Clownskin
One afternoon the sky above us and the sky to the side of us gathered together into a strange and terrifying pattern. So we stopped what we were doing and pointed at it. Even our power-walkers and mail-carriers, even our demons and sasquatches, even our own actual clowns pointed in perplexity.
“Holy shit,” we all said. The hoses in our hands sprayed limply onto our lawns.
“What the fuck is that?” belted Barbara Dukowski’s youngest boy. His eyes were like two plastic drink lids floating in dishwater. Also he was eleven and a half and he already had the faint shadow of a mustache.
“Iggy, watch your goddamn mouth.”
Nearby someone started to cry. Then another. And another.
Iggy meanwhile mumbled something back at her.
“Boy, I’m gonna smack those vowels out those goddamn cusswords if you don’t watch it.”
What we saw, we later learned, rose above sea level maybe twenty-eight thousand feet at the equator and maybe thirty thousand feet at the poles, and stretching from horizon to horizon, it encapsulated our planet within the polka-dotted skin of a clown. The dots were bright red and they were about twice the size of the sun. And the space outside the dots was semitranslucent and white. There were wrinkles and freckles on some parts of the skin and pores and acne scars on others. Also it was hairless—like all the hair had been waxed off—but you could still pretty much make out its goosebumps as they rose and sank across the heavens.
Because maybe, we wondered, something we were doing was really exciting to it.
Sometimes we thought we could see it shiver slightly, the clownskin. Rumors spread of a great meandering vein that throbbed above the Pacific Ocean. Video footage leaked. But we disputed its veracity. AI, we screamed. Deepfake, we screamed even louder. Until all of us undermined it. Then the video disappeared beneath a windfall of new information. Bones. Bones and bones. And we left it for the worms and the beetles.
Even over Bergen, any number of us witnessed several ghastly white warts.
Even over Eritrea and Djibouti, crow’s-feet spread from the horizon.
Rare islands, all but lost to our governmental bodies and academic cartographers and internet search engines, claimed that giant eyeballs and parts of giant eyeballs were staring down at them with various looks of indifference and anger, of fear and wonder.
And as the weeks passed we began to lose contact with any number of aircraft that’d been flying above it when it spontaneously came into our lives. Most of these planes had crashed and exploded onto the clownskin, charring into blemishes that from the ground looked like tiny massive blackheads. Others had managed to land intact along the ridges of gore and fat of its sticky subcutaneous tissue while their doomed passengers opened their window shades onto a stunning new horror of their own.
We were stunned ourselves. I mean how could we not be? Except for those of us who were braindead or in comas or grappling with dementia like our dads once had. Or those of us who lived in caves and bunkers. Just look at what the fuck was happening. And even though we still retained our daytime per se, the sunlight could only refract through the sheer space between the polka dots, casting the sunlands in a dull white glow.
Our clouds disappeared entirely or sank against the planet into banks of thick ubiquitous fog.
Our trade winds shifted directions and shifted again, and again and again and again, til they eventually got lost in the confusion.
Our glaciers uncalved with their young.
The Pentagon even launched several dozen MIM-104 Patriot missiles up at it from its clandestine counterterrorism outposts in the Sahara Desert. We watched it on our cellular smartphones and from the stools of our favorite dive bars and some of us on the little TVs built into our gas pumps. The clownskin shuddered upon impact. We saw these explosions. They thundered in threes. And as the flames cleared, blood rained along the barren landforms of the undisclosed country. The Tuaregs climbed back into their ruined goatskin tents. Tinariwen put away their electric guitars and shook their heads and gestured cryptically at the heavens. Several days later, when our expeditionary forces fired again, it was thick gobbets of pus that suppurated along the dunes.
In the aftermath of all this chest-beating, the rest of NATO and the UN and ECOWAS and the AU and various international concerns signed a mutual moratorium on attacking the goddamn thing. We’ll wait and see what happens, we said in our various tongues. Even our demons got in on the action. Our sasquatches however were MIA. We agree, the demons said remotely via Microsoft Teams and the telepossession of ambassador-media. They wore noisy white tracksuits and aviator sunglasses with the lens flipped up. And they stared vacantly at whatever was in front of them, the ambassadors. Their eyes spouting blood. Their hands flat on their laps. We agree, pooled their eye-blood atop the conference table. Into words, it pooled. Generals, business tycoons, global experts, heads of state scooched back diplomatically in their chairs.
Shut it down, pooled the blood.
But the most surprising thing we discovered was just how quickly we absorbed this new phenomenon into our daily lives.
No more stars or space travel.
No more northern lights.
No more meteor showers or satellites pokying across the exosphere.
