell me one, I will do the three swings.”
The old woman’s calmness disturbed the girl more than anger would have.
The woman was prepared to carry the axe herself.
The girl sat beside her and said,
“Cook me a good plate of Svickova, and I’ll accept that as payment.”
The old woman narrowed her eyes.
“You would cut it down for one meal?”
“It has to be excellent.”
The old woman returned the money to her handbag and stood, leaning on her cane.
“Where is your kitchen?”
As deafness, illness, and demonic forces close in around him, Ludwig van Beethoven must summon his faith and genius to complete the Missa Solemnis—a sacred masterpiece he believes could bring divine light into a darkening world.
I Made My Boy Out of Poetry is a powerful literary vision of rare scope, beauty and emotional intensity composed of stories and poems that flow in and out of each other like the most lucid and articulate of dreams. These are portraits and studies of
Once upon a time, a girl lived alone in the City of Bridges.
