maskormenacelogs | Oh Mr. Clown, Oh Mr. Clown

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Oh Mr. Clown, Oh Mr. Clown

WHO: YOU.
WHERE: Heropa Greenland Park.
WHEN: Sunday August 17th, from 11AM to 10PM.
WHAT: ImPorts participate in the local carnival, hosting their own attractions, helping with the booths and rides, and/or come looking to have a good time. Details here.
WARNINGS: None anticipated; please let us know if this should be edited.

grand stage

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There are no boxes tied up with pretty strings, ready for delivery or compartmentalization. The only boxes overflowing, jagged, crushed or water stained, were in her own head. People labeled and categorized for convenience, but life isn't convenient, isn't neat or likely to turn around and make itself presentable.

What's in public is meant for public consumption. The public; that which would consume a person whole.

For better or for worse? Chilton had asked that in a roundabout way. Are you going to make use of this? he said, in reference to The Grapevine and its liberal reimagining of the truth. Positive images, positive public relations.

Make yourself look acceptable. Make yourself easy to swallow.

"I didn't see bears until that mountain. There was a great big white one, with a black nose. I learned later it was probably a polar bear." Research that pays off. This is more than she's said at any point about Colorado, and it still says little. Annie tracks down her nightmares. She looks for insight into the things she faces. She studies.

She relates.

She doesn't fear: no, that's untrue. She fears a great deal of things. She doesn't fear Will, not as much as perhaps she should.

Her lips pull up into a small, small smile. "Haven't heard of graham crackers, either. Are they any good?"

Chilton asks a lot of things in his own way, knows Will is following his every public word, has been since he got himself as together here in this world as he ever is. Annie came later, a blip on his radar because of following the others in the not-all-Baltimore crowd, and he's wondered about her talk with Gideon from time to time. Yet each time he talks to her, it doesn't seem right to bring it up—or perhaps by the time he thinks about mentioning it, they're already wading into waters that don't have to be turned intimately bloody on his end of things, so he lets it rest.

Polar bears in the mountains has him visibly confused. The only other white bear he can think of, at least in his world, doesn't live in America. Either of them being where he assumes those games left them all makes little sense, has him swallowing without thinking about it. It's a strange, unwholesome taste in his mouth and he can't quite rid of it.

"They're a little sweet. Mildly sweet." The words don't sound sweet at all, though what does over the sound of a drill screwing metal to wood? He's not dismissing the talk of bears, her experience, but he's not sure how to approach it without it getting into intimately bloody waters on her end of things, so he lets it rest. "Rectangle shape that you can break off into smaller ones. People use them to make little dessert sandwiches with chocolate and melted marshmallows. Or pie crusts. Crumbles. Not something that's usually eaten on its own."

Something that needed more than itself to be worthwhile—perhaps that spoke volumes to whether or not Will thought they were any good.

Sidestep. Bloodied waters only highlight the disconnects. What Annie allows herself to feel, and what she shuts off, packages up, shelves in its own neatly labeled container in her mind. The strings that stick out, frayed and colorful, all tied back to her no matter how she ignores them, wrapped around her wrist. Ties that bind. Strings to cut.

Fate and her sisters, measuring out the length of a life. Greek and Roman mythology have been an interesting foray into dead-alive cultures on a world very much unlike and yet hauntingly familiar to her own.

"Mildly sweet sounds about right." Her own statement is mild, liable to be lost in the sounds of screwing, jostled metal, plastic, water sloshing around inside, stretching upward, looking for a way out. Fingers that stretch out, searching for a hold, falling back into the rest and turning out to be nothing more than mildly chlorinated water, chill and warming in the summer sunshine. "The things which aren't always had on their own... sometimes it's nice to have them anyway. Usual or not."

Worth is about perspective. Normal, and usual, have relative worths in the scheme of things in this world, and in her own.

So that's what you were hiding.

Worth has a cost. It might be saving, or it might be damning. In the end, that, too, was about perspective.

Annie, come down here! Don't be exactly what they say you are. Let them be wrong.

Here, she's resolved to let "them" all be wrong.

Bloodied waters that highlighted and obscured, made it difficult to tell string from something more vital, hands slippery and unable to ever properly be clean made it difficult to hold scissors. Shears. Anything sharp would need to be treated carefully, lest one wrong move end up with that blade nestled in one's own palm. Perhaps best left up to Fate and her sisters, the string cutting. Practice made perfect.

The booth was taking abuse necessary to make it what it should have been, that water occasionally reaching out just enough to land a drop or two on his hand, his arm, his shirt. Loud, but Will was used to working with screams, had an ear tuned to put them in the background and focus on what needed it, which meant Annie's words resounded like surround sound. He didn't quite look at her, but his face changed, wondered if the comment about mildly sweet was related to a non-cracker or cookie Graham. Just about halfway done, his shirt pocket getting rust and dirt and grime on it every time he reached in for a new screw, he kept going. No point in stopping until it was done, no reason to half-ass it. It might have held up as it was, but everything in this place seemed on the verge of being too far gone for repair—this wasn't something he could just say "good enough" and move on from.

"They're fine enough on their own, but if you've had them in other things...probably gonna start craving that, if you're used to them that way." Like how certain drinks or foods made a person want another, or caused a smoker to suddenly want to light up. He could sit around and eat them as they were, but he'd probably end up smelling campfire and melted marshmallows and getting aggravated with himself for starting in on something when he didn't have it right. "Like putting on socks but only one of your feet's cold, so you just put on one. Got what you needed, but you're used to wearing them on both. Feels fine, but you have to add something to make it feel right."

