A Children’s Story

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 […]

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