I’m a Circus Clown, but the new guy is freaking me out (part 1)

I imagine the title alone has you asking questions. As it stands, I don’t really know how to start any of this, and I’m on the verge of a panic attack as it is, but I’ll try my best.

This all started a year ago. It was the worst moment of my life up until now, but still no less horrific. I killed three people with a sneeze. It didn’t matter that I was forced to go in sick, or that the other rope-bearer was drunk beyond the point of speaking. The show had to end with its grand finale, and by God, did it.

The Pizelli brothers were a star attraction. Trained since birth to have better core strength than a gorilla and balance that would rival a gyroscope, they were our best performers. I was, and am by all measures of importance, a nobody. I wasn’t the head clown- even though I’m now one of three and the longest-employed- and I didn’t have any special gimmick. I was the product of a grandfather who loved to make people laugh and the son of a man who beat the laughter out of me before meeting his fate in a car accident. I’d like to say I’m a nobody, but I’m a nobody who killed three acrobats.

The trick was that they’d drop from the trapeze, land atop a slack rope, and then stack on each other's shoulders while suspended twenty feet above the ring, all without a net. I was one of the men responsible for minding the rope. The ends of the cord were held by two posts on either side of the ring and tightened with a steel rope binding. It was a sturdy hold. The problem wasn’t the rope. The problem was the platform. It was old, and that night we discovered the hole for the post had been set crooked. “The ground is too hard,” I remember the workers saying. They’d pleaded with the ringmaster that morning to hold off on the trick, at least until they could fix it. The ringmaster would hear none of it. They sold tickets too well. This was the star attraction.

I wish he’d listened.

Towards the end of the act, I sneezed. I didn’t mean to, but that hardly mattered. My body jolted, and with my weight, I caused the whole structure to collapse. The pole fell, and I toppled out of it like a spilled drink of velour and mistakes. My bald cap fell off, along with one of my shoes. It hit an assisting stagehand in the face, taking him down with me. The audience loved it. Everyone thought it was a part of the act. They cheered, laughed, and clapped, but reality set in with the deafening crunch of bones on the sand. It was the sound of snapping celery.

All three Pizelli brothers fell atop each other, breaking their necks- and other things- in front of hundreds of witnesses. The cheers turned to screams as I was left dazed on the sand below, staring up at the big top's spiraling red and white stripes. My ruffled collar and bloody makeup made me feel as dry and itchy as a washed-up fish. I lay there, with three dead men not thirty feet away. Victims of a careless act. Killed by a sneeze.

I spent three months in recovery for an ankle fracture. When I returned to work, it was hard not to notice the stares and whispers caused by my arrival. Even if the lions and elephants thought I was innocent, the other clowns, strongmen, jugglers, dancers, puppeteers, and remaining acrobats found me horribly guilty. A few defended me, half-heartedly, but enough, and fewer still would talk to me. That was fine, as I never really did like talking much as it was. Even my clown character, “Bubbles,” was mute.

However, even with this newfound social standing, I developed a whole new problem.

Panic attacks were becoming more common with me as time went on. The guilt I felt every time I looked at a trapeze net was enough to make me start hyperventilating and see black spots in my vision. One of my worst episodes was when I was twisting a balloon elephant for a child, and I saw a squirrel jump from one tent top to another. It missed its mark and fell to the ground. I did the same. I was a screaming, irreconcilable mess for the better part of an hour. As tears ran down my face and I fell into a near-catatonic state, the other clowns decided to play it off as part of a gag. Two picked me up and placed me in a wheelbarrow, another threw a tarp over my head and played “Taps” on the kazoo.

They docked my pay for that.

I became a background worker. There were no real uniforms, so they made me wear the same outfit I clowned in. I shoveled elephant dung in clown shoes and a red nose. I picked up trash with an old broomstick handle that somebody had sunk a nail into. I was the subject of scorn and unmet glances for the better part of a year. At night, sometimes, I’d see the shadows of the performers through the red and white walls of the big top. Their lanky forms danced, and applause sounded like music from a far-off radio. They mesmerized me and made my heart ache.

