Once Upon a Time
A fiction.
There was once a woman who loved to tell stories.
She had six children, and every night, she would share a different tale with each one. When they were younger, the stories were short and simple, but as they grew older, something changed. The children became jealous of one another. They began pleading for more details and demanding that their story be the most exciting, the longest, the very best of all.
Every night, the woman began speaking at sunset and didn’t stop until the sun rose. Her voice grew weak, and her steps grew weary, so much so that all her neighbors took notice. They decided she was gentle, biddable, and obedient. But the woman, too tired to correct them, could only keep her truth to herself. Each night, bitter from their indifference, she turned them into monsters for her children to slay.
One by one, the children grew up and left home. The woman, now old and haggard from sleepless years, didn’t know what to do. Her husband, having spent so many years with his fingers in his ears, had finally decided it was simpler to go deaf. Her cat mewed and hissed at all the wrong times. She couldn’t reveal her dark, violent imagination to her friends, or they would turn on her.
She cut up her oldest son’s bedsheet and wrote his story on it. But it wasn’t enough. She couldn’t simply get the…
