A sixteen-year-old sharpshooter, swallowed whole by a myth he never corrected, crosses an ocean to be nobody — and arrives in Palermo to find his own description already nailed to a wall.
THE STORY. Holliday Basin is thirty painted storefronts propped up on sticks, and the best thing it ever built was a lie about a boy. Wyatt Westward is five foot four, wears his mother's coat and his father's hat, and lets the story grow. When it collects a federal warrant, his mother sends him east. The lie gets to Sicily first — it had been printed by the ton and shipped as freight.
THE ARGUMENT. The antagonist has no author. The town meant nothing by it. The thief meant nothing by it. The woman in the doorway didn't know there was a person. Kindness is the mechanism of harm.
THE FORM. Two animation registers, and the plot is a boy escaping one of them. Nothing bleeds — paint chips. No cue resolves until minute 121.
WHAT'S BUILT. The complete screenplay. The theatrical one-sheet. The mark family. Full character sheets across both continents.
WHAT FOLLOWS. Not a sequel. One card falls out of a finished game and lands in dry grass — and that's The Knave of Doors.
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