Two Truths and a Lie: A Tor.com Original

By Sarah Pinsker

A dark fantasy Tor.com Original short story from award-winning author Sarah Pinsker, "Two Truths and a Lie"

Stella thought she’d made up a lie on the spot, asking her childhood friend if he remembered the strange public broadcast TV show with the unsettling host she and all the neighborhood kids appeared on years ago. But he does remember. And so does her mom. So why doesn’t Stella? The more she investigates the show and the grip it has on her hometown, the eerier the mystery grows.

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Jun 17, 2020
• ISBN: 9781250759733

Sarah Pinsker

Sarah Pinsker's A Song for a New Day won the 2019 Nebula Award for Best Novel, and her collection Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea won the Philip K. Dick Award. Her short fiction has appeared in Asimov's, F&SF, and numerous other magazines, anthologies, and translation markets. She is also a singer-songwriter who has toured behind three albums on various independent labels. She lives with her wife and a very energetic terrier in Baltimore, Maryland. She can be found at sarahpinsker.com and twitter.com/sarahpinsker.

Book preview

In his last years, Marco’s older brother Denny had become one of those people whose possessions swallowed them entirely. The kind they made documentaries about, the kind people staged interventions for, the kind people made excuses not to visit, and who stopped going out, and who were spoken of in sighs and silences. Those were the things Stella thought about after Denny died, and those were the reasons why, after eyeing the four other people at the funeral, she offered to help Marco clean out the house.

Are you sure? Marco asked. You barely even knew him. It’s been thirty years since you saw him last.

Marco’s husband, Justin, elbowed Marco in the ribs. Take her up on it. I’ve got to get home tomorrow and you could use help.

I don’t mind. Denny was nice to me, Stella said, and then added, But I’d be doing it to help you.

The first part was a lie, the second part true. Denny had been the weird older brother who was always there when their friends hung out at Marco’s back in high school, always lurking with a notebook and a furtive expression. She remembered Marco going out of his way to try to include Denny, Marco’s admiration wrapped in disappointment, his slow slide into embarrassment.

She and Marco had been good friends then, but she hadn’t kept up with anyone from high school. She had no excuse; social media could reconnect just about anyone at any time. She wasn’t sure what it said about her or them that nobody had tried to communicate.

On the first night of her visit with her parents, her mother had said, Your friend Marco’s brother died this week, and Stella had suddenly been overwhelmed with remorse for having let that particular friendship lapse. Even more so when she read the obituary her mother had clipped, and she realized Marco’s parents had died a few years before. That was why she went to the funeral and that was why she volunteered. I’d like to help, she said.

Two days later, she arrived at the house wearing clothes from a bag her mother had never gotten around to donating: jeans decades out of style and dappled with paint, treadworn gym shoes, and a baggy, age-stretched T-shirt from the Tim Burton Batman. She wasn’t self-conscious about the clothes—they made sense for deep cleaning—but there was something surreal about the combination of these particular clothes and this particular door.

I can’t believe you still have that T-shirt, Marco said when he stepped out onto the stoop. "Mine disintegrated. Do you remember we all skipped school to go to the first