If all your words were jokes, we’d all be Laughing
by Tommy Dean
The year of bee stings because he refused to wear shoes as he ran through the backyard full of clover and dandelions. Kicking up indignant bees, wings hovering with the sound of blades near his ears, but only for a second, because he’s running. In circles, up the slide and down, back on those dirty toes, and around the boundary of the backyard, until overhead comes the blob of the blimp, a balloon you can ride, and for once, he wants to leave the ground and be in the sky, where his feet are weightless, and his heart hammers to a slower musical score, and his parents and their threats of divorce, of wanting to burn down the house, and the lack of money for property taxes, and the insecurity of wanting all of their words to be jokes he can fill his belly with laughs, and not wonder if they will end up on the TV, another one of their murder shows, and hoping never to hear their names on the broadcaster’s mouth, no tip in tone, and the scrunch of forehead skin in question, because he wants to go into the world nameless, a boy who could take a sting and keep on running, who could live in obscurity as long as his legs kept moving.
Tommy Dean is the author of two flash fiction chapbooks and a full flash collection, Hollows (Alternating Current Press 2022). He lives in Indiana, where he is the Editor of Fractured Lit and Uncharted Magazine. A recipient of the 2019 Lascaux Prize in Short Fiction, his writing can be found in Best Microfiction 2019, 2020, 2023, Best Small Fictions 2019 and 2022, Monkeybicycle, and elsewhere. Find him at tommydeanwriter.com and on Twitter @TommyDeanWriter.
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “If all your words were jokes, we’d all be Laughing”? This was one of those stories where I used an aerial-type camera to look back at my younger self, adding a dash of real life here and there, fictionalizing when necessary, and rode the wave of this voice, this moment!
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