As in the previous edition, our exquisite corpse has shown that we have versatile and creative writers who each week give us a wonderful work written in community because talent must be shared. Thanks to each and every one of the Authors, your participation fills us with joy, allowing us to dream together.

Last week we chose Edgar Allan Poe's The Oval Portrait as the starting point for our six-handed story, which was the number of participants who co-created the following piece:

The château into which my valet had ventured to make forcible entrance, rather than permit me, in my desperately wounded condition, to pass a night in the open air, was one of those piles of commingled gloom and grandeur which have so long frowned among the Appennines, not less in fact than in the fancy of Mrs. Radcliffe. To all appearance it had been temporarily and very lately abandoned. We established ourselves in one of the smallest and least sumptuously furnished apartments. It lay in a remote turret of the building. Its decorations were rich, yet tattered and antique. Its walls were hung with tapestry and bedecked with manifold and multiform armorial trophies, together with an unusually great number of very spirited modern paintings in frames of rich golden arabesque. In these paintings, which depended from the walls not only in their main surfaces, but in very many nooks which the bizarre architecture of the château rendered necessary—in these paintings my incipient delirium, perhaps, had caused me to take deep interest; so that I bade Pedro to close the heavy shutters of the room—since it was already night—to light the tongues of a tall candelabrum which stood by the head of my bed, and to throw open far and wide the fringed curtains of black velvet which enveloped the bed itself. I wished all this done that I might resign myself, if not to sleep, at least alternately to the contemplation of these pictures, and the perusal of a small volume which had been found upon the pillow, and which purported to criticise and describe them. ( Edgar Allan Poe )

The shirt. Drenched in sweat. The wet fabric is like a waterboarding tool now. It’s suffocating me, my panic attack is coming again.


The air in this room could drown a person. Like a swamp. It was warm and thick.


I blinked and stared at the plaster overhead. I’m confused. I could almost taste the copper and dust.


Did I fall asleep, or was I awake the whole time?


Only seconds ago, the clock had read ten. Had I lost hours? Or perhaps it was my mind that I'm losing?


What was that viscous, alien stream of thought that had just crawled through my skull? It had been happening with a terrifying frequency lately.


Lost in the gray mist where slumber borders waking, my memory staggered, and I knew not which realm I was standing in.


Something darted across my peripheral vision. I whipped around, but there was nothing—only the paintings.


They seemed to shift in the flickering candlelight. The figures, it looked like they were breathing. Their eyes, they were tracking me. Their expressions, they were mocking me.


Then came the sound.


Thump, thump, thump.


It wasn’t the wind, and it wasn’t Pedro. It rose from beneath my bed. I scrambled to check underneath it—nothing.


Thump, thump, thump.


The sound came again. It was from the floorboards.


It grew louder and louder.


The hammering pain grew inside my own head until I couldn’t tell where my body ended and the room began.


Perhaps I was going mad. Oh, God—my fevered mind, my traitorous, burning body. ( @emmabritt )

With a bang, the door flew open; a blinding light slowly poured in, trying to fill me. I didn’t move; I couldn’t. Were my eyes open or closed? I couldn’t tell, because I couldn’t even manage to blink.


The thump-thump-thump had stopped; instead, I heard a deep sound, like a didgeridoo paired with a bass tuba. This sound unfolded into a chord, a major triad. The castle tower trembled slightly, and I felt myself being lifted up along with it.


At that very moment, Pedro clicked his tongue, and all these sensations vanished like an ominous apparition. I was lying on the bed; the candles hadn’t quite burnt down yet, and I was holding the book I’d been meaning to read. Its pages were blank. There was nothing left in it.


I looked at Pedro and realised to my horror that I was looking out from one of the illustrations. I gazed into the room where I was lying, or had been lying, and smelled the scent of ancient velvet. ( @ty-ty )

I am still unsure whether my eyes are open. I could see everything around. I am seeing the bed, the carpet, the floor, the old painted walls and the candles. The book is still in my hand. I knew that I have written something in it. I felt the need to open the book and make sure what I have written earlier is still there. It was like a needed confirmation to make sure that I am conscious. But, strangely, the idea was still in my head the whole time. I did not open the book. I did not turn between pages. I still feel that those pages were empty. I kept looking around, seeing the furniture again. Trying to find reality with my senses. It felt like some kind of a maze in my head. A trap that I was in. I am still standing in the same place. Thinking about the same question that I had in the beginning, and lost somewhere in-between a dream and reality. ( @ronnie10 )

I tried to recall everything in retrospect. How did I end up in this castle?
Then, it dawned on me:

I had gone to the Northern Apennines to research World War II, and—boom!

I heard a deafening noise. I couldn't see a thing; a cloud of dust filled the air. My leg—I couldn't move my leg. Panic set in, and then Pedro appeared to help me. I feel like he should have just let me die. There’s no point in living without knowing who I am.


He picked up the book again; the pages were no longer blank. He saw the title: The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas by John Boyne.


He opened to the first page and read:

Bruno Makes a Discovery

One afternoon, Bruno came home from school to find a surprise: Maria, the family maid—who usually kept her head down and rarely looked up from the carpet—was in his bedroom, taking all his things out of the wardrobe and packing them into four large wooden crates. She was even packing the belongings he had hidden at the very back of the cabinet—things that belonged to him and no one else.

“What are you doing?” he asked, as politely as he could. Although he wasn't at all pleased to find her rummaging through his things, his mother always reminded him to treat her with respect and not simply imitate the way Father spoke to the maid. “Don't touch that.”

