Collywobbles

    ...a gentleman, in short, by all meanings and accounts.

    However, if you are a Clown, these characteristics also tend to be against your nature. By definition, Clowns are clumsy, tasteless, and―yes―very, very dumb. This isn't being racist or rude, mind you; it is simple scientific fact. For example, the section of a Clown's brain that interprets color is twice as large as the areas dedicated to logic and motor skill combined. There are also twenty-seven learning disabilities named after Clowns. And it's certainly no coincidence that―and this is according to official police records, mind you!―Clowns are responsible for nearly two-thirds of all involuntary manslaughter charges.

    Yet Codsfellows are Clowns, whatever the reality may be, and they are admired by their peers as wonderful examples of what Clownish folk can be.

    Cedric Codsfellow―the father of the man that this story is about―was no exception. He was sitting in his comfy rubber chair reading an article in the Clowntown Chronicle about the Bozos’s big game when his wife announced that it was time. This was it. The baby. The baby was coming.

    He peered over his glasses and around his paper at his wife. Gloria had one hand clamped to the staircase railing and the other one pressed against her inflated belly. Her cheeks were as red as her fuzzy nose.

    “Is that so?” he asked, taking his cedar smoking pipe out of his mouth. Since this would be her first birth, she had no prior experiences to confirm her claim. “Perhaps you’ve started to swallow air again when you eat.” He replaced his pipe and scanned over the weather forecast on the back of the paper. “Try burping. That helped before. And do it in another room, please. Preferably the bathroom. The guest bathroom."

    “No. It’s coming.”

    Cedric studied his wife once more. She appeared to have hastily hopped out of the shower and thrown on her nightdress. The fabric clung to her misshapen pregnant form. She stared at him through her dripping hair, which was as green as seaweed and twice as wet.

    “Are you certain?” he asked. “Has your water balloon popped yet?” She did not respond to this, and Cedric assumed she had finally admitted to herself the prematurity of her claim. Nature, however, answered on Gloria’s behalf, and a ball of water plummeted from her gown and splashed against the hardwood floor.

    Cedric stared at the puddle and gave a sigh. He folded up his paper and tapped the contents of his pipe into a small tin he kept in his pocket.

    “Very well. If you must. Let’s go.”

    Gloria nodded and waddled outside. Cedric stood up and went to the powder room to check his hair and clean his teeth. He then went upstairs to his changing room to pick out a suit. He wondered what shade of brown was most appropriate for a birth, but the conflict was brief (Coconut Husk) and he was soon ready to leave. On his way out, he grabbed a bottle of nausea-relief from the medicine cabinet as a precaution; Gloria's eggs were picking a foul time to retaliate. As usual.

    He left his home and locked the door. Cedric swung his keys around his finger and jingled the change in his pocket. A butterfly accompanied him on his walk to the driveway. It seemed to dip and weave to the rhythm of the song he hummed.  It landed on the roof of his car. Cedric winked at the beautiful bug, but it did not wink back. What a sad life, Cedric thought. I don't know what I'd do if I didn't have eyelids to wink with. Invest in a pair of sunglasses, maybe. Either that or suicide, I suppose. If he wasn't having such a bad morning, he would have performed insecticidal euthanasia right there on his car. But he was grumpy, and he didn't bother with the favor.

THE CODSFELLOW FAMILY TRANSPORT was a town-car that doubled as Cedric’s work vehicle. Originally, it was a retired taxi of the station-wagon variety. Cedric had bought it cheap from a Bear who lived about forty miles outside of Clowntown in Dankerton. The Bear lived in a double-wide trailer and sold car parts and baby clothes from underneath his retractable porch. As soon as Cedric had brought the car home, he removed all of the back seats and lined the cab with padded yellow rubber. He tore out the section of roof above the front seats, which he did so he could easily see if it was about to rain (he needed to be aware of that because his car didn't have a roof). After tinting the windows and painting the body a lovely shade of Jellybean Blue, Cedric’s business had become the proud owner of a hearse; no more rentals for Codsfellow Discount Funeral Services.

    It was in the back of this hearse that Gloria now found herself, marinating in a puddle of her own juices and pain, waiting for her husband to get in and drive her to the hospital. Gloria hated few things, but that hearse was certainly one of them.