My grandfather joined the circus as a clown in the sixties and married my grandmother, a contortionist, shortly after. He made a name for himself as a gifted comedian. He could make anything out of balloons and even had a gag where a balloon face lip-synced a record of Pavarotti. He was the best clown the Ealing Brothers Circus ever had, and the ringmaster still told stories about him all these years later.

“No one has ever made me laugh as hard as him,” Ringmaster Bill, one of my few friends, told me one night over a jar of moonshine. His mustache was slick with liquor and regret, turning silver in the moonlight that leaked through his trailer window. I remember having milk that night. “By God, he was great. Funniest man I ever knew. Never complained, never cussed, never did anything but laugh and smile his way through life.” He finished his fourth shot before saying:

“It should have been your father who died in that fire.”

I agreed with him with a nod over a sip of milk.

My father was never as funny as my grandfather. I think at some point a zebra kicked him in the head, or something like that. Something must’ve happened to him. Whatever it was, he turned into a degenerate alcoholic by the time I was born. It was bad enough that my mother left him before I even got to know her. He burned her out of all the photos he had in our trailer, robbing me of even an image to associate with her. My grandmother died somewhere in all of this, leaving nothing but a family of sad men and motherless children.

One night, the animal tent caught fire, and several of our attractions burned to death. The elephants made it out fine, but the zebras, tigers, and other miscellaneous creatures perished. Among the miscellanea was my grandfather. He’d saved three dogs and a horse from the blaze, but the tent collapsed on him before he could make it out of his last run.

It was just me and my dad after that, and with no stable adult left in our immediate vicinity, he spiraled into a drunken haze that he never crawled out of. He became so depressed at one point that he never took off his clown makeup. He’d paint his whole body stark white and would giggle to himself over jokes he only told his bottles. He died in a car accident when I was eighteen, leaving me nothing but a scar on the top of my head from where he once smashed a plate and laughed.

That was my life, and every bag I carried around. At least, that was until I met Giblet.

Giblet joined the circus about six months ago, and I knew from the second he showed his face in the clown tent that something was off.

He was almost obscenely tall- at least seven-and-a-half feet- and thin. He looked like a demented child’s drawing of a clown come to life. He had a red curly wig that was bald on the top and huge striped overalls that drooped over a pair of long flat shoes. He had a tie that reached almost to the ground, and if you followed it from its tail up, you’d discover a wide, bone-white grin. The only thing paler than his teeth was his face paint, which seemed to cover him completely. His head looked almost peanut-shaped, but I wrote that off as just a part of his makeup. Besides, as messed up as it might be to say, if that was the natural shape of his head, it didn’t necessarily stick out at our circus. Especially with the clowns.

He came in from basically out of nowhere, but we were always hiring clowns since they could double with backstage and retail work. He took to the job easily enough, and none of the other clowns ever voiced an issue with him, but we did notice some things that irked us.

We never saw him out of his costume. None of us. Not even me, and I had more opportunities than most, given the nature of my duties. He would perform gags and magic tricks for the guests, like making chocolate coins appear from children’s ears or producing flowers from his sleeve, but he’d also do things that were just off-putting. One time, he twisted balloons into the shape of a heart in an almost unreal amount of time, but then he kept adding more and more to it until it started to look like an actual anatomical model. He gave that to a twelve-year-old, and, to his credit, the kid loved it. His parents were a little more than unnerved by it, and they told the staff as much. However, because there wasn’t an administration in the way most traditional workplaces have, the incident went primarily unnoticed.

