Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Fleeing the Clowns

He sat with her at the bar. Perhaps her beauty had lost some of its sparkle since her glory days, but she was a fetching woman. And yes, she was fickle regarding her beliefs and convictions, but that night, her convictions were of little interest. He sought something lower.

He was surprised the next morning that he had no urge to bolt through the fog of the morning after. They chatted, and he very much enjoyed their pillow talk. She was a decade older, but in the soft morning light, he saw nary a wrinkle on her face. He felt utterly spent from the previous night's horizontal frenzy, but he felt a stirring nevertheless, a feeling that she wasn't just a one night stand.

He used the bathroom, returned to her, wrote down her number, and offered a goodbye kiss. He began walking through the living room. He froze. Hundreds of framed pictures of clowns covered her walls. How had he missed that as they walked through to the bedroom? He tried to tell himself that it was funny, but the gnawing pit in his stomach insisted otherwise. They looked at him. They accused him.

He let himself out, and sprinted across her apartment complex parking lot to his car, and his escape.

At home, he stood in the shower until the hot water abandoned him, trying to wash her off of his body, and out of his soul.






Prompted by Thom G's Three Word Wednesday. Today's words are fickle, sparkle, and wrinkle.

12 comments:

  1. expertly written,, tho i am left wondering why he feared clowns so much,, or what they represented to you...

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  2. Thanks for the comment, Paisley. Yeah, one of the things I'm still trying to figure out as a writer is just how much can be left unsaid. I suppose too much economy in a short story can leave a reader saying, "Huh?"

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  3. Hal, you're a man after my own heart - and mind. The twists in this are fantastic. Clowns. Man, they scare me.

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  4. i'm all about clown fear.... lovely bit of a twist!


    (said by a new orleans native)

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  5. Clowns...why did it have to be clowns...I hate clowns...

    I did, however, really enjoy this story. So much left unsaid that is best left to the imagination

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  6. interesting, a woman who collect clown photos - I think that's creepy, but certainly makes an intriguing story

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  7. Chilling. Clowns are the very worst, unless...

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  8. The clown pictures were definitely very creepy! I loved your clever take on this prompt.

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  9. Oh, CREEPY. Yeah, I'd have a really hard time going back to her, too. There's this bar in San Francisco called Embers (or used to be) that has clown paintings all over the place. We stumbled in there one new year's eve long ago and had to stay. Their juke box actually had Auld Lang Syne on it. Plus, there was no one else there, so we could actually get a drink.

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  10. I like it. I love anything twisted. This can take me to any way I wish for it. You are one great story teller. You can hold a readers interest..

    sultry days of summer

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  11. Lovely, the way I see it is; that he thinks, that she thinks, that she's made a clown out of him too!

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