We felt less like human beings and more like assemblages of Generative Fills and Neural Filters. And we found ourselves caravaning south to where the refracted gloom of the sun was slightly brighter and therefore slightly more bearable. “Chainsaw Gutsfuck” played on our car stereos. One of our speakers had blown out so we changed our phones over to mono for all the instruments to come through. We played high-quality rips of our old vinyl records. Some of us somewhere had put these audio files onto the internet and the rest of us had downloaded them through Pirate Bay and other useful websites. We’d downloaded them a long time ago but we still listened to them because we never made the jump to streaming services for whatever reason.
We stopped sunbathing outdoors and switched over to our indoor waterparks, their domes retrofitted with blazing sunlike bulbs. We grabbed colorful innertubes from off of massive hills of colorful innertubes and floated lazily down artificial streams. Bird and monkey sounds piped in through the plastic palms.
We watched movies that featured scene after scene the old sky. Old Blue, we called it. And that seemed to help. At least a little.
And we continued to sink into vice and uncertainty the same way an old man sinks into a tub. People blew their cool. They blew their little weird-shaped minds out on Netflix original programming and designer drugs and silly made-up games with their cats and dogs and yoga goats. And they posted these games onto Instagram and TikTok and various Christian social-media sites. They clicked and liked and shared and rated each other. They got into violent arguments in all caps. And the news media reported earnestly on these arguments. Then they took drones up to the clownskin to inspect it more closely. Some of them flew jetpacks up there. Others took deckchairs rigged with big helium balloons. The clownskin was springy and taut like a trampoline, they told us from their cellular smartphones. But it was real skin though. We could see the earth thousands of feet below them on our own viewscreens. We pinch-zoomed on their cleavage and cameltoes and semi-erect penises. We could hear their winds noisily through our own phone speakers. They sounded like cellophane being crumpled. Like the chorusing howls of the damned. And we asked each other in the comment threads to what organism does this belong? And why is it here? Some retrieved tissue samples with X-Acto knives and little smoky green vials and sold them at roadside stands along the information superhighway. Families looked out of their big living-room windows at its marvelous traffic of ones and zeros, and beyond it, above the horizon, bleep bloop blop, the clownskin itself. They’re called picture windows if you didn’t know that. It’s where our senior citizens can gaze out in vague patriotic stupors and wave tiny plastic flags with their liver-spotted hands. The Greatest Generation they’re called. And they’re still around if you can believe it.
Tentacles erupted from out of the hot springs of our minds. They slapped down cinematically onto the orangish limestone that made up our surrounding memories. Air and steam fizzled and spouted. Cocker Spaniels drew back barking savagely or tugging at the hems of our flowered sundresses with their teeth while we screamed and turned and fled back to our cars.
And nobody went back to their day jobs. Their night jobs either. I mean what can you do about it? The answer is nothing, motherfucker. There’s nothing you can do about it. Violent celebrations broke out. Riots and self-flagellation and massive Scylla-Charybdian mosh pits. Walls of death split the crowds. We pumped our tattooed fists. Of squids and flames and Sailor Jerry roses. We bobbed our odd-shaped heads. Minor Threat got back together and put out a new record. It sounded like their old shit. Which was pretty rad. Only the lyrics were halfhearted. And the issues they sang about didn’t really matter anymore. Rap splintered even further into more indefatigable subgenres. Disney Corporation festered and bloated. Big boils grew along our new heavens. Their big farty winds. And rumors drifted in from Beijing about some shipment of Syliva Plath finger puppets, sideline novelty gifts for our abandoned bookstores, that were inhaled through the warehouse ducts, from a manifold of converging storm systems, and disgorged several hundred miles away into the Yellow Sea. Clownskin, our daily planners clasped in our claspers, bending up the coiled spines. So many questions we needed answered but shirked for our cocaine and our Honey Boo Boo chiles and our stupid little fantasies and diversions. Our motocross tailgate parties. Our Castlevania speedruns. Our sick VHS collections. All the stupid goddamn bullshit that we tell ourselves just to alleviate the terror we’ve been feeling towards oblivion. Trapped in its maw.
O, Clownskin! Our kids acted weirder than ever, the tides and their algorithms, weather patterns and shit. Fuck if they did. Tornadoes slouched towards their barns. Dust devils squatted in their ditches. Lightning struck in squares and cubes. Crabs exploded. The stock market crashed. It popped and locked it. Shamone, it sang. It kicked out its weird gimpy leg and thrust its pelvis and danced and walked backwards. It did the moonwalk. It spun on the balls of its feet. And it did effortlessly what few stock markets could actually do, shamone. It floated on air, on your TVs, on your telecommunication devices. It bent spoons with its mind, and at times when haunted seaboard houses compelled it to, it assaulted and murdered with an axe its tired, illegitimate family, clad in brown corduroy and red flannel, its spry lesbian daughters. Even these bent spoons got in on all the action. And then on their electro-skateboards they crashed into our cactus-bushes.
