Clown (from the Munich Tales)

CLOWN
By Michael Kroetch

She was a happy child. But she was also full of beans and enjoyed pulling jokes on her friends when they were outside playing games in the street or drawing chalk monsters on the sidewalk. Her mother told her to be nice and not to clown around and laugh in church, but she couldn´t help herself. She saw funny things everywhere she went and was always whispering about them to one of her many girlfriends and making them also crack up with laughter. She had never thought her humor special, but always it seemed she was the one who did the best silly imitations of the teachers or whatever authority figure might have visited their classroom recently. Last week it was a fat policeman and during the lunch break she pretended to be him eating ten donuts at once and then trying to kiss his wife, but not being able to because of his big stomach. She put a cushion from the lunch room under her school uniform for the stomach and made her best friend, Karen, be the wife. Everyone laughed and laughed from where they sat watching on top of the monkey bars. Nobody expected she would miss her step when she stood up after her bow to the audience. They also didn't expect her to fall backward and smack her head on the pavement. They were still laughing at how silly the fake fat belly cushion looked coming out of her uniform. They didn't know at first she was in trouble. It was a nice sunny day. The smell of freshly cooked hotdogs from lunch still hung in the air and the trees overhead were newly green with spring leaves. And all the children were pointing at her and laughing. It was a moment that seemed to last a lot longer than most moments do or should ever last—because what they expected to happen next was not happening. After pretending to fall like that, she should have been bounding up and dancing around like a clown. She was the funniest kid, why wasn´t she jumping up? The ambulance came within twenty minutes, but many of the children later told their parents it took several hours to arrive. It had seemed like that to them. Each of those minutes with her there on the ground with her eyes shut had been an eternity. And an impossibility. This kind of thing simply did not happen. Her best friend and temporary wife rode with her to the hospital in the back of the ambulance. When she woke up, her wife told her everyone was praying for her. She asked why and said that she didn´t owe any of them any money. Then she smiled and giggled at her own joke and her friend did, too. After that she closed her eyes and never opened them again. Her friend and wife kept the fake belly cushion even though it was school property. She knew her friend would laugh at her for being so sentimental. But she didn't care. Some things were worth doing--even if it meant being laughed at.