Two Truths and a Lie by Sarah Pinsker

Author:Sarah Pinsker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

* * *

She had just walked into her parents’ house when Marco called. “Can you come back? There’s something I need to show you.”

She headed out to Denny’s house. She paused on the step, realizing she was in nicer clothes this time. Hopefully she wouldn’t be there long.

“Hey,” she said when Marco answered the door. Even though she braced for the odor, it hit her hard.

He waved her in, talking as he navigated the narrow path he’d cleared up the stairs. “I thought I’d work on Denny’s bedroom today, and, well…”

He held out an arm in the universal gesture of “go ahead,” so she entered. The room had precarious ceiling-high stacks on every surface, including the floor and bed, piles everywhere except a path to an open walk-in closet. She stepped forward.

“What is that?”

“The word I came up with was ‘shrine,’ but I don’t think that’s right.”

It was the sparest space in the house. She’d expected a dowel crammed end to end with clothes, straining under the weight, but the closet was empty except for—“shrine” was indeed the wrong word. This wasn’t worship.

The most eye-catching piece, the thing she saw first, was a hand-painted Uncle Bob doll propped in the back corner. It looked like it had been someone else first—Vincent Price, maybe. Next to it stood a bobblehead and an action figure, both mutated from other characters, and one made of clay and plant matter, seemingly from scratch. Beside those, a black leather notebook, a pile of VHS tapes, and a single DVD. Tacked to the wall behind them, portraits of Uncle Bob in paint, in colored pencil, macaroni, photo collage, in, oh god, was that cat hair? And beside those, stills from the show printed on copier paper: Uncle Bob telling a story; Uncle Bob staring straight into the camera, an assortment of children. Her own still was toward the bottom right. Marco wasn’t in any of them.

“That’s the thing that guts me.”

Stella turned, expecting to see Marco pointing to the art or the dolls, but she’d been too busy looking at those to notice the filthy pillow and blanket in the opposite corner. “He slept here?”

“It’s the only place he could have.” Marco’s voice was strangled, like he was trying not to cry.

She didn’t know what to say to make him feel better about his brother having lived liked this. She picked up the notebook and paged through it. Each page had a name block-printed on top, then a dense scrawl in black, then, in a different pen, something else. Not impossible to read, but difficult, writing crammed into every available inch, no space between words even. She remembered this notebook; it was the one teenage Denny always had on him.

“Take it,” Marco said. “Take whatever you want. I can’t do this anymore. I’m going home.”

She took the notebook and the DVD, and squeezed Marco’s arm, unsure whether he would want or accept a hug.

Her parents were out when she got back to their house, so she slipped the DVD into their machine.

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