All of our spooklights went out. All of them in America at least. From northeast Oklahoma to the ones near Marfa. Spooklights are like ghosts maybe. They’re strange little lights in the distance that nobody can explain. Our wenches swooned. Their bodices ripped spontaneously open. We turned to our stiff liquor drinks. We pointed at you with tumblers in our hands. We slapped your ass and told you to smile more often and called you dollface. Then a battery of smart pantsuited women came to displace us. Switchblade knives. Bubblegum from the bubblegum store. Bitch, I’ll cut you, they said. They fired the trigger-buttons on the ivory handles. The blades popped out. Each blade was information and a narrative in its own right. The gum in their mouths circling about. Don’t look over there, they told us. Round and round. Look over here. Goddammit. We’re the ones who’re talking.
Robots took over our day jobs. Our night jobs too. They were basically three cardboard boxes stacked from large to small, bottom on up. Tinfoil stapled to their sides. The tinfoil was actual skin and it ripped when you grabbed roughly at it. Because the robots were real from nature like the rest of us. Bleep bloop blop, went the robots. Nah, fuck that shit, they actually said. Warbling at us in Auto-Tune. Help me. Goddammit. I’m bleeding. Tourist attractions burnt to the ground. Pets retired their owners. Pets put them to sleep. They paced and cried and smoked mentholated cigarettes out front of emergency people clinics. They nervously clicked their fingernails against their thumbnails. Our cats had thumbs. They pushed and tugged at their cuticles. Cockfights resumed. They fought with their bare fists. Roosters had fists and teeth and goldchains, baby. General admission was charged. Put together by the Knights of Columbus. Ten dollars, those bastards charged us. No Venmo. You put out your wrist for a wristband. And you pretend like everything’s okay. But there’s nothing okay about it. You find yourself at Tiny Bar with Stephen and Betsey hoisting pints and pretending that you’re never going to die, but you are. It’s all going to end and it’s terrifying. And the terror’s cold and raw. And it’s been brining in the walk-in cooler for days. The tumbleweeds halted. You couldn’t find pot anymore which the kids were all calling something else now anyways. And they all laughed at you for being old and out of touch and mortal and dull. And for using words like grass and reefer. Now you’re huffing paint thinner out of potato-chip bags. Now you’re an anthropomorphic potato-chip bag yourself. And your ears go wah-wah-wah. You love your parents again. You strut in a line with anthropomorphic sodas and popcorn boxes and candy. You’re an icon of movie-theater concessionary commercials. And you go back to the gun range. You see a pair of gray foxes cut through your parking lot to hunt for squirrels nearby in the Christian compound. The clownskin somewhat brilliant in the dull rays of the failing sun. You’re breathing heavy inside your potato-chip mask. Your ex takes you back and she really loves you again. Really, she does. And you turn her towards the bedroom mirror and you say to her reflection, “Look how beautiful you are.” And it’s all quite strange and unexpected and amazing and wonderful. And your potato-chip heart wells with unbelievable joy. And you really can turn back the clock, you discover. Midway through your life. And later that night you look up at the clownskin and you bend down on one knee. You’re in the orange cone of a streetlight and you cast forth your wimpy swaybacked arms and you say to the cosmos, to yourself mostly, “This time it’s gonna be different.”
And in some cases, it is.
For the most part really.
Insane Clown Posse becomes prophets. They’re clown rappers and impresarios of sorts if you didn’t know that. Their Gathering of the Juggalos is absorbed into one of our minor national holidays and their fans feel suddenly vindicated. They celebrate with fat blunt cigarettes and regional-brand soda pop. And we come out sheepishly one by one and apologize to them for being such dicks. We’re sorry for gatekeeping, we say. We’re sorry for being such assholes. And they’re surprisingly cool about it. They crouch beside us like boring ole adults who crouch beside kids to explain life lessons or Jesus. “It’s okay, buddy,” says one of the Juggalos. It’s Iggy with the nascent black moustache. “Everybody makes mistakes.”
We’re killer.
We’re debonair.
We stand lost in front of our open fridge doors as they fill slowly with bright celestial light.
We push up our eyeglasses. We puff out our soul patches. We play hot blues licks on Fender Telecasters and we turn up our amps louder and louder and louder just to drown out all the anxiety that’s radiating about us.
