Fiction was already at the bar when Fact arrived.
“Late again,” she said, tilting her glass toward him. “Did you calculate the optimal time to arrive, or did the narrative just lead you here?”
“No, I'm exactly on time.”
“Mm. You practice that?”
“Only when I know you’ll be here.”
He glances at her glass. “Plot Twist?”
“Of course. And you? Still pretending water is enough?”
“It usually is.”
“For surviving, perhaps. Not for living.”
He didn’t rise to it immediately and they sat in silence for a while.
“You always open like that?”
“Like what?”
“As if the reader has already fallen in love with you.”
She laughed. “They usually are.”
“And if they aren’t?”
“Then I give them a reason to be.” She leaned in slightly. “I don’t wait for permission. I take them somewhere. I make them feel.”
There it was. She let it sit between them.
Fact considered it, as one might consider a line worth underlining. “Feeling,” he said, “is unreliable. It swells and fades. You win them quickly, I’ll give you that, but you don’t always keep them.”
“Oh? And you do?”
“I keep them because I don’t lie to them.”
She raised an eyebrow. “You’re very proud of that, aren’t you?”
“I should be. I earn their trust fact by fact. I don’t ask them to suspend disbelief. I ask them to understand.”
“And you think understanding is enough?”
“I think it’s what lasts.”
She shook her head, smiling, but there was something sharper underneath it now. “No. What lasts is the moment they forget themselves. When the world slips a little."
“And what,” he countered, leaning forward now, “do they do with that moment when it's over?”
She didn’t answer immediately.
He pressed, quietly but firmly. “Do they carry it? Do they build on it? Or does it dissolve the moment they close the book?”
She met his gaze. “You think I don’t carry weight?”
“I think you sometimes mistake impact for endurance.”
Then she smiled again, slower this time. “And you mistake endurance for life. You make them careful. You make them precise. You give them answers. That’s fine. But I make them curious. I make them want more.”
“Without me,” he said, just as steadily, “they wouldn’t know what to do with that wanting.”
“Maybe they don’t need to.”
“They do.”
“Why?”
“Because a reader doesn’t just want to feel something,” he said. “They want to trust it.”
“Trust isn’t built on facts alone.”
“No, but it isn’t built on illusion either.”
She tilted her head. “You still think I’m an illusion?”
“I think, you’re possibility. But possibility without structure is… unstable.”
“And structure without possibility?”
He didn’t answer straight away.
She leaned back, satisfied. “Exactly.”
A glass slid somewhere down the bar. Someone laughed. The world continued, unaware that something important was being negotiated.
He exhaled, softer now. “You pull them in,” he said. “I won’t argue that. You give them the reason to start.”
“And you make sure they stay?” she said, almost teasing, but not quite.
“I make sure it matters that they did.”
She watched him for a moment. Not mocking. Not winning. Just listening.
“Perhaps we’ve been arguing the wrong thing.”
“Perhaps,” he agreed.
She lifted her glass. “You give them ground.”
He lifted his. “You give them flight.”
“And the reader?” she asked.
“The reader,” he said, “decides how far they’re willing to go.”
She smiled, properly, this time. “I can live with that.”
“Careful. That sounded like agreement.”
“Don’t get used to it.”
They clinked glasses anyway.
PS. If Fact and Fiction argued this much over you… who would you side with? Or would you let them both win? Send me your thoughts at info@thestorystation.co.za. I'd love to hear from you.