Late Arrival

The clown was essentially white-costumed, even given the black hemispherical hat, the broken golden-hoop large enough to be a wide belt or sash, black slip-on shoes, bleached face containing tiny red lips and drooping black eyes .... sitting upon a huge domed mushroom mound .... awaiting the promised arrival of a blue tree embedded within a solid glass cone. Surely, a snow-globe to shake would have been better to amuse the clown or to amuse the children who might also arrive soon for Christmas – or, better still, another clown as company, bearing in mind the children were not promised to arrive at all.




A smile threatened to shatter the real face the clown was wearing as a frozen mask. Thoughts of sadness often made clowns smile and a Christmas without children was one such thought of sadness. Broken thoughts were mended, mended ones broken. Labelled thoughts were unlabelled, later unlabelled ones labelled. Thoughts of optimistic puppets in the morning, thoughts of pessimistic puppets in the afternoon. Thoughts of black humour when the time had come for going to bed. Erotic thoughts at night to fill the dreams with more than just soft mushroom mounds to sit upon. And by dawn, the more urgent thoughts of meltdowns and golden cummerbunds ... then thoughts about promised arrivals being always late: little different, the clown supposed, from never arriving.




The clown's silent smile forced a love of lateness, accepting that the only promised arrivals were a blue tree in a glass cone and the clown-here-already-so-never-needing-to-arrive-at-all and that both could never be contained within a single thought at the same time. It would make no sense to imagine such an unimaginable companionship. Not even fiction could attempt it. Even music, be it baroque or classical or modern or simply tinkling with snowflakes, failed to conjure such a dual impossibility. The clown’s smile meant there were no false hopes. The roads seemed impossible, the precipitation having formed a ground zero rather than a cone of scintillating light. Lateness was not just for Christmas.


Thanks, TLO, for inspiring this today.