    The day her husband was to buy the thing, she had driven down with him to pick it up. They had taken her car, a Minimini, a graduation gift from her father. Gloria loved that car more than anything she had ever owned. It had a plush steering wheel and a musical cigarette lighter, and her father had attached the horn from her old tricycle to the driver’s-side mirror. She even loved that it had yet to be decramped; the compactness of it comforted her like a heavy blanket.

    But most importantly the car was Pea Green, her lifelong favorite color. She was always attracted to green, maybe because she was born with Pistachio-colored hair and Keylime eyes, but no one who knew her could understand why she loved the shade Pea so much. It was just so...unremarkable. Her family and friends tried to convince her to pick a shade of green with more personality. Gwyneth, her best friend,  suggested the youthful and funny Kiwi, but Gloria thought the color showoffy. Her sister campaigned for the hard-working Mint, but Gloria believed Mint was too sad and secretly bitter. And her mother pushed her own personal favorite color, Watermelon, because of how reliable and wise it was; however Gloria never did like her mother's favorite―frankly, Watermelon just took itself way too seriously.

    Her father, though, who was never clever―who, like the others, could never understand his daughter’s appreciation for the quiet Pea, could never understand its way of softly uniting all of the colors around it―knew that he loved his daughter and that she, for whatever reasons, would love the cramped car with the immature horn and the boring, boring, god-awful color.

    Which is why it hurt so bad when she sold it the day her husband bought the ugly station wagon. She did it without the first hesitation, though. Her husband’s new business needed the money more than she needed a car. She was a wife now, and she took her new duties with grave seriousness.

WHEN CEDRIC FINALLY CROUCHED into the driver’s seat on the day his wife decided to give birth, he put on his seatbelt, checked his mirrors, opened the glove compartment to make sure the registration was still in there, adjusted his seat, and started the car. While he waited for the engine to warm up to a responsible temperature, he turned and knocked on the plexiglass separating him and his wife. When she looked up, he offered her a quizzical thumbs-up, and she nodded. Her head was now very similar to a raisin, he noted: contorted, purple, shiny. Cedric chuckled at how unattractive his wife had become.

    He then backed out of the driveway and stopped at the mailbox. (It was a good thing he checked! Not only did the Pipe Express Spring catalog arrive, but he also received an invitation for jury duty!) While he rifled through the papers, their neighbor Bill jogged by and stopped at Cedric’s window. Like everyone else in their neighborhood, Bill was a Clown.

    “Morning, Cedric,” he said, jogging in place, “Gloria,” nodding to the heaving, crippled mass in the back. “So how’s your weekend going?”

    “Oh, well enough,” Cedric said. “My stomach is a little...qualmly from Gloria’s omelet this morning, but other than that everything is pleasant. I guess you saw that the Bozos lost last night.”

    “Oh, yeah, homerun, final inning. What a shame.”

    “Oh, indeed," Cedric said, responding with one of his favorite words. "What else, what else... Not much I suppose. How’s your weekend Bill?”

    “Oh, you know, same old same old. Ted went and had a stroke. Died back on Thursday, I think it was.”

    “Oh, Ted. He did look pale this weekend, come to think of it.” Cedric patted the outside of his door, slapping the decal of his business's logo. “I guess I’ll be doing business with Nancy and the kids soon.”

    “Oh, yup, I guess so.” They laughed. “Where you heading?”

    “Oh, I’m driving Gloria to the hospital. Her water balloon popped just now, so the baby’s on its way over.”

    “Oh, you don’t say! Congratulations, guys. Say, Gloria, when you’re done, Janet was wondering if she could borrow your recipe for that sweet potato salad with the caramelized bacon in it―the one you made for the pool party last week. Where on World did you find such a tasty recipe?”

    Gloria made some noises, but mostly just shook her head and wept. Bill gave an uncertain nod and continued on with Cedric. “Well, I don’t want to hold you two up. You guys have a good rest of your weekend.”

    “You too, Bill.”

    Bill jogged off and they drove away. Fortunately for the Codsfellows, Clowntown General was fewer than two miles away from their home. Yet Cedric drove right past it. He didn’t want his child born at the General. He, his father, and his grandfather were all born at Clowntown Clinic, the hospital on the western side of town. The Codsfellows were loyal patrons of the clinic because it once placed twenty-third on Wash Rag’s annual list of Best Cafeterias for Diabetics. “That’s a nationally recognized publication,” Cedric told his wife for the countless time, looking at her through the rear-view mirror to make sure she was paying attention. “Have you ever been nationally recognized for anything? I sure―” He held his stomach with the hand he wasn’t using to drive. He took a slow breath and continued. “I sure know I haven’t.”

