{"id":9912,"date":"2022-08-03T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-08-03T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=9912"},"modified":"2022-08-02T19:01:42","modified_gmt":"2022-08-02T23:01:42","slug":"the-ring-of-truth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=9912","title":{"rendered":"“The Ring of Truth”"},"content":{"rendered":"
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My short story protagonist Brianna Yamato\u2014newly minted reporter for The Sweetwater Register<\/em>, the fictional newspaper of Sweetwater, Texas\u2014is on the story once again. Her latest exploit, \u201cThe Ring of Truth\u201d is published in the August 2022 Mystery Magazine<\/em><\/a>. Previously, she solved a four-person homicide and the death by rattlesnake bite of a wind-turbine repairman who had the makings of a potential boyfriend, but . . .<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this story, Brianna is a volunteer with the local community theater group putting on the comedy, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum<\/em>. This is a show my family and I have seen on stage a half-dozen times in various-sized productions\u2014from amateur theater to Broadway (Nathan Lane). And the Zero Mostel movie is a perennial favorite when we need a pick-me-up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alas, in the Sweetwater production, the high school senior playing the romantic lead dies one night during rehearsal, and Brianna starts to dig into her story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Because I\u2019ve written four short stories about Brianna (three published), I have to keep in mind certain details about her world. Since I can\u2019t count on my memory, I created a Word document titled \u201cFacts about the Sweetwater Stories,\u201d which lists the stories in chronological order and when they took place. It has bulleted facts about Brianna, not just her physical description but her way of working (\u201cshe tends to let interviewees talk\u201d and \u201cshe matches their body language and expressions\u201d), that she lives in a house\u2014not an apartment\u2014with her friend Ruth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Brianna, being Japanese, tiny (and female) has to hold her own in a sea of big and tall Texas men. They\u2019d love to patronize her, if she\u2019d let them. In several of the stories, she gets comments like \u201cyou don\u2019t look like a Brianna\u201d and remarks about immigrants. So I established that her family arrived in California, where she was born and raised, in 1880. Similarly, in the current story, she receives an earful from an interviewee, father of the dead girl who wants her to stop her \u201cmedding.\u201d Here\u2019s how she sets him straight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYou people\u2014\u201d He started to walk away.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe journalists? Or we twenty-somethings?\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

He came back and barked in my face. \u201cYou Orientals start your wars, let us settle your hash, then leave your crappy countries and move here, to enjoy everything America offers.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Oh boy. I said, \u201cMy granddad and his brothers served in the US Army in World War II. You\u2019ve heard of the Purple Heart battalion? His youngest brother was killed in Korea. And my dad and uncles fought in Vietnam. What was your unit?\u201d I could hear my editor now.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

To break off his death-stare, I said, \u201cKayla\u2019s friends say nice things about her. I just wondered whether you\u2019d noticed any change, anything unusual, before she died.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cNo. You people saw more of her than we did those last weeks.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOh. We thespians.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I also keep a list of the businesses she visits\u2014the Triple Joe Caf\u00e9 next door to the newspaper, the Southside Grill with its homestyle cooking and the names of its friendly servers, the Egg \u2018n\u2019 Oink where Brianna likes to track down police chief Hank Childers while he\u2019s having his Sunday brunch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I was a kid, I had family who lived in Sweetwater and visited them every year. The picture in my mind of the community is no doubt vastly different from what the town is today. I read the newspaper online when I\u2019m working on a story to bring myself forward a few decades. But the rattlesnakes are the same.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My short story protagonist Brianna Yamato\u2014newly minted reporter for The Sweetwater Register, the fictional newspaper of Sweetwater, Texas\u2014is on the story once again. Her latest exploit, \u201cThe Ring of Truth\u201d is published in the August 2022 Mystery Magazine. Previously, she … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Keeping a consistent world view across a number of stories. Brianna Yamato of Sweetwater, Texas.","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1335,52,3,126,120],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9912","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-amateur-detective","category-crime","category-mystery","category-reading-2","category-short-story"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-2zS","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9912","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9912"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9912\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9914,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9912\/revisions\/9914"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9912"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9912"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9912"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}