Wotcher!
Here is the first piece of fiction I am adding to this blog. I wrote this back when I lived in Scotland, as part of one of my “Craft and Experimentation” classes.
This was an exercise titled “Inspirations”. We were basically given total freedom to find works that inspired us to write our own piece. My Little Sister Sally was inspired by a combination of Lewis Carrol’s poems and the wacky wordplays of French Canadian storyteller Fred Pellerin.
My little sister Sally used to be an honest girl.
She was overflowing with truthfulness.
Then, one day, quite unexpectedly, she was all truthed out.
Deprived of her legendary truthtelling, she adopted a silentness of the grave kind.
But silentness is not a state which can easily be maintained. One needs to speak, provided that one is lucky enough to be endowed with the ability to do so.
So Sally began to lie.
The quality of her fibs was of course inherent to her newness in the industry. Her fibbing was pretty see-through.
Pinocchio, my parents called her upon discovery of her enlyingment.
My parents, truth be told, were under the impression that lying was one of the human nature’s most unpleasant characteristics. Sally, as a result, endured many a scolding from our ruthless parental entity.
Yet she continued pinocchioing and pinocchioing.
She pinocchioed so much that, eventually, the whole family developed a concern regarding the permanentness of the situation.
A kindly aunt suggested that the mistruthing girl should be brought before a doctor.
At my parents’ earliest convenience an appointment was made.
The doctor enquired as to the reason of my parents’ discomfiture.
‘Our Sally has become lieful,’ my father said. ‘Is there anything you can do to truthen her again?’
The doctor examined my little sister.
‘The reason she has assumed her current liefulness is quite clear,’ he said. ‘You have been dragging her truthward for so long that she must now compensate. Let her go lieward for a while. When the truths and the lies have been balanced out, she will go back to normal.’
At first, my parents were rather uninclined to modify the strictness of their nature. But as the doctor insisted that it was the only solution, they agreed to accommodate.
Years passed, and still Sally mistruthed, lied and pinocchioed. She mistruthed her way through middle school, passed her high school exams with lying colours and got into a prestigious university by pinocchioing her interviewing panel.
Then one day, quite unexpectedly, my little sister Sally started truthing again.
But the doctor, we discovered, had lied, for she never went back to her former self. She truthed most of the time, but now and again, in all her truthing, she threw a lie.
Gwen’s Writings 