This concept was a strange one to Mina, for silence was almost a deadly poison to playing. Any pauses onstage were the length of a heartbeat, or two at most, and served only to make the next words punchier. As Narratrice, Mina had been the straight foil for the others’ cavortings, but she had been aware of how the briefest of pauses made all the difference to whether an audience laughed at a joke or not. She had picked up on the unspoken maxim that there had to be something happening all the time, or the audience would wander, and with them their coin.
Storytelling was different though. As the afternoon passed Sofia wove story after story, showing Mina the way silence could enhance the words, prolong the wonder, allow space for the story to breathe. Each story was short, but the more Sofi
