The belly of a clown is filled with cotton candy and cola and colored flags. That’s what my cousin told me when we found the big dead clown.
Clowns weren’t people. They were creatures, symbols, agents. We found one, belly up, floating in a stagnant pond near a culvert. Mountain Dew bottles and cigarette butts clustered around the clown body, like a black hole pulling in stars and gas.
“Shit,” my cousin, Philomena, Phil, said, “that’s gnarly.”
I didn’t share Phil’s enthusiasm. She was a couple years older than me at the time. Middle school, I think, but it’s been a while.
“What is it?” I said. It looked like a clown, like the sort of clown you’d see at the circus or in a horror movie or painted on the side of the van, as if in warning.
“I dunno. It’s like a clown, but like, too much clown?” She had an unlit cigarette in her mouth. She liked to do that, just hold one there until it got soggy, until it fell apart and she had to make pspsps noises to get the paper off her tongue. Said she wouldn’t light a cig until she started high school: a gift to future-Phil.
The clown, if it was a clown, was big, too big; too big in ways that made something deep in my lizard brain go, Nah.
The clown’s body must’ve been as tall as me and Phil stacked on top of each other in a trench coat. It’s feet stuck straight up out of the pond, red leather shoes beginning to rot, bulbous toes peaking through. They that looked more like pickled hog trotters: huge split things, skin mottled white and purple, pushing through the size 26s. One of the shoes was peeled like a banana down to mid foot, a foot flensed of flesh leaving just a network of bone like the lace doilies under the brass lamps at Aunt Gerry’s place (that’s where Phil lives). There were too many toes on that foot, and I stopped counting at a dozen.
“Why is there a clown here?” I whispered. Phil was whispering too. Seemed appropriate.
“Murder or suicide.”
“Or a heart attack.”
Phil flung her thin, wiry arms wide, indicating the whole of this little ravine and the dirt road that ran over it. Colors seeped from the clown as it floated: white facepaint, red lips, blue accents, all those colors turning into a greasy smear of cotton candy vomit.
“Yeah, he was out for a hike in full clown regalia and keeled over from angina.”
Phil was on one and I wanted to get off the ride, so I focused on the pinecones between my feet.
“Do you see a tiny car? Do you see a bike with a big front wheel? Do you see a pedo van?” She let out a quiet, disbelieving chuckle. “Do you see a Carolla with mismatched body panels?”
I shook my head.
“Then how’d he get here if someone didn’t stick him here?”
I felt my ears get hot. Phil could be a bit much. I crossed my arms and looked into her wild, darting eyes.
“Maybe his clown-mom drove him?” I said, trying to stir the shit.
Phil looked towards the sky. “The youth of today,” she muttered.
The clown had ankles narrow as garden hoses. It looked like you could pick up one of those legs and twist it into a balloon animal. The tight blue fabric of his pants went all the way down and into the shoes. The too-thin ankles remained nearly the same diameter, until slightly above knees that looked like jam lids, and then pants flared ou to a waist band that arced several feet above the water, and seemed to be functioning a bit as a sail, slowly pushing the clown body around the run-off pond.
The clown’s torso was strangely thin again. Too big and too thin, with clothes that didn’t make sense. That’s what the clown was. Exactly like two trailer court kids in a trench coat trying to rent Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
“I want to get a closer look.” Phil didn’t wait for me to agree. She shuffle-slid down the short, slick, steep embankment to the narrow shore of the run-off pond. “A clown’s belly is filled with hot dogs, beer, and your mom’s panties all tied together.” She liked to say stuff like that. Liked to try and get a rise outta me. It didn’t work that often. It just made me think she was cool. For all I knew, the clown had eaten all my mom’s underwear. I wasn’t an expert in clownology. Maybe Phil was. Maybe that was a required class in middle school.
“Dad’ll tan my ass if I get my new shoes dirty,” I said, but Phil didn’t hear me. I slipped outta my Converse, tied the laces, and tossed them over a low branch. I slid down the bank to join her, trying to match her cool, casual lean. Some stentch like orange peels boiled in vinegar made my noise itch.
The clown’s yellow shirt clung to his wide, flat chest. His arms were hidden, trailing somewhere underwater. I imagined long, nightcrawler-fingers and the twisted little critters nibbling on them.
You could see every rib sticking through the fabric, from where they series of bones began under the waistband all the way up, every two or three inches, thin, sharp ribs, all the way up to the neck. Where the fabric was torn, more of that polka dot skin: all icing white and grape soda.
Phil had a stick—no, a full branch—Phil had a long, thin tree branch and was inching towards the edge of the water. The far end of the branch was wide, dozens of dead, gray leaves still hanging on. She raised the stick and brought the wide, leafy end down onto the clown with a whump.
She’s trying to bring the body in. The thought appears, and I know it’s true, and I hate that I know it’s true.