Food and clothing, the basics of life, easy to use as comparisons (even if they didn't make it perfect). Perspective of someone who grew up poor, who fell back on things that were easily understood as opposed to starting in with other languages, with methods to paint, things that only certain people could relate to, or pretend to. A low, perhaps meek one, the dirty side of a messed up coin talking about feeling right and wrong to someone who might not have felt right much in the first place. But talking about it being "right" to wear two socks was much different than talking about being right in general.

Everyone was wrong in some way or another. Whether they accepted it or not was up to them, but as long as they didn't turn it into something malicious, something that needed to be contained, Will couldn't hold anyone's wrongness against them.

Or cruelty made systematic. Centuries at a job didn't guarantee the practitioner was any deft hand at their work, simply indifferent to it. Though the directness of those named after fate seemed to meddle even now, in every place where imPorts were granted importance.

Sweet as a synonym for kind, for an understanding of kindness that's aware of circumstance. Mildly sweet sounds about right. All while watching Will Graham through metal bars, universes away from stone walls. Neither one made the cage around them all. Neither one have defined her prisons in the past.

She's only barely able to see some of them now.

"That's the case with familiarity. You start to expect what you're used to... what feels right is different from what's necessary."

If it's what you wanted or not. Right, wrong, those were values that didn't need to be malicious. Malicious in righteousness, perhaps, more than in rightness, and wrong can be gentle, sticky, persuasive. A tar pit of experience pulling you under by degrees.

Every place where imPorts were granted importance—he'd wondered about the name itself quite a few times, but he highly doubted he was the only one. It stuck out like a sore thumb, a splash of neon paint on a white wall. How could it not?

"There's a lot of cities here that I've got back in my world, too." Might come across as off topic, just that, but he wouldn't leave it at just that. "They're all familiar but not. Different. Places that used to be flat land have been built on. Apartments are business, businesses are apartments." He wasn't sure what the spot that should have been was in this world, hadn't had the fortitude to go to Wolf Trap and seek it out. Find nothing, find a grocery store, find an abandoned building, a dump, find a house that looked just liked his but wasn't, owned by someone who wouldn't sell. "I'm sure the changes were necessary, but it's still not right, doesn't match what I know."

Compared to his world, which was not right either, never would be right. The conversation wasn't a pleasant one, turned his timing more effective until he got to the last hole and realized that while the metal wall had room for one more, the booth did not quite line up with that. He could leave it as it was (which would be fine) or drill into it and make the scene a louder one.

Finding that he had exactly one screw left in his shirt pocket sealed the deal, and with something akin to an apologetic look sent her way, he set to finish what he started, squealing and splintering and angry sounds from everything involved amplified more than they had been. No maliciousness or righteousness, only doing the job right. It wouldn't take long at all, but that wasn't the sort of noise one got out of their head easily.

She steeled her shoulders at the apologetic look, prepared (but not quite) for the sounds that followed. It was a raw sundering, forcing the screw in through material that hadn't been prepared. The hold might be more secure, as long as too much of the surrounding tank didn't destabilize. As long as no cracks spread too far out from its epicenter of attack.

There are too many noises that won't leaver her mind. This one falls alongside the rest, but in a strange contrast. To have sounds remind her of this day, with no overt horror, is almost a kindness.

A cage to keep out intentional harm along intentional lines. The kind of cage that needed to be almost seamless around her heart and mind, but never would be. She and the Grinch wouldn't have had much to talk about, in hearts growing three sizes, or shrinking down. My heart was chained down that day. As if it were one day as if it didn't strain against the bindings, letting them sink in and scar, overgrowing them flesh might overgrow a chain that cuts.

Everything changes. Even the familiar changes.

"In that way... how much more unsettling a world has to be for almost being what you remember, but not quite."

Never quite the same.

She might have risked a look of disappointment if she were to voice that, that it might work as long as the cracks didn't spread. That Will didn't know what he was doing with this, that he didn't have the proper eye to know the booth could stand some raw sundering, a proper application of force. The guy who routinely broke dogs of all kinds could tell when an inanimate object couldn't handle something—a kindness that all went without remark.

Already dirty fingers busy themselves getting dirtier, feeling around the screw, a nail picking at a splintered bit sticking out. No matter how noisy and jarring it might have been, Will appears to approve of a job well done. It wasn't seamless but it didn't need to be, attached and done so as well as could be. He's still focusing on it when she speaks, doesn't look up until he's picked off that splintered bit. There's a scar now, small, on something that would serve much better if it were replaced entirely.

"Just gotta find other ways to cope." Thin, stretched, but a smile nonetheless. Will has issues with things being what they were but still not what they were at all, but he's well aware that he's lucky to have what experience he does, to know how lights function, how to fix a toilet if it makes certain noises, that he's familiar with what he considers basics even in his own world. "I spend more time with a dog in my bed than I used to."

He drinks more, too. Knows it, can't bring himself to stop when it's not yet a problem. It doesn't linger on his breath before, during, and after work. His clothes sport dog fur, nothing else. There is no going through his drawers desperately trying to find what he swore he'd hidden there just a week before. The stash of beer he once kept in his shop isn't always there. Not yet.

"This looks good to go."

He pops the battery off as he says it, eyes still on Annie. The booth doesn't needn't him.

(The booth probably wants him to go before he gets more ideas for it. The booth probably doesn't like him at all. Too bad for the booth that it has no feelings for him to absorb or ignore.)

Are we good to go?

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Oh Mr. Clown, Oh Mr. Clown

but i buttered up all the people...

paula deenibal

the milder taste of evil

that smile tells you something wicked this way comes tho

then you learn the something wicked is "fleeting happiness"

cooked with a big stick uh buttah

you sure that's buttah

if it churns like buttah and it clogs arteries like buttah...