MIKE MCCLELLAND + CASEY MCCLELLAND
A Feast for Clowns
I’m not the kind of gal who trusts food from unknown sources. I just want everyone to know this before I start. Because if I was the kind of gal who just ate random food off the street, then I wouldn’t be very sympathetic, would I? I’d just be pretty stupid.
But the cherry pie, left on my Wipe Your Feet and Your Ass! doormat, was just so damned beautiful. It had the most tempting, golden brown lattice, dusted with crystals of sugar that shown silver in the florescent lighting of my apartment building’s hallway. And the cherries. The cherries! You’ve never seen cherries so red, so inviting. They peeked through the lattice like ruby slippers, and I just wanted to bury my face in the whole thing at first sight.
However, as I said, I am not the kind of gal who just eats something she finds in the hallway. Even this, the unicorn of pies. I picked it up and found a card attached to the bottom of the delicate pearly pie plate, addressed to me—Tonya—and signed personally (or impressively forged) by Jibleigh, who I’m sure you’ve heard of. If you haven’t heard of Jibleigh, if perhaps you’re finding this account ninety years in the future and all record of Jibleigh has been expunged from the history books, then I’ll tell you who he is: the most famous underground clown artist in the history of underground clown artists. At least, that’s who he was ninety years ago, if you’re reading this ninety years from now.
Jibleigh, again I’m sure you’ve heard of him but I’m going to tell you this because he left me a pie, had taken the world by storm with a series of stealthily painted clown murals (not graffiti, no I won’t even entertain the argument), spontaneous horror clown flash mobs (I’m sure you’ve seen them on Instagram), clown dance club takeovers, and all of those clown dinner menu “changelings,” which saw orders “clowned” at Pittsburgh’s most prestigious culinary hotspots. Spaghetti replaced with confetti, lady fingers supplanted by rubber gloves, charcuterie switched with “cartoonery” drawn on the plate—all of which were signed by Jibleigh, that genius, who then took time from his busy schedule to bring me a pie.
I swept the pie into my apartment and found myself unsure of what to do with it. I snapped a few pictures and debated posting them on social media, but then decided that I wanted to keep the joy of Jibleigh’s attention to myself for a few moments. Was I to eat the pie? I flipped over the card. The back read, “You first!” I took a closer look at the pie. The cherries, which I had first seen as only vibrantly red, all appeared to have little bruises on them.
I dug a spoon in carefully between several of the strips of dough latticed across the top of the pie and plucked a few cherries out. I eyeballed them closely—there was something beneath the skin. I grabbed one and popped it out of its shell, like a concord grape. Inside was a white, fleshy ball, which someone had embellished with a little, hand-drawn clown face. I plucked more cherries and popped them out of their skins. More faces, each one unique. Some were smiling, some leering, some winking, some sneering, but all were most certainly clowns. I had been clowned! By Jibleigh!
I could make no meaning of the clowning. I wondered if I should try to reassemble the pie. Surely it will sell for a significant amount of money. But I knew that I was meant to eat it. I cut a large slice, and settled onto the couch next to Groucho, my mangy tabby, and tentatively took a bite.
It was delicious.
It tasted nothing of cherries. Rather, it had a salty-sweet vanilla and citrus flavor. I know that sounds vague but that’s the best I can do. The taste gave me the mental picture of a clown with orange hair, a bright white face, and the biggest, saddest smile in the world. As my teeth sliced into each little clown head, it let out the faintest honk, like the pinch of a tiny clown nose.
I am a logical person, so I spent the next few hours nervously waiting to die of poisoning. But I felt nothing but happy. Not drugged happy, just happy. Like my best, most fun self. It made me want to dance, to sing, to put a whoopee cushion on the chair of a friend.
The rest of the week went by quickly, and I must admit to experiencing a bit of disappointment that nothing further happened with regards to Jibleigh. I put a picture of the pie on Twitter and hashtagged it #Jibleigh and #clownpie and received nothing but a bunch of trolls calling me a big fat liar and telling me to choke myself to death on my lie pie.
Two weeks later, however, things began to look up. I began to see paintings of cherry pies on my route to and from my office. Sometimes I would glimpse one on the side of a bus as it passed. A few times I spotted one painted on the brick wall of an alley. One even had “Tonya” written inside a cherry. Perhaps Jibleigh was in love with me from afar? I don’t know how we would have crossed paths, but no one knew Jibleigh’s true identity, so it was entirely possible that I’d encountered him somewhere and not even known it. Hopefully it wasn’t my colleague Gustavo. He’d given me quite a few (unsolicited) cat figurines over the years, but never anything indicating an affection for clowns or baked goods.
These reminders of Jibleigh filled my veins with champagne bubbles of joy.
About a month after I’d received the pie, and about twenty cherry pie sightings later, I walked by a door on Murray Avenue that caught my eye. I’d seen the door before—it was bright blue, a shocking feature to an otherwise normal brick building. But today, the door was different. It had a beautiful cherry pie painted on it. And, like the pie left on my doormat, the cherries had little clown faces. I shrieked with delight. I didn’t even think to knock; I just turned the knob. I was surprised when the door opened so easily, and even more surprised when the momentum of my forward movement sent me hurling into the bottomless hole that lay on the other side.
I awoke under a brilliant blue, cloudless sky. I was on a ladder that stretched horizontally like a weak, bendy bridge—something you’d see in the circus. I couldn’t even see where it ended. It was as if I were on a miniature planet, and the ladder stretched over the planet’s curvature, past the horizon. I was on my hands and knees.
I’m probably spending so long talking about the ladder to avoid describing the real anomaly in this scenario, which was the unimaginably large amount of clowns marching twenty feet below.
They didn’t seem to notice me.
I decided that the only way forward was, well, forward, but when I grabbed the next rung, it tickled me. I grabbed the next, and it let out of hissing squirt of air, just like a whoopee cushion. The tickles and honks and bells continued, and I began to laugh. I couldn’t help it.
Unfortunately, the clowns heard my laughter. Heads twitching, they were like deer catching scent in the wind. Then they were snapping their teeth.
I know what you’re thinking.
If she’s telling her story, then she wasn’t eaten by clowns. Tonya survived.
Well, yes and no. But that’s a story for another day. This is a story with a moral. If anyone, famous or not, leaves a pie on your doorstep, throw the damned thing out.
Like Sharon Stone and the zipper, Mike McClelland is originally from Meadville, Pennsylvania. He has lived on five different continents but now resides in Georgia with his husband, son, and a menagerie of rescue dogs. He is the author of the short fiction collection Gay Zoo Day (Beautiful Dreamer Press, 2017) and his work has appeared publications such as the Boston Review, Queen Mob's Tea House, Permafrost, and others. Keep up with him at magicmikewrites.com.