I slipped and felt my butt go cold where wet clay had immediately melded with the denim of my jeans. “Let’s go tell Aunt Gerry.”
Phil looked like she was fanning the water with the branch, but slowly the body moved towards her. The clown’s shirt tore in a dozen places where small, sharp branches stuck on each stroke. One sharp spike ripped a hole in the clown itself. A thin trickle of milkly blue and dark, dark red flow from the wound, coloring purple at the edges but mostly immiscible. Dark, rubbery things like big blood clots tumbled from the wound every few seconds.
I wanted to leave. I wanted to go tell Aunt Gerry and let Phil do whatever it was that Phil was going to do, but I didn’t know my way back. Phil liked to cut through woods and across yards to get to places. Even then, even as a kid, I preferred paths. You could always find your way back if you followed a road or sidewalk or deer trail.
Stay with the Phil and the dead clown, or strike out on on my own and take my chances with rutting bucks and rutting sasquatches, hungry black bears, and tree-dwelling pedophiles. I would stick with Phil for now. I wasn’t familiar with death at that age. I didn’t understand it. I hadn’t lost anything yet. Anyone.
I should have taken my chances with the cryptids and dirty diddlers. You live and you learn. Well, some of us do.
I skirted the edge of the irregular pool, hopping over the creek that let out from the pond. I almost slipped backwards into the water when I hit the bank, but managed to maintain my footing, and made the final few strides to where Phil had abandoned her stick.
“Thought you’d have it by now,” I said.
“Smartass,” Phil said. The cigarette was bent and wet, but still clung to her bottom lip, alongside a few brown scabs. Her buck teeth pulled one of those scabs into her mouth. “I think it moved.” She chewed.
Near the culvert, a bunch of road trash had accumulated. Phil left the branch and went over to a pile of plastic Valvoline bottles and crushed Milwaukee’s Bests and ragged t-shirts and broken two-by-fours and shredded tires and busted side mirrors. At least one washing machine sat nearby; a front loader, big cyclopean eye socket staring, forever, darkly, blindly.
I wanted to ask what she was looking for, but I also didn’t want to get roped in, so I stayed put. Crouched on my heels, I picked at rocks in the wet soil. Whenever I pried one free, I pitched it at the clown. A few hit. One split the side of the clown’s face, white greasepaint parting in a pink and gray grimace.
“Gross,” I muttered.
Phil looked up and then from me to the clown. She smirked. “Nice throw, Randy Johnson.”
The muscles around the rock hole relaxed and this second mouth opened proper: a long, thick, gray tongue unrolling past a lipless grin. The end of the tongue splashed into the water, and I saw some sort of fleshy mass at the end. It reminded me of the lure of an angler fish. My mouth started to sweat and I put my head between my knees.
“Now that’s fucking gnarly,” I heard Phil say and she must have really meant it because she only liked to say “fucking” when she really meant something, in the way an adult really meant something.
Once she had demonstrated this to me: “Where’s my fucking smokes,” she had said and her tone was so compelling I offered to go snitch a few from Aunt Gerry’s purse. And I never snitched anything from Aunt Gerry.
I heard a splash and opened my eyes to see a catfish clamp down on that rotting gray tongue-thing, it’s wide, flat head breaking the water with a grunting honk, throwing a spray of fetid ditch water around the clown. When the mist settled a few moments later, the catfish had half the clown’s tongue in its mouth, and three thin, sharp, bony spikes were piercing the catfish near the tail. As I watched, a fourth spike erupted from the thick loin of flesh near the catfish’s spine. The catfish jerked from side to side.
“Phil, are you seeing this?” I whispered. I was crouched on my heels, arms around my knees, trying not to shake. This was wrong, so wrong, and I knew the longer I watched, the longer I stayed, the more wrong it would get, and I didn’t know how much wrong I could take, how much more wrong the world could take before something broke, before something broke so bad that even if it healed, the scar tissue would always ache.
I don’t know if Phil responded to my question. I didn’t care. I couldn’t hear anything besides gurgling of the water falling from the culvert, the burbling of the water as it moved around the catfish, as the catfish continued to swim even as more bones pushed through its soft muscle and skin, even as its many wounds stopped leaking and its eyes went cloudy.
The water churned a few feet from me. A long dark shape wriggled towards the catfish, just under the surface. I watched it the ripples move, like a bottle rocket on a string, slam into the side of the fish. As it flopped, I saw it in earnest: a lamprey, three feet of sinew and teeth. The eel-like parasite latched on and began to writhe, to roll, to almost tie itself in knots as it sought purchase.
“Phil!” I called. She would love this, but more than that, I needed her to help. I couldn’t move. My hands were frozen stone around my knees. Another thin, dark shape darted across the pond, and a second lamprey hit the catfish. And then a third. And then, like a gate being lifted, dozens of lampreys swarmed the catfish; too many, too many for the one fish, and the water was moving like it was boiling, boiling broken spaghetti.
