Lies I Tell My Children (#17) by Ruth Joffre

*THE BLUE FROG 3^rd PLACE WINNER*

If they ask me for a little brother or sister to play with, I’ll tell them all about the egg I’ve been incubating in the attic: the size of it, the slick red surface of its shell, as if someone dipped a dragon’s egg in blood. It has little ridges on its surface (tiny ripples, like the precursors of veins), and when I press my ear to its curve I can hear something: not a heartbeat, exactly, but a rending, a pulling, as if teeth were tearing flesh from bone. I wonder sometimes where the egg came from, if in the grief and confusion of being widowed I tore the egg from myself, infusing it with a great and terrible magic that has lain dormant all these years. Or perhaps their father left it for me, a parting gift pressed through the membranes in between worlds, so that whatever creature grows inside will straddle the lines between living and dead, me and him. I imagine it will have my ears and his nose and glowing red eyes that will remind my children of lava, of the volcanic eruptions they saw in a documentary at school. Once it hatches, they will ask me, “Can it breathe fire? Can it walk on walls? Is it more like a lizard or a human or are we all lizards and you’ve been lying to us all along?” and try as I might I won’t be able to answer. The child will beguile me. It will have skin like knobby scales and teeth like flower petals with tiny, serrated edges, and when it wants to nurse, I will give it my thumb, let it bite down often enough to permanently alter my fingerprints. My children will offer their own thumbs, say I deserve a rest, but I won’t let them. Some things a mother must bear alone.

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RUTH JOFFRE — Ruth is a Bolivian American writer and the author of the story collection Night Beast. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in more than 100 publications, including Wigleaf, SmokeLong Quarterly, TriQuarterly, Pleiades, Baffling Magazine, and the anthologies Best Microfiction and Best Small Fictions.

Art by ALI McLAFFERTY — Ali is an Austin-based artist and writer moonlighting as a high school history teacher. Her fiction has been published in The Forge, and Flash Frog has featured both her flash fiction and several of her art pieces. She loves working in acrylic, watercolor, colored pencil, and graphite pencil, and believes every surface–paper, wood, walls, stone, or skin–is better with a little paint on it. When not writing or creating artwork, she spends her time gardening, mountain-biking, and dabbling in green witchcraft. Her biggest fans are all the neighborhood children who demand painted tattoos on every limb.