Two Truths and a Lie
By Sarah Pinsker, first published in Tor.com
At a funeral in her hometown, a woman promises to help her childhood friend clean out his dead brother’s house. In the process, she uncovers unnerving truths about her childhood she had forgotten.
Author
Published in
Year
Words
Availability
Plot Summary
After Dennis, a brother of her childhood friend, Marco, passes away, Stella promises Marco at the funeral that she’ll help clean out the family home. The home has been filled to the brim with junk, with treasures like Star Wars collector’s items buried underneath. Stella is a pathological liar and as she recounts her childhood memories she tests them against Marco’s own for legitimacy. When Marco and Stella find an old TV set and VHS tapes, they rewatch the Uncle Bob show, a program from their childhood, and witness a young Dennis playing well with other children — a surprising visual given his antisocial tendencies which began in his teenage years. The pair work and listen as Uncle Bob recounts a creepy story in first person about a child who gets buried alive and returns to their parents without their body.
After spending 9 hours cleaning the house, Stella goes back to her parents’ home, with no plans of returning to help the next day. At the house, she talks to her mother about the Uncle Bob show and her mother reveals that she was a part of the show’s filming, although Stella has no memory of being on the show. In fact, Stella learns that every kid in their town was a part of the show, except for Marco. An online search turns up no information on the tv show and so Stella visits the film studio to find the tapes. After watching a couple episodes, Stella realizes that Uncle Bob is predicting the twisted futures of each child in the room. She goes back to the house and shows Marco what she found and in return Marco shows her Dennis’ shrine to Uncle Bob in his bedroom. She takes Dennis' notebooks and his tape of his story from the show home and when she watches it, Uncle Bob supposedly predicts Dennis’ future, except the young Dennis interrupts the show’s host and the ending is left untold. Instead, Dennis went on to defy this prediction in every way, ending in his death.
On her way out of town, Stella stops at the fan mail address for The Uncle Bob Show and finds an abandoned stone cottage with a “For Sale” sign out front. At the back of the house, she finds the hill Uncle Bob talked about constantly in his show and recalled how he said he had been buried alive and shoveled himself back out again. She crosschecks the story with Dennis’ notebook and walks on to the hill. As she does, she thinks about her false life and grows confused at who she is, her ankles sinking into the dirt. She promises to pull herself out of her false life and live truly.