Any Way the Wind Blows E-Book

Erjon Alimi

• Herausgeber: via tolino media
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Any Way the Wind Blows is a literary novel inspired by Queen’s legendary 1975 song Bohemian Rhapsody. It transforms the song’s operatic rise and fall into the story of Mateo Alvarez, a young man caught between fantasy and reality, guilt and yearning. The novel begins in a dim apartment, where Mateo drifts between fragile hopes and creeping despair. A single violent act—impulsive, irrevocable—shatters his life. From that moment, he must navigate aftermath and guilt, haunted by memories and by the quiet, relentless gaze of his mother. As the city watches, Mateo becomes both fugitive and legend. In surreal visions, he imagines himself on trial before a chorus of mocking voices: clowns, scientists, devils, saints. His dreams blur with the world outside, and every whisper becomes judgment. Yet beneath the storm lies the unshakable pull of family and the faint hope of forgiveness. His escape unravels in fever and panic until the inevitable return. The authorities come not with cruelty but certainty, leading him back to face what he cannot outrun. The final chapters unfold not in spectacle but in silence—trial, sentencing, and the slow recognition that peace lies not in freedom but in acceptance. Through lyrical prose, blending realism with flashes of dreamlike opera, Any Way the Wind Blows captures the essence of Bohemian Rhapsody: tragedy, defiance, absurdity, and resignation. It is a story of consequence and of the fragile moments that still matter even when all else seems lost.

Leseprobe

Erjon Alimi

Any Way the Wind Blows

A novel inspired by Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody (1975). A haunting journey through guilt, fantasy, and reckoning, following Mateo Alvarez as he confronts the aftermath of a crime and the quiet search for meaning when nothing else remains.

First chapter — “Real Life / The Edge”

The night smelled of oil and cut grass, of boiled coffee left to cool in dented cups. Mateo lay on his back on the narrow mattress and watched the plaster cave of the ceiling, letting the shapes there drift into scenes like cheap cinema. Above the wooden shutters a siren wound itself out somewhere down the line and then away; the city exhaled and settled. He couldn’t tell whether it had been real — the late-afternoon laughter that had sounded like permission, or the way he’d thought, for a moment, that the next door neighbor had winked something like pity — or whether his mind had been inventing angels out of every small kindness.

He had a habit of rehearsing exits he would never take. He learned them the way other people learned their lines: by repeating them alone until they were a fact of the mouth. Tonight the lines came soft and without conviction. Open your eyes, he told himself, and when the words meant nothing, he closed them again and let the dark keep him company.

He was poor enough to be invisible to most people and too visible to himself. Poverty had taught him small economies of hope — how to stretch a compliment like bread, how to fold a lie into a day and pretend it fed him. He’d been a porter, a clerk, a helper who disappeared when the tide changed. His hands still smelled faintly of the warehouse where he’d stacked crates—a smell he clung to because it reminded him he’d done something useful once. Usefulness made time obedient. Without it he was float, a paper that might catch on any wind and be gone.

A photograph lay on the crooked bedside table: his mother, formal and stubborn, cheeks luminous under the golden filter of some long-dead camera. Her eyes seemed to follow him when he moved, not in accusation but in the weary, infinite patience of someone who had loved him into being. He ran a finger along the frame until the glass fogged. “Mama,” he said aloud, though she was no longer in the apartment and not even in the city most nights. The syllable felt like trying to catch smoke.

“Tomorrow,” he promised, because promises were the quiet currency of desperation. Tomorrow he would leave. Tomorrow he would get a new job. Tomorrow he would find the courage to tell the truth or the cunning to hide it better. Tomorrow, it always began again.

When he drifted toward sleep the room opened like a mouth and swallowed him. Dreams were crowded with images from his life and others: a silhouetto of a man on a rooftop, a cheap toy rolling down a puddled gutter, lightning frozen like a photograph. He woke with the taste of iron on his tongue and didn’t know whether the rust was in his mouth or in his memory.

At noon he wandered out, because the city required ritual observance: you could not be friendless if you walked the streets at the right hour and let the boulevard witness you. He drifted through the market where the fishmongers measured grief by the hour, past a café where two old women argued over songs as if the songs were currency, and into an alley that smelled of warm bread and unwashed clothes. People moved around him like a current; he tried to slip into it and be carried.

A child kicked a ball too close and it struck his shins. The boy looked up, a coronation of freckles and honest outrage, and for a moment Mateo felt the ancient surge that made a man want to be better than his reflection. He stooped to return the ball and the child’s mother watched him with the wary assessment of mothers. There was always a scale. Nothing costless ever passed a mother’s eyes.

By evening he found himself in a bar that smelled of spilled spirits and older regrets. The piano in the corner coughed a tune out of somebody else’s memory and people leaned into it as if the melody might hold them. He ordered coffee twice and then whiskey once; the second drink burned less. He noticed how actors on the barstools put on a different voice when they told stories and how the stories grew with every telling until finally they were opera: exaggerated, enormous, impossible truths made beautiful by the telling.

That, he thought, was the only meaning to be found: that inside exaggeration you could hide a smaller truth and make it safer. The world was a stage, and if he could learn his part he could survive the encores. He told an empty joke and watched a woman at the far end laugh like it was the first laugh she’d had in a year. It struck him as almost obscene, the way happiness sat so easily on some faces and slipped like oil from others.

---ENDE DER LESEPROBE---