The eater of tales

The bike chugs down the road at a sedate pace, matching the rider and the ride. It slows and stops besides a lady, the rising sun to her back.

The man raises his hands in mock surrender and asks if he can give the lady a lift till down the road. She seems apprehensive and asks why he would offer a lift to a stranger. He says that she can pay him. With a story.

"Make it a sad story", he says.

Puzzled, but mollified, there is something about him that tells that he isn't going to harm her. And she is confident that if he tries anything, it won't be during daylight, in the middle of the office rush. And she is getting late to work. So she gets on.

"Story, please" he prompts again.

So she starts, and tells him the story of how her mother died and her father remarried and her step-mother always hated her.

And the minute she ends it, the story is different. It is shared now. He grabs his end of the story and yanks. And the tale is eaten. The fiction disappears and she is only left with the truth.

The truth of how she, as a child, thought that only she could ever replace her mother in her father's life. How she could not tolerate a stranger in her mother's place and made life hell for the new woman. Which, naturally, led to the step mother resenting her intrusion into what was her life with her husband.

The tears follow. Catharsis, remorse and relief all rolled into one powerful emotion. She is left naked in the light of truth and sees herself for the first time as, not the protagonist in a sad fairy tale, but as a flawed human being in someone else's.

"Who are you?", she whispers through the storm.

"A humble eater of tales."