    They stopped at an intersection and Cedric rolled down his window in hopes that some clean air would help his stomach. He rested an elbow on the sill. It was one of those divine mornings that could hypnotize with its coasting clouds and shifting sunbeams. A butterfly couple flirted and danced across the hood. Cedric closed his eyes and listened to the warm breeze rustle through the willows. “Twenty-third,” he said with a chuckle.

    The car behind him honked and he jolted. It was his turn to go, but Cedric had forgotten which way they were turning.

    “Say, honey, where were we...?” He turned to his wife. Her eyes were rolled back in her head. “Oh, right, of course.”

    They drove, and while Gloria continued the excruciating and lonely battle of labor, Cedric continued to hold a conversation with himself. “You know, I’m starting to wonder if it really was your cooking that misgruntled my stomach,” he stated, and wiped a wave of sweat off his brow.  He swallowed a handful of the pills. The feeling was hard to identify. It wasn’t diarrhea or gas; there was no pain or nausea either. His stomach was churning itself into a cold jelly and tying his guts together in the process. “This is quite concernable,” he informed the windshield.

    The car slowed. They had already made it to downtown, but Cedric was pulling over just out of sight of the Clowntown Clinic.

“CEDRIC!” Gloria pleaded from the back. The baby was early and she was starting to get scared. “Don’t―ahg!” Pain twisted through her muscles. Her fingertips slid across the rubber interior until they caught a lip in the padding, and she squeezed until it hurt too much to let go.  “Please! Why are you stopping?”

    “Honey,” Cedric said. “You have no idea how uncomfortable this is.”

    “The baby, Cedric! The baby!”

    “I’m sorry Gloria, but I just can’t. Don't fret. I’ll call an ambulance.”

    “But we are almost―!”

    More pain. Gloria heard her husband dial three numbers and she listened to some of what he was saying. “Ambulance...Periwinkle hearse...Browne and Finnick...a shame...homerun, final inning...”

    Gloria surrendered.

CLOWNTOWN WAS ALMOST ENTIRELY populated by Clowns, but it did have a tendency to attract the occasional misfit. Magnus, who was never accepted in the city she grew up in and was shamed in the Nurse school she had attended (despite her astounding scores), ended up in Clowntown a few years back. Her boss had transferred her there as a joke. Ha ha.

    As much as she dreaded moving to county-sized asylum, it never ended up feeling like punishment. The town was annoying, no doubt about that, but it also had a charm she could not quite place. The Clowns were too stupid to bully her or to even be afraid of her, and after just a few months she earned a promotion, and after a second year another. She had made it further there in twelve months than she could have hoped to have made in two decades anywhere else.

    But the Clowns gave her such a headache, and on days like today, when the sun blinded her and the pollen congested every channel in her body, she had a hard time remembering why she grew fond of Clowns in the first place, if she even ever was.

    She was sitting in the passenger seat of the ambulance when it arrived at the scene. When she stepped out, the vehicle sprung a foot higher and the shocks squealed in relief. Unlike the rest of her team, who scrambled out of the ambulance and clumsily prepared the back for evacuation, Magnus was a manimal, not a Clown. Born from a Hippo mother and raised by her Biker father, she was a horrible hybrid of ugliness.

    “Phillip! Dexter! Get the cot and roll it to the car,” she growled. “Slowly, this time, and then just stand there and breathe. Sally, come with me.”

    She stomped over to the hearse and looked in the window. A Clownish man was half-way passed out in the seat with his hands clutching his belly. Hernia, maybe, she thought. Magnus opened the door, and asked the man if he was okay. He groaned.

    Dexter and Phil were ready, so she and Sally lifted the Clown onto the stretcher just as the fire truck whirled onto the scene. The siren startled a congregation of butterflies who abandoned the roof of the hearse and relocated to the roof of the ambulance. The Fire Clowns instantly hosed down the parked car. Magnus’s headache worsened, but the fire department was not her responsibility, so she ignored them and strapped down the patient.

    “Glad you chums made it,” the Clown was able to say. “This is a most scaresome illness.”

    Sally put an oxygen mask on him and the boys loaded him up. Phil whispered to Dexter, “Hey, do you think this fellow is a Codsfellow? Big words and things? Look at how nice he dresses." Phil fondled the patient’s pink tie made of braided, polka-dotted rubber. Dexter shrugged and slid the collapsible stretcher onto the table. Magnus was about to close the doors, trying to exit the scene as soon as possible, but a sound stopped her dead. Screaming. Coming through the walls of the hearse and torrents of hosewater. Magnus’s headache turned icy and slid down her spine.

