I am not crazy.  That sentence is plastered in my brain after years of constantly reassuring myself with it.  As I rinse the blood off my hands, I start to question if it is true.  

      I look into the bathroom mirror and am startled at my own reflection.  The bright clown makeup I had so thoughtfully applied this morning has been distorted and mangled.   My masterpiece has been ruined.  I want the man in the mirror to go away.  I need him to go away.  I know all control was lost when I see the shards of mirror land at my feet.  My hand throbs, but the mirror man is gone so its okay.  It is all okay. 

       When I was a kid,  I absolutely adored clowns.  Everyone did.  Thats why I did what I did.   Children need to be taught to be grateful.  When a child is not grateful, like stare at there smartphones instead of witnessing the wondrous joys of a hardworking clown,  they should be punished.  I just punished the children for them.  I am not crazy.

      Would crazy people take the time to carefully capture thirteen kids without being witnessed once?  No.  Would crazy people be able to hide thirteen bodies without a single one being discovered?  No.  

      So I, am not crazy.  

I screamed, the sound ripping through my bright red lips. My hands flew to my eyes- probably smudging the eyeshadow - in my vain attempts to remove the images, still burning in my mind from the nightmare that had rudely awoken me. It had been so real, so vivid!

In it, I had been a rather handsome middle-aged man with an office job, a beautiful wife and three children. Perfectly sane... perfectly boring!

With a shriek I leapt from the bed, aiming straight for the bathroom. I fell through the door onto the vanity and looked in the mirror, sighing with relief at the reflection that stared back at me; my own makeup smeared face underneath a head that was topped with dirty, green hair. Glancing down, I saw I was still wearing the blood-stained shirt from the night before. There was even still blood on my hands. The sight made me smile, my reflection smirking right along with me.

Whistling a jaunty tune, I returned to the bedroom and my smile widened. She was still there, gloriously naked and lying on the bed where I had left her.

"Well of course you're where I left you, doll," I said amidst my laughter. "You can't go anywhere when you're dead now, can you!"

I picked up the pretty, blonde and blue-eyed corpse. Shit she has a great set of tits, I thought. Funny how they can still be so perky even in death. I began to dance, humming the waltz as I spun her around, her luscious bosom bouncing with the movement and her silky, bloodied hair flying. I laughed again. I couldn't help it. It was just too perfect.

"Who needs a beautiful wife when I got you, doll?"

She didn't answer. She just stared at me, her mouth hanging open, ready and waiting. I was only too happy to oblige, the nightmare long forgotten.

She's such a good doll.

©CJ

“How exciting, huh?” the chipper nurse addressed the patient. “Your bandages will be removed today and you can see yourself for the first time!”

The patient, Nedly Nelson, tried to respond, but couldn’t, for his throat was still wrapped and intubated. He could not wait until he could say just what he thought of his new face. How dare the judge sentence him to life with a clown’s face! Hadn’t the judge heard of the Eighth Amendment? If anything was cruel and unusual punishment, it was having to walk around with a crazy face forever more!

So yeah, he’d been convicted on twelve counts of kidnapping, torturing, and murdering clowns. Did that really mean he deserved to be sentenced to live the rest of his life as one? He thought not... Unable to control his mind, Nedly fell to remembering some of his crimes.

First, there was Ripples. Ripples! Stupid-ass name for anyone, even a clown! He’d grabbed the “entertainer” from behind the carnival, taken it to his warehouse, and tortured the crap out of it. He’d especially taken great pleasue in carving the guy’s mouth into a real permanent smile, a la the Joker. Ripples had thought it real funny to squirt him with his flower three times! Who was laughing now?!

Then came Dan. If Ripples was a dumb name, Dan was an even worse name for a clown. But, oh, the screams and yells that came out of Dan’s mouth as he had cut off his toes! Bet he wouldn’t be taunting anybody else with those big shoes!...Course, he was dead now, so he wouldn’t be doing anything else, big feet or not.