Maria shook her head and pointed toward the staircase behind Bruno, where the boy's mother had just appeared. She was a tall woman with long red hair tied back at the nape of her neck in a sort of hairnet. She was wringing her hands nervously, as if there were something she wished she didn't have to say—or something she wished she didn't have to believe.

“Mother,” Bruno said, “what’s happening?” "Why is Maria rummaging through my things?"

—"She’s packing."

—"Packing?" he repeated, quickly reviewing the past few days, wondering if he had behaved particularly badly or uttered words he was forbidden to say, and if he was being punished by being sent away somewhere. But he found nothing. In fact, he had behaved perfectly well lately and couldn't recall causing any trouble. —"Why?" he asked then. —"What have I done?"

But Mother had already gone up to his bedroom, where Lars, the butler, was gathering >his things. She took a look, sighed, and threw up her hands in frustration before turning back toward the stairs. Just then, >Bruno was coming up; he had no intention of letting the matter drop without an explanation.

—"Mother," he insisted, "what’s going on? Are we moving?"

—"Come with me," she said, pointing toward the large dining room where the Fury had dined the week before. —"We’ll talk downstairs."

Bruno turned and hurried down the stairs, getting ahead of his mother so that he was already waiting in the dining room when she arrived. He >watched her silently for a moment, thinking she had applied her makeup poorly that morning; the edges of her >eyelids were redder than usual—just like his got when he misbehaved, got into a scrape, and ended up crying...

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Heavy footsteps were heard on the stairs, and his heart leapt with fear. Those weren't Pedro's footsteps; who else, besides Pedro, was in the castle?


He folded the corner of the page to mark his place.


In case, for some reason, he couldn't resume reading. Perhaps someone else could continue the opening of this tale or the story from Boyne's book. ( @solperez )

Lost in thought, I play with a strand of my long hair. My long red hair. A searing flash of memory shot through me: I had a son, Bruno! This book… I’d know for sure if I were an author myself. But… It must be true: someone has written about me, about us, about my family. Maria… Yes, there was once a Maria. I was younger, Bruno was still small. She looked after our household. What on earth had happened then...? Damn it. I’m racking my brains, but apart from these fragments, I can’t find a single clue.


There’s a knock at the door. Pedro pokes his head through the crack and asks if I’d like some willow bark tea for my pain; he’s found a supply. He remembers from Maria how to use some natural remedies. From Maria?! Of course. She was his wife! A long time ago…


I politely decline and am just about to let my thoughts wander off again when my gaze falls (and not for the first time) on one of the pictures on the opposite wall. It’s smaller than the others, darker in tone and more abstract than representational: you can make out a human eye. It looks wide open, unnaturally fixed. And it’s striped... ( @weisser-rabe )

The image didn't vanish. The fixed, striped eye in that dark painting seemed to stare right through the dim light of the turret, locking onto mine. My heart hammered against my ribs like a trapped bird. Was it just my fever playing cruel tricks on me, or was the castle itself pulling memories out of my head and painting them on these cursed walls?


I pulled the heavy black velvet blanket up to my chin, my fingers shaking as I tried to shut out the gaze. "Pedro," I called out, my voice raspy and barely louder than a whisper, "are you sure there is no one else in this place with us?" But the only answer that came back was the low, hollow scrape of wood against stone from somewhere deep in the dark corridor outside. What do you think is making that sound down the hall, is Pedro hiding something, or has someone else found their way inside? ( @dannyben39 )

The Game

If you don't know the game: Exquisite Corpse (cadavre exquis) is a surrealist technique from 1925 in which several people build a single work by taking turns, each one seeing only the last fragment before adding their own. No one controls the whole. No one gets to plan the ending. That's the point.


We're bringing that chaos to this community, one paragraph at a time — and yes, we're putting real Steem (and more) behind it.

A note on this edition

To keep the early editions simple — and until we have a better mechanism to play the game as faithfully as possible — we're adjusting the dynamic for now: instead of starting from a blank page, each weekly post will open with an initial paragraph from a public domain work. Participants will write the continuation in the comments.

How it works

🗓️ Starts: every Sunday
🏁 Closes: every Saturday, 23:45 GMT
✍️ How to participate: the post opens with an initial paragraph from a public domain work. Write the next paragraph of the story as a comment on the weekly post
🌐 Language: English. If you don't write in English, translate your paragraph with whatever tool you trust before posting — Google Translate, DeepL, an AI, a bilingual friend, whatever gets the job done
📏 Length: no minimum, no maximum — write what the story needs
🧠 The only real rule: your paragraph has to make sense with what's already been written. Read before you write.
👥 Number of participants: unlimited
⏱️ Final cut: whatever has been published as a comment by Saturday 23:45 GMT is what counts. After that, the story is closed — even mid-sentence, even if it's a disaster. That's the deal.

Rewards

Our dear @weisser-rabe will reward every participant who meets the criteria with a 500 SP delegation for a period of 1 month.


80% of the liquid Steem rewards earned by the weekly post will be split equally among the participants who meet the criteria.


The remaining 20% will go to the Dream-Steem Community, to build a fund of its own for prizes in future games and contests.


At the community owner's discretion, additional prizes from sponsors or supporters who want to back the dynamic may also be added.

About bots, multi-accounts, and AI-generated entries

This is a human game about human unpredictability. It goes without saying that the game is intended for human users only: multi-accounts are not allowed, and neither are responses generated with Artificial Intelligence.


Entries that look bot-generated or AI-generated will be muted by the community owner — unless the participant can justify or demonstrate the legitimacy of their contribution. Consider yourself warned, not accused.

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Inspired by the surrealist Exquisite Corpse technique (1925). Proposed and organized within this community.

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