    “Sir,” she said to the Clown who owned the hearse, “are you certain what your hauling is still...qualified to be in it?”

    “Huh?” He leaned his head up and looked at her then his hearse. “Oh, that would be Gloria, my wife. She’s about to have our baby. I'm so embarrassed. She's usually so quiet.”

    Magnus’s ears, which were the same tubular ones her mother had, drooped to the sides of her head. She stormed over to the idiots hosing down the car, roaring at them, telling them to turn off those damn hoses. They did, and she swung open the back doors of the hearse.

    A Clownish lady in a damp bath robe was hyper-ventilating on the shag carpet of the car. She was certainly pregnant, and the baby was most definitely coming. No time to go to the hospital.

    “Sally!” she screamed. “Bring me an OB satchel!”

    Sally blinked.

    “Oh, come on, girl! The bag you painted penguins all over! Quick!”

    Magnus ducked into the back of the hearse and it squatted low. The Clownish lady was crying and sweating. Magnus was furious with the man that had hijacked this poor woman’s ambulance ride. Her patience with Clowns was almost entirely spent, but she spared the last of her kindness to talk this woman through what was happening.

    “How you feeling, hon’?”

    “Where’s Cedric? Where―” She squeezed and gasped. “Where’s my husband?”

    “In trouble.”

    “Is he...alright?”

    Magnus grunted as she mopped the sweat off the Clown’s brow. “I don't know if I'd call any of you 'alright'.”

    Sally came inside with the bag of supplies. Magnus put on a surgical mask and some latex gloves, then instructed Sally to do the same. The pregnant Clown started to wail, and the Fire Clowns grew nosy. They gathered around the back door, and Magnus shut it as loud as she could.

    She proceeded to deliver the baby. It was an uneventful birth of average length that followed the typical rhythm: squeeze, I can’t, push, I can’t, squeeze, push, squeeze, push, splat. The baby was delivered.

    There are a lot of misconceptions about Clownish childbirth (balloon-animal umbilical cords or confetti afterbirth, as you may of heard), but there is one truth to be found in all the nonsense, and it was something that always made Magnus grin, even today in spite of herself: a Clown baby will always come out laughing.

    She cut the cord and held the child upside down by the ankles. The baby continued to laugh and enjoy the party it assumed this new world to be. Magnus promptly corrected this worldview with a sharp spank, and, after a surprised hiccup from the infant, the laughter disappeared forever, thus officially initiating the somber life of a modern-day Clown.

    Magnus gave the child to Sally, who cleaned the thing until its skin was as pure as porcelain. The mother stared through exhausted eyes at the child, and Magnus placed a hand on the lady’s shoulder. Despite Magnus’s masculine demeanor, a distinctly feminine smile passed between her and the mother.

    “Alright, Sally, you stay here with her,” Magnus said. “I’m going to get the backup cot and call for another ambulance. We’ll unload the...father and make sure this nice woman gets there first.” Magnus gave a final, loving pat on the mother’s knee. “Good work.”

    The Clown smiled, and, after Sally returned the baby to its rightful holder, admired the odd little person squirming in her arms. Magnus hobbled towards the rear of the hearse, trying not to overthink the irony of the impromptu delivery room, and swung open the doors. Waiting on the other side was the father, sitting on the cot with his sports jacket across his lap. His face was now the same sickly color as his wife’s hair. Magnus was a little surprised and turned to Dexter, who was standing beside the cot.

    “How did he get out?”

    Dexter shrugged.

    “Did he ask to get up?”

    Dexter stared, then shrugged.

    “Is he still sick?”

    The father vomited on Magnus’s feet. Clowns were not faring well in her book today. Not at all. Especially this one.

    “Is my wife in there?” he asked.

    “Right where you left her.”

    He turned green again and held back a gag. Magnus had little sympathy. The Clown then said, “My insurance needs my social identification number, and she’s the only one who knows it.”

    Magnus could have dissolved the Clown with the heat burning in her blood. “Well, she’s right inside.” The Clown nodded and walked past her, holding his stomach. “It’s a boy, by the way.”

    “Hm?”

    “Your son. The one your wife just gave birth too. You know...your family.”

