If they don’t stop growing up so fast, I will be forced to freeze time. For everyone else, the world will stop and it will be 11:42 on Sunday morning. Mrs. Sorrento will forever be gliding back into her driveway after returning from Mass. Her son will be leaning out of the rear window, shouting at a kid blowing bubbles across the street, and those blobs will hang there, oblong and iridescent, until my children pop them one by one with a needle from my sewing kit. I will allow them to do this because it is harmless, because if we borrow some bikes from an open garage we can always return them, later, after we’ve ridden into town and scooped ourselves three rocky road ice cream cones from the chain store that won’t realize they’re missing; after we’ve gone down to the creek and marveled at the minnows with their gleaming silver scales as if we never knew this was here, as if we haven’t passed it hundreds of times on the way to and from the grocery store, never once thinking to stop, to watch a green June beetle eat a leaf or a northern flicker lift off from a branch overhead. We will have the time to look these names up. To say of every wondrous thing we see, Oh, this is a 3-D printer or this girl’s pulling sugar to make candy. I will tell them not to get jobs yet. Not to work at the mall yet, not to sneak out at night to throw pebbles at a girl’s window. I’m not ready, I’ll say, even though we all know, deep down, that it isn’t true. 

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Ruth Joffre is the author of the story collection Night Beast. Her work has appeared in more than 100 publications, including Wigleaf, SmokeLong Quarterly, TriQuarterly, Pleiades, Baffling Magazine, and the anthologies Best Microfiction 2021 & 2022.