I Found a Circus Tent in the Woods Behind My House by Ben Farthing

Author:Ben Farthing [Farthing, Ben]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Ben Farthing

I almost wished for the dark vindictiveness of the hanging ribbon tent.

We found ourselves in a brightly colored, eerily lit space full of clown props. Not the little trinkets and gags we’d found in the trunks, but a large plywood set design, cut and painted to look like clowns.

One close to us was a plywood cut-out of a fat clown, with a funhouse-style mirror for a belly. Its face was painted white and red. Its cartoonish eyes seemed to bore into Jacob.

I shifted to put myself between the painted-on eyes and my little boy.

The mirror reflected my movement, warping it into a spiral that couldn’t be a natural bending of the light.

I carried Jacob past the two-dimensional clown.

Throughout the rest of the tent, a crowd of fake clowns watched us.

Half of them were the same cutout style that had greeted us. But the other half were statues—painted and unpainted wax, wood that looked to be carved with a chainsaw, and even a welded metal impressionist sculpture with golf club limbs, a muffler head, and a spring doorstop nose.

Jacob was still hanging on to his bowling pin, and I could feel his other trinkets bulging in his pockets. “Are they silly clowns, Daddy?”

“What do you mean?” I walked carefully past an unpainted wax statue of a comically skinny clown with a giant bowtie. If my sense of direction wasn’t too wonked out, then if I cut through behind a chainsaw carving of a clown on a tiny tricycle, I’d get around the tent with hanging ribbons and we’d be on our way back to the main ring.

Jacob reached out to poke the wax statue with his bowling pin. It rocked precariously before righting itself. “I saw nice clowns on Disneyworld Plus. But Christy saw a scary clown on YouTube.”

While Jacob could never remember the right name for his favorite streaming service, his sister had a habit of weird rabbit holes on YouTube. I’d been meaning to figure out the kids’ version of the app. Right now, it didn’t seem like the biggest priority. “These aren’t real clowns. You don’t have to worry. I don’t think they’re nice, but they’re not scary, either. Just mean.”

“They’re real,” he insisted in his confident four-year-old tone.

I don’t know why I was sneaking around. No one was following us at that point. But still, I practically walked on tiptoes past a painted wax statue of a seven-foot clown. It looked like an old French clown, black pants and suspenders over a white sleeveless shirt. Sad white makeup. But the thing was huge. The paint on his arms—which had no makeup, just creamy skin with strands of hair painted on—was shockingly realistic.

“See?” Jacob dropped his voice to a whisper. His fingers clawed into my back. “I told you they’re real.”

I froze. I breathed a question into his ear. “What did you see?”

My heart pounded as I frantically looked around the room. I triple-checked that the statues closest to us were just statues. I pushed the seven-foot French clown.

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