    “My...son?”

    He looked confused, and then turned to the messy place in the back of the hearse where his wife sat, holding a bundle of something in her arms. Magnus watched the father’s face and saw on it an expression that she had seen few Clowns use but was nonetheless uniquely Clownish. His eyelids hardened and his brow furrowed; his lips curled into a tight frown. It was the look a Clown gave when his brain was forced to process an informational load that surpassed its very limited capacity.

    He stepped into the car, at first with caution, and then as if hypnotized. His wife looked up at him, and her teary eyes shimmered like emeralds. The Clownish man was still in a state of thought-shock and proceeded to analyze the organism held against the bosom of his wife.

    Magnus was doing some analyzing of her own and watched the spectacle with a similar bewildered interest. Since living in this town she had spent much time observing Clowns. Despite how simple they were, the more she studied them the more difficult they became to comprehend. She would, in her retirement much later, be driven by her thoughts and theories to write an article in Scientific! magazine about the paradoxes of Clowns, in hopes that such a perspective would help curb the prejudice against them. This article would open with an observation she felt was key to understanding their race:

    “I believe that every Clown is capable of a rare, brief, and universal clarity that rivals even the most astute observations of history’s most brilliant Scientists. If this is ever proven to be true, it will certainly be argued that it is due to the similarities between the simplistic and 'colorful’ brains of Clowns and the brains of savants or those experiencing a drug-induced high. I will argue that these moments have nothing to do with the Clown’s brain, but with the often-unrecognized depths of a Clown’s heart.”

    And when she would later write this paragraph, she would recall the scene in the back of the hearse more vividly than any other.

    The father crouched by his wife, the confusion in his eyes melting into a sheen of serenity. His wife mimicked his gaze, and Magnus knew that they were sharing some kind of magic that she had forgotten still existed in this ugly and real world of over-educated Bikers and under-achieving Hippos.

    “Look dear,” the mother said. “It’s a boy.”

    “Oh. Well that’s real swell, Sweet Pea,” the father said. "Look! He's got your dimples!"

    "And your gender."

    The baby's mouth puckered and closed, puckered and closed, already looking for its very first meal. The mother pacified her child with a bent knuckled.   

    “We’ll name him Cedric Jr.,” she said. “Like we talked about.”

    “What’s that? Oh! No, no. That seems...silly now," he said, adjusting the hood of the blanket so he could see the boy’s face. “I think we should name him after your father.”

    “After Dad? Oh, Cedric, we don’t have―”

    “Oh, I know we don’t. But, I think your mother would like that. Don’t you agree?”

    The wife smiled. “I do.” The child cried, its fingers clutching for something that wasn't there. Gloria touched her finger to the tiny palm, and her child squeezed without letting go. “Arthur. Arthur Codsfellow.”

    They sat like that, in the dark and quiet corner, a family huddled and isolated from the universe, yet caught in a moment so utterly absent of loneliness.

    Without moving her attention from her baby, the mother asked her husband, “How’s your stomach, dear?”

    “Hm? Oh, you know what, I had completely forgotten about it,” the father said, and as he spoke this, just above the hearse, a crowd of butterflies resting on the roof erupted up and away like a twinkling mist.  “I guess whatever I had is gone now. Strangest thing. I wonder what was making my stomach feel so funny?”

    “I don’t know, dear, but I’m happy you’re feeling okay.”

    “Yeah,” he said. “I’m feeling fine.”

    With regurgitated omelet still wet on her shoes, Magnus had a thought that would accompany her for the rest of her day: Thank Doug for Clowns.

    And then the window of Clown Clarity started to slide shut.

    “You know,” the father said. “Arthur is a very fitting name for a Codsfellow. I’m glad we could claim it before one of your sisters.”

    “Mm-hm.”

    “If your father had known that a name as distinguished as his was at risk of being partnered with something as generic as ‘Floppyface’ or ‘Dungswallow’, he probably wouldn’t have died in the first place.”

    “Mm-hm.”

    “I bet Ol’ Artie knew his name would be passed on to a Codsfellow. That’s probably why he decided to fall dead of pneumonia in the first place. To free up his name for our son, you see.”

    “I don’t know, dear.”    

    On and on this conversation went. The mother was loaded into the ambulance and the father was already talking about next season’s chances for the Bozos. The new and improved Codsfellow family started their first journey together, in an ambulance headed towards the vehicle’s origin of Clowntown General Hospital.