The Sad Clown

The Sad Clown

By Jordan Cohen

I build two circuses. One in my mind. The other my twin and I build outside.

We are Mexican beans on a trampoline.

Our skin turns to bleeding chalk on the frigid suburban streets of Plainview, Long Island.

The soft chime of my grandfather’s grandfather clock strikes for dinner. It strikes every 15 minutes, which is weird, but we were keeping track. We hear it and sprint.

We pass the little boxes, all the same. The rooves play with the sky.  The trees shake and rumble as they let fall drops of rain.

In my grandfather’s house in Plainview my mom is sitting, drinking her martini dry.

My grandfather sips his diet coke and his three-legged cat limps by. My dad sneezes and it sounds like a yell. He is eating steak and drinking vodka.

The house smells like grandpa and my lips are chapped from too much cold sun. My nerves are stretched taut as a bowstring for some reason. I go downstairs to the basement bathroom to wash my hands in the warm water. Soapy blood. Before I join my family for dinner I stop dead in my tracks to look at the picture on the door of my uncle’s room. My uncle, Dadu, was adopted from Washington D.C. My grandfather went to visit relatives and buy a car. He got his car, but also wound up with a kid too. A kid who loved football and had an old and tattered picture of a sad clown on his door.

If the ruined ruins of the clown could speak, he would marvel at my childish shock. After all, he has been through so much. That’s why his faint paint is laughing on the outside, but he is crying on the inside. In his mute and shattered eloquence, he spoke for a century before me. About my uncle who taped him on his door. About life in the ticky-tacky little boxes. I snapped out of my trance as I heard my heavy grandfather lumber down the stairs:

“This old picture, huh. Heavy as sadness, but sweet as love”

He puts his calloused giant hands on my shoulders and I felt comfortable.

In a squeaky voice I ask: “Why is the clown sad, what is the point? Why did Uncle Dadu keep this on his door? Who made this? Did Nana like this picture? Can I have it?....”

The light was leaving the dusty basement windows and my grandfather’s grandfather clock struck and the birds squawked obnoxiously outside in the unsympathetic air. I slowly walked up the stairs, I was hungry. We both seemed to fade with the light. To blend in with the house and the clock and the sounds. My grandpa lifted his voice louder than the cries of the clocks and the seagulls and the short distance and called out:

“Yes, beautiful child, remember this moment for a time when I cannot”

I couldn’t really hear him, but I looked back. Heavy as sadness, but sweet as love.