In the lower village there was a woman who told stories in the long room behind the mill, and she did all the voices herself. The miller came out of her chest like something rolled down a ramp. The girl who ran away to the salt flats spoke fast and high and swallowed the ends of her words. The girl's mother clipped every sentence short, as if there were only so many words in the house and she was rationing them.
The upper village was four hours up the mountain, and from the first snow until the thaw nobody went down.
So a copyist sat at the back of the long room with a board on her knees and wrote while the woman told. She was quick, and she was not a storyteller, and she knew it. She took down the words. Once a week a man on snowshoes carried the pages up.
In the upper village the pages went to Tomas, because he read well and because his hands were too bad that winter for anything else. Every seventh night people crowded into his kitchen and he read the story aloud in the only voice he had, which was dry and a little cracked and did not go very low. He made the miller as deep as he could manage, which was not deep. He made the girl a bit quicker. Mostly he just read.
They loved those stories. They argued about the mother for weeks. A boy cried when the girl reached the salt and found nobody waiting, and was ashamed of crying, and came back the next week anyway.
When the road opened in spring, half the upper village walked down to hear the story told properly.
Tomas almost stayed home. He had a worry he hadn't said out loud. What if what they had loved all winter was him? His pace, his cracked voice, the place he always paused before the mother spoke. What if they heard the real teller and it was a different story, and the winter had been a kind of mistake that only he had made?
He went. He sat on a bench near the back, next to the copyist, who was writing out of habit even though there was nobody to send the pages to now.
The teller's miller was much lower than his. Her girl was quicker. Her mother was colder, and the coldness was funnier than he had ever let it be. Within ten minutes Tomas knew he had been doing every one of them wrong.
And it was the same story. He could not have said where the sameness lived. It wasn't in her voice, because her voice was nothing like his. It wasn't only in the words, because the words had been on his table all winter and the words alone had never made anyone cry. But the girl reached the salt, and nobody was waiting, and the boy from the upper village put his face in his sleeve exactly where he had in Tomas's kitchen.
On the walk home, a child asked Tomas which one was the real one.
He said he didn't know, and that the miller was still the miller either way, and the child accepted this the way children accept answers that are honest but not very satisfying.
What he didn't say was the thing he had noticed on the bench. He had been reading over the copyist's shoulder. In among the words, in smaller letters, she wrote things down. (slow here). (she drops her voice). (she laughs before this line, not after).
He had read those notes all winter. He thought he had been skipping them, the way you skip page numbers. But sitting there he heard the teller laugh, before the line and not after, and he realized he had been pausing in that exact spot for four months. He'd thought the pause was his own idea.
The copyist wasn't a storyteller. She had said so herself. She had only meant to take down the words. But she couldn't hear a laugh and leave it off the page, and so the teller's timing had gone up the mountain in the margins, bit by bit, and he had been reading it aloud in his cracked voice and calling it his.
The next winter he asked the copyist, through the man on snowshoes, to keep writing the notes. She wrote back that she had never stopped. She didn't know how.
On the seventh night he got to the line where the teller laughs. He'd heard the laugh now, and he could have tried it. He knew he'd get it wrong.
He didn't do the laugh. He left the gap where it went, and the kitchen filled it.
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