1.
The story might go a little something like this:
Once there was man who lived in a little town.
As a young man, he had left that very town,
the town of his birth, because there were
no stories to tell, no songs to sing, and
everyone had fallen into a kind of
forgetful fog. This bothered him –
he saw the lives they weren't living
and the only thing that bothered him more
was the the thought that if he stayed,
the forgetful fog would overtake him, too.
But that had been many, many years ago,
and eventually he felt like he had done
what he had set out to do, traveled and seen
all he wanted to see, learned stories and songs
that he had wanted to learn from places
no one had ever heard of, and he decided
to go home.
But by the time he returned,
the stories he had gone off to collect
were no longer needed and he had no one
who would sit and listen.
No one except for one small childe,
a little girl named Matilde
who was very precocious
and who could be seen
talking and laughing to herself
in her mother's flower garden. She
was seven years old. Her favorite color
was purple.