The Storytellers of the Four Provinces

My father used to say that storytellers never came to a good end. His hands were shaking when he said it. I was sixteen that year, and I thought he was afraid of dying. My father was a storyteller. He spent his whole life spinning tall tales: how he had killed three hundred demons alone at Wangxiang Pass, how he had seen a Demon King tear off its own wings, how the wooden clapper in his arms had been given to him by a nobleman. Everyone in the city laughed at him. So did I. For sixteen years, I helped him revise his stories, fixing more than seventy details. Only later did I learn that half of his tall tales were true. And every story I tell comes true.