Ruth Joffre and Clare Johnson will be reading in Cascadia Magazine’s Seattle Writers + Artists event at 6:30 pm Tues. December 10 at Vermillion in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. More details here.
One of the Lies I Tell My Children (#1)
If they don’t get some sleep, their nightmares will have no choice but to become real and torment them in their waking hours. Imagine unzipping your backpacks to find small armies of venomous spiders; opening the fridge in search of an afternoon snack and getting sucked through a portal to a parallel dimension where humans shed their skins like snakes, then sew their skins into dresses. Imagine, I tell my children, never knowing if you’re awake or safe or sane—never being sure the person beside you in the hall isn’t really an animated corpse—and always suspecting the surfaces around you (the black and white tiles in the boys’ bathroom, the square window with the smudged fingerprints where children tried to escape), thinking at any moment that the illusion would break and a thousand would shoot toward you from every direction and grab hold, grab tight. You can’t live like that, I tell them; you don’t want to know what it’s like to be pressed flat against the door of a bathroom stall, unable to scream as your bodies are torn apart. “But Mom,” my children will say, “those are your nightmares. Our nightmares are cool. All they want is to play video games in the basement and eat the neighborhood cats.” I don’t believe them, so one day my children invite the nightmares over and set out little bowls of snacks and introduce the nightmares one by one as if they’re friends. And I realize: their only fears are of imaginary creatures, like anthropomorphic sea monsters with the biceps of professional wrestlers or the disembodied heads of fire-breathing dragons. When one of my children shouts, “Look: this one can light a candle with its laser eyes!” I start to cry, not because I’m afraid but because their little faces are still so innocent and because I know I’ll only be able to protect them from the real monsters for so long.
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One of the Lies I Tell My Children (#8)
If they don’t go outside and get some exercise soon, the world will start to shrink around them. It will be almost unnoticeable, at first: a subtle tightening in the atmosphere pushing the dark spires of skyscrapers together and forcing the shy crowns of trees to touch for the first time in centuries. My children will not notice the shifts, their eyes fixed as they are on the narrow windows into the world they hold in the palms of their hands, where these distortions can be explained away with a filter or a special lens. For weeks, they’ll walk blithely past bus shelters and mom-and-pop shops becoming ever narrower, their painted benches and wooden shelves butting up against each other until, inevitably, they buckle and crack, like the fragile surface of reality—and then the shrinking will really start to speed up, with mountains receding into foothills, lakes evaporating into ponds, walled borders cinching around countries until their capitols collapse and their economic bubbles finally burst. It will be chaos then (roads crumbling, cars falling away, into nothingness) until our house becomes the last building left on Earth. I will pull back the dining room curtains when that happens. Ask my children if they’re afraid of the darkness circling around us like a mouth poised to swallow us whole. If they’re prepared to die this way—home alone with their mother. Without looking up, my children will say, “This is fine. We were never going to be able to afford our own houses anyway.”
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All illustrations by Clare Johnson.
Publication of these flash fiction pieces and art was made possible by a generous grant from the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture.
Ruth Joffre is the author of Night Beast and Other Stories. Her short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Kenyon Review, The Masters Review, Lightspeed, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Mid-American Review, Nashville Review, Copper Nickel, DIAGRAM, The Offing, Chicago Review, and elsewhere, and her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, The Journal, PANK, Crab Fat Magazine, and elsewhere. Her nonfiction and criticism have appeared in Electric Literature, The Millions, The Rumpus, Kenyon Review Online, Colorado Review, The Gay & Lesbian Review, Lambda Literary, and elsewhere. Ruth lives in Seattle, where she teaches writing and literature at Hugo House. Follow her on Twitter at @Ruth_Joffre.
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Clare Johnson is a writer and artist born and raised in Seattle, with awards including a Jack Straw Fellowship, Allied Arts Foundation Emerging Artist Award (Grand Prize), and Artist Trust GAP. Upcoming work includes a 4Culture-funded project transforming fencing around a Low Income Housing Institute tiny house village into giant participatory coloring sheets. Her ongoing Post-it Note Project (drawing/writing on a post-it every night for over a decade and counting, with over 4,000 so far) has been featured in Real Change, Seattle Magazine, Seattle Weekly, and Seattle Review of Books. Follow her on Instagram at @clare.e.johnson.
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