Most of the other clown tortures ran into a blur, but he was quite fond of the last one. She’d been a girl clown named Peaches so of course he’d covered her liver in herbs before he ate it. But that was after raping her a couple of times. She may’ve been a clown, but she’d still had a pussy, so he’d made use of it.

“Alright, Mr. Nelson.” Doctor Hannah broke his reverie. “Time to take off those bandages, huh?”

The doctor, obviously reveling in Nedly’s discomfort, beckoned orderly Benji to assist him in putting the patient into a wheelchair before wheeling him over to the mirror on the wall. There the convict sat, dread gripping his whole body as the process began. Nedly watched as the physician removed layer upon layer of wrapping. When he finally got to the last layer, the doctor removed the intubation, rebandaging the area before continuing. When Nedly tried to speak, he quieted him, “Just a moment, we’re almost there.” He removed the last layer and Nedly took in the full visual, horror filling his every fiber.

He tried to scream, but nothing came out.

“Oooooh, that’s right,” the doctor spoke. “We decided that being a clown was too good for you, so we made you a mime, instead. You can’t talk any more, either.”

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The red smile stretched across its face. It's pale face dripping with blood from it's fresh kill, this time it was a little boy about five or six, he had little brown hair and a polo shirt with khaki pants that were cover in the dark red color of his own blood . The little boy's guts were ripped out of him like somthing a rabid dog would do. the clown stood up with its polkadotted outfit covered in blood splaters and holding the little boy's heart in its hand. Then the thing turned slowly towards me and its smile grow as its eyes met mine. 

Father Floggybottom hit the wall, and all of his 200 pounds on his 6 foot frame went limp. His skin and priestly vestments snagged on the porous and jagged teeth of the red brick as he slid to the ground. The delicate pink tutu snagged as if it were hanging on, pulling the gossamer material from his side before it released and snapped back to his rainbow polkadot tights. 

Floggybottom rolled off his left side and fell against the wall, and returned to the concrete. Before he could take pleasure in the cool cement's caress, he pushed up with both palms planted firmly on the ground. He paused momentarily, wondering where the smeared and splotched imprint on the cement, left by face paint and blood, had come from. 

He scraped his palm and broke nail of his index finger to the quick. 

The security light at the top corner of the building highlighted his efforts. Floggybottom stood like a drunkard on respite from his sojourn home: One arm propped out, a palm supporting his swaying weight, head bowed. Blood ran down the front of his face and pooled in the bright red bulb of his nose. It sloshed as he swayed. The skin on his bald head burned and tingled from scraps and lacerations. It was almost as read as the tufts of hair on the sides of his head. 

Bored with his progress, the security light switched off. 

"Don't turn off the light, Father...One more..." he slurred. "I swear, do good papa. Me do good."

Father Floggybottom wondered how drunk the guy who said that must be. He laughs harder when he realized it had been him and he had been sober for 91 days. When he drank, he drank to a stupor. The reason he quit: The real life monsters morphed into unspeakable beings of darkness and pain. He could never drink enough to drown them.

Floggy took a deep breath and, waking up the security light, shuffled past the end of the cracked pavement onto the sparsely grassed dirt of the playground, fifty feet from the wall. He turned and faced the building. 

"Watch this, you...ahhhrgh!"

Floggy sprinted as fast as he could in his half-calf high combat boots and slammed into the wall, his head taking the brunt of the force. 

Sister Mary would find him at dawn when she came to begin the day's meal preparation, probably seeing him out of the corner of her eye. She wold think it was the drunk they've had to remove from the grounds on several occasions. 

Sister would not recognize him. Understandable given the distortion of his head from colliding with the wall, also understandable if one were to only account for the passage of time. Last time she saw him, he had not been a clown. It is only after staring into his cold, dead eyes that she would recall his frightened and pleading eyes twenty years ago before being closed behind the heavy rectory door.