I got a lot of silly ideas when life got sad.īut first, I had to find my wee buddy and wake him up. Today we would fly to that moon, a place with no sadness and no clowns. I would take my best friend, a friendly rat named Singer Boy, and we would build a rocket ship out of parts I’d been collecting along the riverbank. My heart pounded and my mouth felt dry as dirt. I could see where long-disappeared oceans had once lapped against silver shores.
I could see the details of all the craters and mountains on its surface. It was huge and bright and looked like it had been dusted with a thin layer of gold. And there was something else there, hanging in the air. It looked like it had been dipped in neon, but it still bore deep-purple bruises from the sun’s vigorous midnight bath. I kicked off the itchy wool blanket and checked the sky through my window. And even though my boss had a good point, I still wanted to go home.īut that was yesterday and all the days before. I tried to stand up straight but my knees buckled. "Get up! You lazy clown! Get up! You know what you are? You're a sad sack of clownish misery!” He just kept yelling and waving that whip above his head. Well, he took out his tiger whip and started swinging it around. You know the ringmaster who likes to wear a suit made from his own hair? He's got this huge beard that looks like it's made from rusty razor blades and he always wears the same three pairs of pants: one green, one blue, one brown. Said I looked like I’d been attacked by a dirty laundry fairy and left in an alley.Īnd then my boss came at me during work.
Yesterday someone shouted at me from a clown car. The possibilities were endless.īut when you can’t roll your weary funny bones out of bed in the morning… We could call ourselves the Fainting Ladies, or maybe The Sighing Angels. There would be a juggling act called The Swooning Fainting Ladies With A Touch Of Schadenfreude. Maybe I could start a new kind of circus, where sadness ran away with the elephants. A healthy dose of super-sadness and melancholy to lighten the burden. What I needed was an adventure, a little danger. Somewhere along the way those colors dyed into my skin, that ruffled collar and those two floppy red-rubber shoes defined me. I woke up the saddest clown in this painted world. The story is called "Singer Boy and the Trip to the Moon." The Saddest Clown There’s a short commentary about how I wrote this story after the outro if you’d like to stick around and listen to that.
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