Then there was an issue involving the mice. Unfortunately, the nature of a circus leads you to have more contact with things like rodents and bugs, and there’s not a ton you can do about it. In November, when the crowds were getting low, we were struggling with the budget. We were doing our best to hold out until the Christmas rush by conserving our animal feed, but a pack of mice started raiding our supplies. I could hardly do anything about it, and what mouse traps I did have only ever caught two or three of what must have been over 10, maybe even 20 of the pests. The other clowns had about the same luck as I did, and we told ringmaster Bill as much. However, right in the middle of the crisis Giblet stepped forward and said he'll take care of it.

“I'll have them before you know it,” he said, smiling through every word. “I'll make sure they have a good time.”

That’s how he talked. Every word felt like the tail of a giggle. Ringmaster Bill let him have at it and told him it better work. I’m sad to say, it worked better than we could’ve possibly imagined.

The next morning, when I went into the feed tent, I saw what he’d done.

Suspended from the ceiling poles of the tent by glittery yarn were almost two dozen rat traps, each with a mouse clamped tightly in their springs. That alone was disturbing enough, but as I stared longer at the rat traps, watching them sway under the weight of their pale victims, I noticed that the back of each trap had writing in Neon Sharpie.

“DON’T MIND ME,” one said, “JUST HANGING AROUND.”

“MY NECK IS KILLING ME,” said another.

“IF I WERE A FISH, I’D BE A SNAPPER.”

“HICKORY DICKORY DOCK, THE MOUSE FELL OFF THE CLOCK.”

Joke after joke, line after line, they turned darker and darker. I hadn’t even realized I’d vomited. I started to hyperventilate and panic, imagining the sound of their necks like celery, like the Pizellis. Then I heard a deep snicker. It was hyena-like. A raspy, genuine, morbid laugh that pooled in my ears like tar. I hadn’t even noticed Giblet standing at the back of the tent. His painted smile almost looked real.

“Sorry for the mess,” he said, “It was crunch time.”

At that, he laughed out loud, and I began to scream. I ran from the tent and rambled to everyone I saw about mice. Eventually, Bill grabbed hold of me and eased me down. I told him everything I could manage and dragged him like a dog on a leash to the feed tent. However, when we got there, all of the traps were gone. Giblet wasn’t there. There wasn’t an echo of laughter. There were only the feed bags, lying on their pallets, not a mouse or toothmark in sight. I went hysterical.

An hour later, I was in my family trailer, curled up on my mattress under a thin blanket, shivering and rocking back and forth. Bill called an ambulance, and the paramedics checked me out. They wanted to give me something for the shock, but I didn’t have insurance. They went away saying I’d had a severe panic attack that had resulted in a hallucination, and Bill readily accepted that idea. He poured some moonshine into a glass of milk and made me drink the whole thing. On the bright side, I got the day off. On the other hand, the ostracization became even worse, and even my few remaining sympathizers wouldn’t speak to me. Bill started avoiding me.

I started doing my work at night when the shows were going on. At least that way, I could avoid the stares. We’d moved location about three times that season, and with each move, I was almost left behind. If I weren’t so handy with the animals, I think they would’ve committed to it. I thought about leaving, but in the end, I didn’t know where I’d go. I was raised in the circus and “homeschooled.” I had no qualifications or certificates for anything. This was all I had. I was alone and was attached to the circus as some parasitic organism or unwanted growth that could easily be removed if anyone bothered to try. I couldn’t afford any meds for my condition, and every day I woke up from that point was filled with dread. I started twitching more and developed a perpetual tremor. The other clowns started calling me “Shakey”.

Comedians.

I started to ache, and before I knew it, I developed a lingering slump in my posture. It hurt to stand up straight. I felt like a hunchback without a bell tower to hide in. I was the show for the circus performers. The urban legend that killed three acrobats. A killer clown who went insane and started seeing things. All the while, the real horror, that giggling freak, melded in. Unscathed by ridicule. He was just odd. I was the freak.

I grew to hate Giblet and tried to avoid him at every opportunity, but one night while I was staring at the shadows of the big top’s walls, I heard him speak without a laugh.

