AVRA MARGARITI
CW – depression
Welcome to Melancholia Mills
The town is brighter than most. The buildings, much like the surrounding autumnal forest, are painted in sunrise-and-sunset swirls of color, the eaves standing in curlicued relief. Yet the residents are achromatic and expressionless as they go about their day, barely lifting their bent heads in greeting.
“So the rumors are true,” the troupe says in somber tones. “People here really have forgotten how to laugh.”
The Clown King has to agree with her harlequins, pierrots, and mimes. The news anchor–boxy television set, ant-crawling static–talked about a mirthless town, and she thought it her duty to check.
A deciduous forest circles the town, charmingly rustique but for the backdrop of factories belching out dense smoke. Laughing parlors crop up like weeds all over. The Clown King and her troupe visit them one by one to examine the services provided. Tickling, jokes, over-priced laughing gas. Yet the people who can afford them still leave the parlors slack-mouthed, furrow-browed. Their shoulders remain hunched, carrying the weight of their little world, their merry-go-round worries. Those few bursts of laughter from within the parlors sound unsettlingly fake. A poor imitation, like a parrot or a myna bird.
Children go to school dragging their feet. Fingers pull lips into the shape of smiles, their tongues darting out like a dead animal’s; roadkill rictus. The Clown King still beams at them. There’s a performance she’s planning tonight, and won’t they come watch?
The troupe visits the dusty general store for canned food and camping supplies.
“We’ll be in the town hall tonight,” the Clown King informs the grizzled man behind the counter.
He expels air from his rattling lungs, a deflated attempt at a giggle or a sigh. “It’s not gon change anything ’round here, but you’re welcome to try.”
Outside the store, snake oil peddlers and other charlatans promise outrageous cures. They, too, must have come here after watching the footage of a town ripe for exploitation. The World’s Saddest Town, boasted the headlines. Of course people would gravitate here in a bid to make quick money.
The Clown King and her troupe don’t charge admission their first evening in town. People trickle into the town hall, hesitant at first, then hesitantly hopeful. When all the seats are filled with young and old, the Clown King turns to her troupe, fluttering with nerves in the wings. “Let’s give it everything we’ve got.”
And they do. Juggling balls then letting them drop on their heads, face-planting into pies, honking their red noses, dancing up symphonies of big, squeaky shoes, playing fast and loose with the laws of physics. Every old trick in their repertoire is used, combined with new gags and props just for the occasion. Not a single laugh comes from the audience. A few wobbly mouths might be trying to smile or hold back tears.
For the last act, the Clown King and her troupe don the town’s folk costumes, brimming with colorful embroidery and history. The local musicians still know how to play their fiddles and flutes, but their rhythm is off, the soul gone from the music. Only blue hues left.
By the time the troupe returns to their tent in the forest, they are sweaty and bone-tired, their limbs trembling, their facial muscles aching. And still, less laughter than at a funeral.
The Clown King tosses and turns in her sleeping bag. Her lungs feel full of smoke from the factory deep in the woods. She talked with the locals earlier, knows the factory produces canned foodstuff, like the ones sold in the general store. Yet there were other whispers, about secret experiments and radiation saturating town and forest alike. The ground and tree-limbs hum and groan at night like ghosts caught in spiderwebs or earth fissures, and she thinks she believes the rumors after all.
When the shadow of a deer falls against the tent wall, the Clown King untangles herself from her sleeping troupe and steps outside. The fire has eaten itself out of existence but the selfless stars are enough to see by. The deer is a young fawn, moonlit silver, perfect if not for the potato-eye growths on her coat, the innumerable antlers bowing her head low.
The deer watches the Clown King, then trots deeper into the forest. She grabs her backpack, flashlight, and water bottle. Laces up her hiking boots, rather than her squeaky shoes. The Clown King has heard enough stories to know when to follow the forest’s echos. Sometimes, the red string of fate appears as a path covered in autumn leaves.
It’s another two weeks before the camera crew returns to the world’s saddest town. The Clown King pauses her lesson of theater and dance, which many people are now attending. It seems to help, despite their continued lack of laughter. The Clown King grabs her prop bag and runs to the main square where people have gathered.
The reporter asks the Clown King, “How does it feel to be in a town where laughter comes to die?”
The Clown King marches before the cameras in all her rainbow glory, squeaky shoes and red nose, prop bag falling open to reveal a small galaxy inside it. The camera zooms in as she takes out strings of handkerchiefs, a garland of flowers, a gaggle of juggling pins. When she has every human and camera eye on her, the Clown King reveals one last item from the very bottom of her carpet bag.
“This is a toxicology report. I mailed a sample of the town’s creek water to a chemist in the city. You’ll find the factories and their pollution are responsible for the poisoning that stole people’s laughter.”
Everyone gawks at her, but the Clown King smiles serenely. She’s used to all the gazes. She slaps the toxicology report into the stuttering reporter’s hands and commands, “Read.”
The camera’s eyes turn from her to the reporter. She catches her troupe’s eyes in the crowd, brimming with pride. She watches the locals too. Their mouths snarl with anger, a useful emotion, one that can help them win back what was stolen in no time.
Avra Margariti is a queer Social Work undergrad from Greece. She enjoys storytelling in all its forms and writes about diverse identities and experiences. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in SmokeLong Quarterly, The Forge Literary,Baltimore Review, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, and other venues. Avra won the 2019 Bacopa Literary Review prize for fiction. You can find her on twitter @avramargariti.
Art by Gale Rothstein