Pinocchio

A lone carpenter, half-poet, half-alchemist, carves a marionette from storm-felled pine; the wood still hums with sap when the first silver of dawn slips through the attic shutters. One blink later, the puppet—jointed like a cathedral gargoyle—draws breath, and the Tuscan village becomes a carnival of terrors: schoolmaster’s canes turn to sabers, circus spotlights burn like Inquisition pyres, a fox in a topper sells boys to salt-mines across the sea. Pinocchio is hanged from a great oak whose roots sip the blood of forgotten bandits, survives the creaking noose, staggers into a snowfall that tastes of iron, is swallowed by a leviathan that once devoured saints, escapes by lantern-light, rides a smoking howitzer-shell across constellations while gunpowder sparks sketch delirious halos around the moon. Each episode is a woodcut etched with acid: colonial rifles crack, Indigenous drums answer, a whale’s belly glimmers like a cathedral nave, and every time the puppet lies, his nose does not merely lengthen—it blossoms into a profane branch heavy with mocking leaves. When at last he crawls back to the workshop, flesh-and-blood tears salt the shavings; the old carpenter, eyes milky as candle smoke, recognizes the splinters of his own nightmares. Crickets hush; the puppet’s heart, a knot of pine resin, beats once—twice—then steadies into the rhythm of a human pulse.