Honest Lies 

Kendra Busby

There’s a moment in every late night story swapping gathering where you find that it’s time to unleash The Story.  It’s the one you’ve told to just about everyone—friends, friends of friends, friends of friends of friends, and at certain point strangers—simply because it is The Story, the one that defined your youth or makes someone laugh without fail or perhaps even, for selfish reasons, the one you tell because it makes you look like a fantastic story-teller. 

The Story I always tell is not one that begins with a hook or a clever line, but rather the sentence, “Okay, so one day it rained a lot.” Sad, perhaps, for someone who wants to be a writer themselves.  But without fail, I find myself continuing with the same words at the same pace each and every time.

Okay, so one day it rained a lot. My sister and I were in elementary school and it rained so much that we feared the all-mighty and sacred recess would be cancelled.  Of course it wasn’t—as I can imagine looking back on it now, a teacher of 8 year-olds would want nothing more than to get rid of them for a good hour.  So off we went, the lot of us, running into a giant field of wet grass covered in puddles.

To the left, a puddle.
To the right, a puddle.
Puddle.
Puddle.
So many puddles. 

And we were defeated. There was nothing to do except look at the field we had come to love and only imagine what it would be like to play on it in better weather.  It was wet and muddy and the air was thick and muggy and the overall consensus of the 8 year-old student body was to turn around and go back inside.

But just like that everything changed, because as I turned around to walk inside I felt a splash of lukewarm muddy water hit the bottom of my legs.  It was horrifying, looking down at the gunk that covered my calves. What would do this? Who would do this? And there she stood, laughing so proudly at her work of art, my sister, standing in the puddle she had so happily jumped into for the purpose of splashing me.

I wouldn’t even call it laughing, more like cackling. She ran across the field, puddle to puddle to puddle, splashing everyone in sight.  The splashing, the cackling, the look on her face, the pride.  I couldn’t stand it. No one could.  We all just watched in disgust as she jumped from one to the other, kicking up dirt and sloshing around in the mud.  Who knows how much time had passed before she finally made her way over to the last puddle, making sure that she didn’t miss her target on her final go-round.

And she didn’t miss.  No, she hit that puddle dead on, her feet landing right in the middle.  The thing was that this puddle was, in fact, not a puddle.  It was hole, one that had perfectly camouflaged itself among the others, completely submerged in that same dark brown muddy water.  We all looked on as she sank into the abyss, mud covering her completely up to her rib cage.  It was like watching karmic forces finish a job right before our eyes. And we all died laughing. I think I’ll probably always remember that as the day my sister got what she deserved.  Or maybe instead I’ll just remember it as the day she jumped into a giant, mud-filled hole.

So there you have it, The Story, the same one I tell every single chance I get.  I was telling it most recently to my cousins over a family vacation and my sister sat down to listen along with them.  I went over it in the same manner, again with the wording and the pacing and the

Puddle.
Puddle.
So many puddles.

My cousins laughed, as did my sister, but at the end of the telling she pulled me aside. She said something along the lines of, “I’ve heard you tell that story before and I remember the way it goes, but I honestly don’t remember any of that actually happening at all.”  And as she walked away it hit me: neither did I.

I’m not trying to give the impression that I’m some sort of liar.  I do lie, we all do.  In a span of ten minutes the majority of us will tell at least one lie. It happens.  But I’m not interested in discussing the reasons I tell lies or the fact that I do.  What I want to explain is that I had no idea this was a lie until my sister reminded me of it twelve years after the event took place.

In retrospect, I remember why the lie was told.  My sister did jump into a hole of mud as I saw her afterwards covered up to her rib cage, but I wasn’t there.  And it wouldn’t make sense that I would be there.  We weren’t the same age and we wouldn’t have had recess together.  When I was eight she was ten.  And the idea that we, as young children, would find it acceptable to ignore our teacher’s orders to play outside and instead turn around and walk inside is in some ways absurd.

When my sister did find me at the end of the day, she told me a generic story of what happened. It was funny, but only because I was witnessing the aftermath of the events.  She was humiliated and certainly didn’t want to exaggerate the conditions of her embarrassment.  But I couldn’t let an event that I deemed uproariously funny fall to the wayside.  Oh no.  This story would be told, and it would be told well.  Which is why I came to tell The Story to my parents, and later to my grandparents, and eventually to my friends, friends of friends, friends of friends of friends, and even strangers.

But what I can’t help but notice is at some point in the twelve years I told this story, I convinced myself, and for that matter my own memory, that I was there and the story itself happened in front of my eyes.  No longer was I the messenger of a funny anecdote, I was the witness of it.  And if my sister hadn’t reminded me that day that it was basically a farce, I could have continued on for another twelve, twenty, even fifty years describing a memory that wasn’t my own to begin with.

Does this make me a liar? Perhaps. But what it also does is make me question the legitimacy of all memories.  If it is so easy to manipulate our minds and convince them that what didn’t happen did, to what extent are any of our memories true? And on an even larger scale, where does this leave us as storytellers and writers? 

This is a question that is, maybe, unanswerable.  I guess we could take the first path and constantly question the truth behind memoirs, journalism articles, campfire stories, and anything related to our memories. Or we could take the second and recognize that, of course, our memories aren’t completely accurate nor are they completely factual the way we would like, but they are the truth we have come to know. 

Still, it leads the way to a tough life for a nonfiction writer.  Either way you spin it, your understanding of something will always somehow be questioned. The Story is now The Lie.  And yet I keep coming back to the same thought: am I lying if I know it to be a truth?

Kendra Busby is a junior at the University of Pittsburgh studying Nonfiction English Writing, Religious Studies, and Film Studies.  She is currently an intern at The New Yinzer.