This is the first story in this summer’s online Flash Fiction series. Read the entire series, and our Flash Fiction from previous years, here.
To please his mother, a writer attempts a children’s story. The mother doesn’t usually read fiction but will read a children’s story and, if it’s good, show it to all her friends. In his mother’s eyes, the writer is, by and large, an anomaly. She believes that writing is a skill, not a vocation, and to make up stories for anyone other than children is a silly way to occupy one’s time.
So here is his attempt at a story that maybe his mother will read and show her friends.
Once upon a time, there was a clown. The clown lived in a village that
had no other clowns, for each village was allotted only one. The job
of the clown was to scare some children but amuse others. He had
balloons and face paint and could juggle. Half the time, he appeared
without warning, and the other half he provided notice of the when,
where, and what. Children had a fifty-fifty chance of receiving each
option: the clown could either burst out from under their bed to
juggle hatchets (no notice) or appear at their birthday party to
juggle balls (notice given). If a child was amused once, there was no
guarantee that this would happen again. Still, the chance of that
child’s being scared was no higher than it would have been, because,
in this fair and made-up world, the clown existed to teach a lesson:
that events of fear and events of joy are independent, and independent
events must have independent probabilities.
The writer thinks this last sentence will please his mother. In her home country, she’d taught math and begun work on a textbook, but then came instability, uprisings, and she and his father had had to leave. For a long time and openly, she’d hoped that her son would carry on her work. “My son, the writer of textbooks” is how she would have introduced him—instead of simply “my son.”
The mother now lives in a facility, and he visits her there. He gives her a printout of the children’s story, and she reads it. From bed, she says, “You must have footnotes with proper notation. How else is a child supposed to understand that for independent events the probability of A equals the probability of A given B, and the probability of B equals the probability of B given A? It’s not clear. But what’s clear is that you’re writing about me,” she says, tapping her finger on the page at the word “clown.” “You’re clearly writing about your father and me, and none of my friends will want to read that.”
The writer’s father is no longer with them and was neither a funny man nor a person who had opinions about clowns. He and the writer’s mother had been married for forty-seven years, most of which were arduous and sombre. In the new country, they’d had to work menial jobs. It did not help that the father had a horrendous temper, made worse by his belief that everyone around him was belittling him, and by the fact that everyone was. So he raged and lashed out at home and left all the bathroom cleaning to his wife.
“Also, I want a happy ending,” the mother says, folding up the story and setting it on her nightstand. “You don’t know how to write happy.”
He asks how she could know that if she has never read anything of his.
“I hear things from my friends,” she says. “They all say you’re too serious and no one knows what you mean.”
Because she raised and didn’t abandon him, because of her troubles and the unfinished textbook, the writer returns to his story to see what he can do.
One day, the children gathered in the village square to take a vote.
Future clown encounters, they argued, had to either all be happy or
all be scary. One of these options had to win, and they would not
accept an in-between. They needed to have certainty. They voted
unanimously for happiness, of course, and then, in parallel lines,
wearing hats and safety equipment, the children marched to the hut at
the edge of the village where the clown lived. They barred the door
and windows from the outside. They lit a torch and told the clown
inside that if he didn’t change his metrics, they would burn down the
hut. The clown refused: the rules of his tenure were fixed, and if he
gave in to the children’s request the village would oust him and
replace him with another clown. The children encircled the hut and
held hands. They chanted gibberish and made menacing expressions that
were subpar. Then they threw the torch onto the hut’s straw roof.
“Fear and joy!” the clown lectured, until he suffocated and could no
longer be heard. The children cheered as the flaming hut caved in and
crushed him; then, in parallel lines, they marched back to the village
square, where the adults were waiting.
Having learned what the children had done, the adults were grim. With
the clown gone, they now had to scare or amuse the children
themselves. Up to this point, the adults had had a contract of
emotional neutrality. They dealt with the feeding, sheltering, and not
abandoning, while the clown dealt with the rest. News travelled to
other villages of what the children had done, and the children of
other villages followed suit, which meant that clowns were soon in
short supply and the over-all profession lost its prestige. As the
adults of these murderous, arsonist children were forced to take on
new roles, they found the rule of independent probabilities failing
them. Some could bring only fear, and the probability of future fear
was dependent on the probability of past fear, as well as on the
parent’s over-all chance of penitence. Others could only bring joy,
and, likewise, that probability was dependent on other factors, such
as the children’s response to repeated joy, to guaranteed joy, and to
the adults’ ability to sustain joy through their socioeconomic status.
The clowns never returned, and the adults became parents, and their
children became adults who begot more children, whom they had to
parent. Thus was born, in these villages, the idea of conditional
probabilities and, with it, the practice of conditional love.
After the mother reads the story, she is silent for long enough that the son thinks she has died, in bed, with her eyes open. He waves a frantic hand in her face until she blinks.
“You must be making fun of me,” she says.
The writer says he would never dare.
“You are,” she says, with patience and firmness.
The writer truly would never dare.
The mother looks at her son in disbelief that she has brought such a person into the world. A person incapable of writing a children’s story or a happy ending. Is this a result of too much imagination or too little? Is this revenge? ♦