“You want that, don’t ya?” he said to me. He was half illuminated by a Ghostlight from one of the tents. He was twisting his tie in his hands. He was still smiling, but his voice was lower than normal. More relaxed. “Oh yeah… You want it, alright. But you can’t suck down the nerves. Plus, everyone here hates you, so who’d even give you the chance…” He stopped fiddling with his tie and let it drop taut from his hand. It was weighed down by a rubber chicken, dangling by the neck. “You could always choose the smart way out.” He let out a sharp bellowing laugh that only lasted a second before returning to that same low voice. I was too petrified to move. He tucked the chicken in the bib pocket of his overalls and started petting it. “There is another option.”

I didn’t understand what he was saying, but I didn’t like it. I could feel my throat closing, and my breath became more static. My white face paint felt greasy, pilling with sweat. I wanted to rip my red nose off just for the sake of feeling cold air in my nostrils. I thought of all of those mice and acrobats. The sound of breaking celery. The morbid jokes. I wanted to scream.

I didn’t have the chance to.

Giblet took something new out of his pocket and tossed it on the grass in front of me. I jumped back, thinking it was another dead mouse.

To my surprise, it was nothing like that.

It was a piece of candy. Or, at least it looked like one. It had a bright red metallic wrapper. It was about the same size as a lozenge, but there was no logo. I looked up and saw Giblet cocking his head to the side, curiously.

“What is that?” I asked him

“A lil something for your nerves,” he said, courteously. “I think you’ll like it just fine.”

“Why should I eat that?” I tried to kick it back, but my shoes were too big to maneuver.

“It’ll help you, Bubbles,” he said, taking out another identical candy and unwrapping it. It did look like a cough drop under all that red. He popped it in his mouth and crushed it up in his teeth. It sounded like glass breaking. “It’s a medicine. A home remedy. I’ve been taking them for years.”

“I’m good, thanks.” I turned to leave, taking my trash bag and stick with me.

“That’s fine,” he told me, grinding his jaws. “Your grandaddy was that way at first, too.”

That stopped me dead. I turned around and saw him lick his teeth.

“That’s right,” he said, “I knew him when he was younger. Met him while he was just a runaway.”

“You didn’t know him,” I said. Giblet looked surprised and feigned offense

“He was my best student,” he told me, his voice dropping almost to a whisper. “Who do you think taught him everything he knew?”

“There’s no way-”

“Think about it,” Giblet said. “The balloon art. The magic tricks. Every gag he ever learned was because of me.”

“No,” I said, my voice shaky but firm. I felt heat rising in my chest. “You’re a demented lunatic.”

He laughed. “He never did join the fold completely, but you know what they say. The third time’s the charm.”

A sudden burst of applause from the big top made me turn my head and grip my chest. I almost eased myself back into a state of relief, but then I felt a hot air down my neck.

Giblet was standing directly over me. His face was less than a foot away from mine, and his grin was the widest I’d ever seen. He held up the “medicine” in front of me and said:

“There are so many things you could do if you’d only try…” Without breaking eye contact, he slid the candy-whatever it was-into the pocket of my suit. “You know they all hate you,” he said. “But not us. We care about you very deeply.” He patted me on the head. “Consider what you’d become if only you leaped. After all… what do you have to lose?”

He started laughing, and I started running. I dropped the trash I’d been collecting and rushed to the trailer, my wide feet flopping like seal fins. I got inside, shut the door, and drew every curtain I had as I fell into another heavy attack.

I imagined the noises, the laughter, the evil realities of my actions, the hate others felt for me, and anything else my wild head could conjure up. My chest felt like it was about to burst open and implode at the same time. I felt empty, yet full. I felt like a balloon being held underwater. I started hearing my father’s laughter and seeing the phantom of a flying plate. I saw Giblet’s smile in my own.

As I write this, the candy is still on my table, and that freak’s words are still in my ears. I want to take it. I need help. What should I do?