Giggles's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

For three weeks and four days, Giggles had watched the same woman and never once made her laugh. He wanted her lips. Not a kiss, not a promise. He wanted the actual grin off her face, cut clean, to stitch into the perfect smile he was building from people who refused to laugh at his act. But he could not take a lip from someone who kept smiling politely. He needed a target who would not laugh at all. He had only watched. He had never chosen. He found her in the parking lot of the crumbling clown motel. The faded painted faces above the door grinned down with cracked cheeks. She sat on a bench near a rusted child's tricycle, its chipped stars catching the streetlight. Giggles walked out where she could see him. He did his best bit. He tripped over his own huge shoes. He pulled a limp flower from his sleeve. She did not laugh. She did not even look up. That was the yes he had waited for. His hands shook. He stepped closer, close enough to smell her cold coffee. This was the moment. He reached into his coat for the small curved knife. "You're doing it wrong." The voice came from behind him, calm and flat. Giggles spun. Another clown stood by the motel wall, orange hair wild, striped suit faded, mouth painted into a wide red grin. He had not been there a second ago. "She's mine," the clown said. "She's been practicing fourteen years. She just doesn't laugh anymore. That happens." He said it the way a man reports the weather. Giggles knew him without being told. His ability had shown him this one before, in a dream he tried to forget. Chuckles. The clown who kept people. Giggles's throat went dry. "I only need her lips," Giggles said. Chuckles tilted his head. "You need someone who won't laugh. So do I. But I keep mine." He stepped between Giggles and the woman. "You can't take what's already claimed." Giggles looked at the woman. She stared at the ground with dead, patient eyes. He understood then. She would never laugh. But she would never be his either. Chuckles owned every unsmiling face in this place. "Go find your own," Chuckles said. "Or join the troupe. Make me laugh, and I'll let you leave." Giggles backed away. His knife stayed hidden. He had wanted a target who wouldn't laugh. He had found a whole collection of them. All locked behind one clown who would not share. He walked past the tricycle and the grinning motel faces. His gift had led him to the exact people he needed. It had also led him straight to the one man standing guard over all of them. To finish his smile, Giggles now understood, he would have to get through Chuckles first.