This is all Jen's fault. She said that I couldn't write an erotic story about clowns. Okay. Maybe this isn't very erotic - but it does have a clown, and she is having sex. So ha ha. I did it. :P
Uhm. Don't read this if you're not over 18. Or if you're at work. Or if stories about clowns having sex are illegal where you live - or frighten you.
You've been warned.
...
The small tent smelled of hay and sweat, and outside, she could hear the bustling carny folk getting ready for tonight's performances. Tammi sat in front of her cluttered desk. The desk was littered with dishes of greasepaint and brushes and mementos from the dozens of states she'd been in, and old faded photographs taped to the broken mirror, and a few cheap pieces of junk jewelry from her childhood. Tammi sat there and tried to still her mind. It was essential that she find that quiet part of her mind, that place untouched by the horror and pain of her childhood, the violence and nastiness of her adulthood. It was from this tiny place, this seed of joy within her broken soul, that she drew the happiness and silliness that allowed her to entertain the children each night. When she'd found it, she looked up into the mirror, and began to apply the white face paint.
Tammi was 27 years old, but most people mistook her for 35. Once, she had been a pretty girl: but that was a lifetime ago. Her skin was dry and damaged from wearing the thick clown make-up each night, with red blotches across her nose and cheeks, and harsh crows feet around the eyes. Her hair hung limply to her shoulders, damaged from the hot pink wigs she wore. Her eyes were sunken and bloodshot from too much Jack Daniels this morning and too many tears over the years.
But as she began to smear the white paint across her face, all that started to change. She didn't become beautiful. No makeup could turn back the years. But it did allow her to create a new persona, allow a new creature to temporarily wear her skin. For a couple moments, she stared at her face in the mirror. It was completely white. No expression. No wrinkles. Nothing but two eye holes, two nostrils, and a tiny slit where her mouth was. Tammi had disappeared completely. Gone was the 5 year old who would huddle in her thin blankets at night, hunger pains wracking her frail frame, as her parents fought and then had drunken, violent sex in the next room. Gone was the 12 year old who did whatever her stepfather wanted, so that he wouldn't touch her 3 year old sister (only to learn, years later, that he did it anyway). Gone was the 14 year old who slept in alleyways and stole and sucked guys off in order to get enough money to feed her heroin habit. Gone was the 17 year old who went to Washington State's women's prison for knifing her pimp after he beat her so badly that her left eye had swollen shut, and she'd gone deaf in that ear. And gone was the woman who had spent the last 6 years traveling through the South, performing for a third-rate Circus, never quite making enough money to squirrel away to escape her hellish drudgery. All that was gone. Only the purity of nothingness remained.
And then she took the brush and dabbed it into the dish of red paint. She etched a smile across her lips, and applied two dabs of color to her cheeks to make them look rosy and lively. Then, slowly, she began to draw on the detailed eyes of her clown face, and when she was done, she put on the big rubber red nose and hot pink wig and looked at herself in the mirror. Her lips curled at the ends into what was supposed to be a smile, and she turned her head this way, and now that, trying to convince the mirror that she was happy. The mirror refused to be convinced.
Especially when Tammi saw the flap at the entrance of her tent being lifted, and the broad frame of Chester step inside. Chester was a short man and extremely fat. He was balding, with greasy hair that he combed over in an attempt to hide it. His jowls and chins were covered in rough bristles that never quite became a beard. He chewed on nasty smelling cigars and coughed up bloody phlegm, which he spat everywhere - even in his performer's tents. His huge belly hung over his gray dress slacks. And even across the room, she could smell the fetid stench of his unwashed body. Tammi would have curled her nose in disgust - but it might have ruined the paint.
