dragged... (Part 35)

                    Killer Clown

I laid there with my eyes shut somewhere between dreamland and reality, more restless than a dime-store whore sitting in the front pew, Sunday, on Easter Morning.  If I had to explain the state of consciousness I was in I’d have to say it felt like I was in a damned Steven King movie clip because the air around me smelled stale – musty like a vacant locker room after all the football players had showered and left.  There was one lone drip hitting the bottom of a porcelain sink with a spooky, echoing ping, and I kept repeatedly trying to open my eyes, but they felt like they were glued shut. 

My mouth felt cotton-dry on the inside and when I tried secreting saliva from the glands to wet my whistle, the insides of my cheeks burned like they were being sliced in half with a salty razor and I winced in agony and it felt like I was suffocating.  With every passing second the sour scent in the air grew stronger and my hands and feet were tightly bound; all I could do was rock from side to side helplessly. Nothing about the experience felt real so I told myself that I had to be dreaming, but as hard as I tried to make myself wake up I couldn’t. 

Finally, when it felt like I couldn’t take another second of the madness, I was able to wiggle my toes, then my ankles, next my fingers, then my wrist, and then finally I was able to open up my mouth and when I did I gasped for what I had been robbed of, air.  The moistness returned in my mouth and the intense burning had subsided.  I felt the tightness around my eyes dissipate as well and when I opened them up I was mortified at what I saw staring back at me. 

It was a crazed, plastic, demonic looking clown with these humungous, bulging, blood red eyes and the sight of him literarily threw me back into a catatonic state, only this time my eyes were wide open to see it all.  The foul, rank, stench immediately filled the air again, and I couldn’t move my eyes off of the horrific, evil faced, clown now leaning forward close enough to touch my nose.  I didn’t understand what was happening and why it was happening to me.  

When I opened my mouth to yell nothing came out except tiny yelps that sounded like they were miles away and if I could barely hear them, how in the hell could my mother hear them.  The more I tried, the more distant they got and that’s when my bed shook violently and stopped;  when I closed and opened my eyes the clown had vanished.   

I tell you, children, I wasn’t really too much of a drinker but if I had a gallon of Jack Daniels I would have drank it all in one sitting.  Now, even though I was able to rise up out of my bed, I knew something still wasn’t right because the carpet beneath my feet felt extra spongy.  That's when I knew that shit was probably getting ready to get crazier than it had already been. 

All of sudden, I could hear light circus music playing in the distance and my heart started racing wildly because I knew that that big red nose motherfucker was going to pop up out of the blue and when he did, it was going to be on.  As I started tip toeing down the hall I could hear the music getting louder and louder, and once I reached the living room I felt a strange new weight on both of my feet, and when I looked down, I saw two of the longest, widest, shiniest red clown shoes I had ever seen before on them, and they were bending upwards at the toe-end.

“MAMA…!” I screamed out, hoping it was loud enough for her to hear me and come into my room and wake me up.   

Just when I thought things couldn’t get any worse, the circus music slipped over into the tune of the wedding march, and it sounded satanic and I saw two figures approaching me in the distance.  When I turned and tried to run it felt like I was on a moving sidewalk and the faster I tried to run, the more exhausted I became.  Then all at once, the sidewalk abruptly stopped and because I had been running, the force of the halt sent me sailing into the air head over shoes.  I was tumbling over and over suspended in the air above the two figures below and when they looked up at me, they had no faces.  This shit was getting crazier and crazier by the minute.

Then without warning I stopped tumbling and started falling and falling into darkness and I felt someone or something take my hand and when I looked over I saw that my friend, the demonic clown with the bugged out eyes had returned.  He started pulling me over to him and I kept shaking my arm trying to free myself from his grasp, but his grip was so tight it felt like he was cutting of the circulation in my arms and that’s when I saw my arm blowing up like a balloon.  When it reached a point of being too tight, there was an explosion and I began my aimless tumble again.  

I landed with a hard thud onto my butt and it felt like I had broken every disc in my back, and when I put both of my hands down to try and lift myself up, I was punched in the face so hard until the force of the blow knocked me backwards and I hit the back of my head on the ground.  All I heard was laughter and all I saw was lightning bolts flashing all around me.  

That’s when the person laughing stood over me and when I saw who it was I gagged.  It was Stanley Simon and he had a large machete in his right hand and I helplessly watched him as he slowly raised it.  Then out of the blue, my sister appeared and she was holding a large butcher knife with blood already dripping off the sharp, silver, blade, and she was laughing too. 

Just as they were about to hack old Sunny Skies up, children, I woke up drenched in a cold sweat with my mother sitting beside me on the bed.  It took a moment for me to regain my composure and my mother just sat there in silence for a minute, looking at me, probably wondering if I was losing my mind. 

Then she said, “Bitch, do you want a valium?”

I looked at her like she was crazy and said, “Bitch, the last thing I wanna do right now is go back to sleep, go in the kitchen and get that unopened bottle of Hennessey, the only thing I need right now is a tall, stiff drink!”

I climbed out of the bed, stripped out of my wet undergarments and headed to the shower to rinse off every ounce of sweat from that horrific dream that I had just had.   I knew, from that point on, I would never think of a clown as a humorous addition to a birthday party or a damn circus.

Sunny, girl, you need to pull yourself together.  Either all the shit you’ve done is catching up with you, or you are, indeed, cracking the fuck up.  

While I was in the shower, I heard my mother calling for me, so hurried up rinsing myself off, turned off the water, grabbed a clean bath towel, and wrapped it around myself. 

“Sunny, bitch, do you hear me calling you?” She impatiently asked. 

“I hear you, damn, I can’t come out if I’m still dripping wet, shit, hold your fucking horses,” I told her. 

“There’s some huge, thug looking, nigga at the front door asking for you, should I let him in or what?” She asked. 

Oh, yea, I knew exactly who it was….