And then, on some unseen stimulus, the clown’s tongue jerked, setting a dozen bone hooks, pulling a dozen lampreys with it through the hole in the clown cheek. Teeth moved up and down under thin, rotting skin; up and down and up and down and around like a carousel, mushing up twitchy lamprey flesh, even as the injured and forgotten ones tried to push into the grinding un-mouth.
I convulsed and fell back onto my butt, my pants fully wet (only with mud and clay!) by this point, and the spell was broken. I scrambled away, heels digging into the soil, fingernails bending backwards.
Phil appeared in my vision then, an avenging angel with a buzzcut and a bottle-green plastic net and red clay up to the knees of her black jeans, craning over the top of me. She followed my eyes to the clown body, the foaming lamprey flesh, and nodded solemnly. “Nice,” she said.
It didn’t seem nice to me. Nothing about this seemed nice. I wanted to go back to Aunt Gerry’s and eat store-brand sandwich cookies and watch “the Wheel.” That was nice. Whatever this was—this clown monster, this lamprey trap, this calcified and painted and polluting thing—this wasn’t nice.
“Phil, let’s go. This is fucked,” and I never used that word, lest some adult appear out of thin air and stuff a bar of Dial in my mouth, but dammit, these were some adult-fucking-circumstances.
She laughed, a pig-snort and gasped, shaking her head. “Why would you want to leave when it’s just starting to get choice?” She gave me an okay sign and clicked her cheek.
“It’s alive, Phil,” I said, pointing at the raft of fish-gore surrounding the clown head, “It did that.”
Phil set her plunder down, and I noticed the tin coffee can under the plastic net. She reached into the can and grabbed a long, rusted bolt, and then tied it to the edge of the net.
When I looked back over the pond, the clown-thing was sitting up.
Sitting up in the water.
Sitting up in the water, head turned towards the two of us. The tongue lolled out of the side of its cheek, all bones and fish and lamprey gone. The little fleshy chunk at the end of the tongue was getting bigger as I watched, expanding into a pulsing, dull-red disk.
Lollipop, and I didn’t want to think it but that’s what it was: a lollipop, a sucker, hard candy on a stick. The sort of thing a child might want, might expect from a clown.
I grabbed Phil’s collar and started to back away, keeping the clown in my sight. Phil had several bolts and nails through the edges of her net, and didn’t notice I was dragging her until she fell on her ass in the cold wet mud in the same way I had. I didn’t stop pulling and felt the fabric get tight at her neck.
“Leggo, you shit, I’m choking,” she said, twisting and turning out of my grip. I grabbed her arm and continued to pull her waway but she jerked free. “You spaz, what the fuck!” She punched me in the shoulder and my whole arm went numb so I raised the other arm and pointed. She followed my finger and I watched her body crumple in on itself, as if every ounce of gumption and reserve in her had liquefied and flowed down into the soil. Maybe it wasn’t gumption. Maybe it was just piss.
Now it was Phil’s turn to grab me by the collar and start dragging me away, away from the pond, down the embankment further, into the darker woods, and I didn’t say anything, just let her drag me away and then we were finally going up again, up and out of the forest and the ravine, and before I knew it, I was muddy and barefoot on the side of a gravel road. The sun was shining. There were no clowns or clown-things anywhere.
Phil took a few moments to look up and down the road before nodding and grabbing my collar agian. I wriggled out of her grasp, or tried to—she had the strength of high-tension wire—and eventually I just had to say, “It’s okay, Phil. We’re alone.”
She shook her head and muttered something about needing to get back to Aunt Gerry’s for dinner because they were having beer brats and 7-Ups and I could have her 7-Up if I promised not to tell Aunt Gerry or anyone else about the clown-thing that day. I promised immediately, because it was an extra 7-Up.
My fingers were crossed. Anyway, who would believe us?
Who would want to?
Oh shit my shoe—
The clown-thing’s tongue deflated, red lollipop collapsing into something small and hooked. The tongue seemed to extrude itself from the clown’s second mouth, an endless pock-marked gray serpent, the hooked tip flicking above the surface like a cobra, like it was tasting the air , like it was looking.
The tip of the clown tongue hit the shore and paused for a moment before continuing across the mud, before transitioning up the bank. There was a smell in the air, a faint, oh so faint chemical, a pheremone, something signaling to the clown-thing or at least the tongue to come this way.
The tongue topped the embankment and entered the dense woods. There, honing in on its target, it curled around the trunk of a small tree. Over a low branch were a pair of sneakers.
The tongue became rough and bumpy as the gray bark of the tree, the tip curving into a viscious spike that buried itself in the soft canvas.
The belly of the clown was filled with lamprey flesh and catfish flesh and an entire deer skull and a thousand tadpoles, and soon, very soon, maybe something just a little bit sweeter.
