Diane Josefowicz

Short Fiction

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Show don’t tell, he said, and I believe he meant it kindly, this advice, offered like a tumbled stone or a coin with half its thickness rubbed away from use, exchange, commerce, or just the thinning that’s the inevitable result of exposure to the world, abrasive as it is, or the equally but differently abrasive air, with all its mysterious latencies and humors, everything we can’t perceive except by means of effects, random rusts, molds, clustered spots of mildew and other pervasive small intrusions on the serenity of bodily existence, if you’re lucky, that cloister of inner space and the peace that reigns there, sometimes, anyway, or maybe we just imagine it does, certainly it has a fleeting quality suggestive of fiction, or a dream, scarcely remembered but still with its discernible imprint, a peace, moreover, that is noticeable only after it is disrupted, as it so often is by the arrival of bad advice, or perhaps the advice is not bad but simply ill-fitting, as if advice must be tailored, as a suit, not accepted off the rack; even so, despite the fact that nothing about advice is ready to wear, I found myself trying it on, this advice, to show and not tell, and in the course of so doing I remembered a similar phrase uttered repeatedly by my father about the affordances and possibilities of fiction, I mean children, who should be seen and not heard, who should show and not tell, and of course there is so much that we showed and, in so doing, told, quite without intending to, and so much else that we neither showed nor told, so many secrets we kept, wearing them smooth as we turned them in deep hidden pockets of the clothes that fit us poorly, clothes we’d outgrown or never grew into or simply did not suit us, and so we came into being, silent, sheepish, with our hands jammed into our awkward pockets, the sheepish silent objects of others’ contemplation, first of all our father’s, secondly our mother’s, as the sun to the moon; and sometimes, shyly, we looked back at our contemplators, our observers, our surveyors, our judges, our dear benighted difficult parents, and we did not tell, but in that silence we spoke and spoke, in the glare of the lights of the changing rooms of our development, before those strangely shifty mirrors of the department store at the new shopping center, tapping our shining bare feet on the differently shining new bare floor until we heard an echo that announced the glad existence of a space, a hollow beneath the floor, an ear into which we might pour all our untold sadness until it took on our shape, or shapes, for we were not yet precisely separate, and wandered out into the light of the shop and strode, unseeing and untelling, past the yawning clerk who knew just what she was seeing and not telling with her cashed-out eyes, even if we didn’t; that is to say, she was seeing herself as she had been seen, from every angle except the right one, and not heard, not ever, not at all, and so, held by her tenderly knowing zombie gaze we made our stumbling way into the parking lot where we were stunned by darkness, the fact of nightfall, before being suddenly and unexpectedly blinded by the ambient lighting, newly installed to guide us safely to our parked car and along the marked exit route and finally back out into the world of showing and telling, or in our case, showing and not telling, a world of open secrets and the closed mouths on which they depended for their continued existence, and the closed ears, too, closeted within the darkened houses all along the dead closed roads. 

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Diane Josefowicz is a novelist, editor, and historian. She’s the author of a novel, Ready, Set, Oh (Flexible Press, 2022) and a novella, L’Air du Temps (1985), just out from Regal House. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Boston Globe, LA Review of Books, Dame, Liber, Conjunctions, and Fence, among others. She serves as Reviews Editor at Necessary Fiction, Associate Fiction Editor at West Trade Review, and Managing Editor of the Victorian Web, the internet’s oldest and largest website devoted to Victoriana.

Photo Credit: Kirill Egorov has recently crossed the Atlantic to settle with his family in a small town in New Jersey. For him, photography is about visual storytelling, and he is happy to share his stories with others (IG: @baddyglass)