My grandmother used the phrase whenever someone became too pleased about exposing a lie. Soð bið swicolost, she would say, then translate it loosely as truth is the most treacherous thing. To us it sounded like another of her inherited cautions, alongside advice about weather, strangers, and never trusting a door that opened too easily. Only during her final week did the words acquire a different weight.
After the funeral, three relatives gave me accounts of her death. Each spoke with the calm certainty of someone describing events personally witnessed. One remembered her lucid until the end, sitting upright and asking after everyone by name. Another described a difficult final night in which she recognized nobody and repeatedly tried to leave the bed. A third recalled a long private conversation that, according to the others, occurred several hours after she had stopped speaking.
No one appeared confused. Dates matched. Nurses remembered all three relatives being present. Hospital records supported details from each version while quietly contradicting the others.
I began testing smaller truths afterward. I asked two people about dinners we had attended together, then compared their recollections with mine. Rooms changed shape. Conversations migrated between evenings. People remembered wearing clothes still hanging unused in their closets. Photographs occasionally supported whichever version I examined first, then seemed subtly different when I returned to them later.
The effect eventually reached my own days. I told a coworker I had spent Sunday at home, and while describing it I remembered the entire afternoon clearly. Later I told my sister I had gone hiking and possessed an equally complete memory of mud on my shoes, cold wind, and a sandwich eaten beside a stream. My phone contained photographs from both days, timestamped within minutes of one another.
I have stopped trying to determine which account is original. That question assumes truth begins somewhere stable and becomes distorted afterward. My grandmother seems to have understood something less comforting: perhaps truth accommodates the person receiving it, growing a shape each mind can carry without ceasing to be true.
Her final expression returns to me differently depending on when I remember it. Sometimes she looked frightened. Sometimes amused. Increasingly, I remember recognition in her face, as though she had been waiting for the moment when I could finally inherit more than the phrase.
©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys
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