THE DAY I BECAME A CLOWN

SHORT STORY - THE DAY I BECAME A CLOWN

     By Travis M. Whitehead

     I was only five or six years old when I saw my first circus. I loved seeing the lions and the tigers and the elephants and the trapeze artists, and when a guy in a gorilla ran around wearing a woman’s bra I couldn’t stop laughing, nor could my mother.

     However, those clowns prancing around in front of the audience scared the hell out of me.  Clowns are supposed to be happy and playful, but oh no, not to me. They totally creeped me out, and when one of them began making his way up the bleachers in my direction I wanted to run and hide.       

     The clown had this grotesque red grin surrounded by this pasty white paint like it had spent the whole afternoon rummaging through an Avon bag. Those monstrous shoes looked as though his feet had swollen up like the balloons it was now twisting into bizarre shapes to hand out to the kids.

     And that hair! Oh my God, the hair. How in God’s name did he get hair like that? Had he stuck his finger in a light socket? What had happened to this guy?He was running around like he was crazy, twisting those poor balloons into unnatural shapes. Balloons were supposed to be round like kickballs or long like hot dogs, not bent out of shape like a pretzel.

     A sense of dread swept over me as he came closer, and closer, and closer…I started breathing heavily and sweat soaked my shirt. Finally, he was towering over me with this ghastly grin, his eyes glittering as he turned the balloon into some strange animal.

     “Keep that thing away from me,” I said as he leaned down to hand it to me. Without even thinking about it, I popped him right in his big red bulbous nose. He went down, my mother shrieked, and all the kids started laughing.

     Now I was the clown, and I didn’t even have to wear any makeup.