The crowd at the storytelling festival watched Janet’s every move now, rapt in a way that only people fully emotionally invested in a story could be. Janet knew this story had it all: danger, romance, betrayal, a monster, and a sense of inevitable reckoning. It was why she’d chosen to tell it, and she wasn’t surprised by the response.
She’d been noodling on her guitar throughout, and now she made eye contact with the sound man, who raised the volume gradually until it was loud enough to provide real accompaniment. She sang:
And the winter went by with its snow and ice
Until the spring spread its petals anew
And everyone with the truth in their blood
Knew something was coming, and soon.
I was just a girl, and I could only watch
I didn’t know the threads in the skein
But as they drew tight to form the fabric of their lives,
I knew the truth would pour like rain.
Because it doesn’t matter how well you hide it
Or how many secrets your heart has beside it
The truth has a way of coming out on its own
Even when you stop, or try to postpone
Because only the fire can burn off the sh—
She stopped in mid-word, and everyone laughed, releasing some of the tension that had been building. Some, Janet thought smugly, but not all. Just like she planned.
“Almost forgot we had some kids here,” she said, and the sound man took her cue and eased the guitar’s volume back down.
Janet looked out at the crowd. She blinked sweat from her eyes and tried to see if any of the Tufa had driven over to catch the show. It wouldn’t be like them, she knew, but then again, you could never tell. There were a few heads of jet-black hair, but none seemed to connect to her the way another Tufa would. This was a totally mundane audience, and she was giving them tons of Tufa secrets in such a way that they’d never, ever believe them.
Of course, in her head, the story unfolded as it had all those years ago, with the real people and their real names. Luckily she was good enough, and practiced enough, to redact on the fly.
“So, once again, we have to jump ahead a couple of months. Things progressed as they do: one girl grew more pregnant, another girl continued to plug away at both her music and her senior year of high school, the game warden and the paramedic found a lot of new ways to do the oldest thing in the world—”
She paused for knowing laughter.
“And the girl with the secrets in her head waited for the old luthier to finish his job. Some things can’t be rushed, and a guy like that puts more of himself into his work than most of us do. Every curve of the wood re-created a woman he’d known as a young man. Every notch in the bridge was perfectly cut to hold his own dreams. It’s a slow way to work, and to a lot of people, a ridiculous one. After all, most luthiers can bang out a banjo in a week. But for him, there was only one way, and it took as long as it took.
“And so all these stories began to draw together, on one day in the late spring. It began with the pregnant girl giving her troubled fiancé an ultimatum.”