And we’re half-asleep and we’re barely functional and yet we’re hitting the fan switches to our air mattresses. And our partially deflated mattresses start to blow up again. We’ve all gotten fat by now and our added weight forces the air to escape gradually through the night. And while our air mattresses engorge beneath us like massive tumescent penises or like giant sea anemones, inflating into such gargantuan sizes not even our largest sea creatures could eat them, and while our downstairs neighbors blow their brains out on depression and holy terror, and while the buckshot blasts up through their ceilings and up through our floors and punctures our swollen air mattresses, we’re just floating there, slightly drunk, slightly oblivious, our ex-ex-girlfriends snoring with gusto in other rooms, and we find ourselves sinking rapidly while our wimpy legs sting with metal and pieces of wood and skullbits.
And that was the fun part if you can believe it.
But that was also where the fun part ended, so.
Science and religion fought over the origin and remedy of the clownskin. Witches quit witchcraft. Cults ensued. Our clowns exalted to the status of chieftains, royalty. Honking horns. Pies in your faces. Tiny cars rolled off assembly lines. Large, prosperous families crammed inside of them. They terrorized the streets. They fired confetti cannons. The confetti was actually bits of painted scrap metal and rock salt. Some of us were hit by this and we exploded into liquid and goo. Others were chased down by the clowns meanwhile and overtaken at the chained-off terminals of remote county roads. We squirmed and pleaded. Bound and partly gagged. Please, we cried. Then the clowns reached behind our ears. You don’t have to do this, we added. Our ears caked with sand. We were scared. We were confused. The murky sun beyond the clownskin still burned our own skins which were now bright red. And it felt like ants were crawling all over them. Because we weren’t made for this. The clowns removed their fingers from behind our ears and pulled out quarters. Then they honked our noses while we struggled against the ropes. Against our loosened gags. Our wrists and ankles tore and bled. So we stopped.
Please, we said. Jesus Christ, hold on a sec.
Then before long, the clownskin begins to rot. It starts so slowly at first that we don’t even know it’s happening. But we know that something’s off. Only we can’t really say for sure. Then the smell of the air changes imperceptibly. Then it’s barely perceptible. Then it’s unmistakable. So we stop everything. We stop fooling ourselves. Because that’s what we’ve been doing all along. It’s horrible, we think. We look uncomfortable. We look like we’re in pain. We have puzzled looks on our faces like we’re being fucked roughly with tiny penises. We don’t go outdoors anymore. Not that it’s much better inside. It smells fucking horrible in there too and we try to cover it up with scented candles and Nag Champa and essential oils and aerosol bathroom sprays.
Then parts of the clownskin begin to collapse. The pieces are small at first. So small we can’t see much beyond these new gaps. The corpse-eaters among our fauna go apeshit. Others not so much.
Here marks a new era of mass confusion and panic. Even more so than when the clownskin first appeared across our heavens. Big pieces fall. The size of pickup trucks. The size of football fields. Like clouds from the olden days, they have their own peculiar shapes.
Some come as dragons. Others as canaries.
One comes as a giant jack-o’-lantern smoking a corncob pipe.
Another as a big-ass Ring Pop if you can remember those at all.
There’s even a humanoid chunk over Muscatine, Iowa that looks like some of us look, staked to the ground. Our arms and legs stretched out. Our wrists and ankles bound roughly to the stakes. Nearby another chunk falls off that looks sort of like a potato-chip bag dragging an axe. It looks like Iggy wearing a strange and wonderful Halloween costume. There are smaller chunks near the giant analogues of our bound hands that look as if our fingers have been chopped off at the middle knuckles. All but the thumbs. And it looks like a number of clownskin ants are carrying them off in different directions. Probably from different colonies or something, we elaborate in our church clothes, apocalyptically from our red and white checkered picnic blankets. The same way rioters from different races and nationalities and socioeconomic backgrounds and from different neighborhoods converge upon a department store.
And it all starts to make a new kind of sense.
Many of our buildings are destroyed.
Our bridges and 5G cellular towers.
Our monuments of antiquity.
Billionaires retreat to their bunkers, just outside of Concordia, Kansas. The bunkers are decommissioned SM-65 Atlas silos where once, long ago, we hid these nukes underground that we aimed at the Soviet Union and Cuba. Now they shelter billionaires pretty well and provide nice quirky homes for them to live in, ones that filter out the air and that store their invaluable works of art and their hillocks of variegated jewels. They drink cocktails in their golden Jacuzzis that they fill with recycled water. Not much we can do about it, they tell their horrified families and staff. They tell Chrissy and Bill in their blue boilersuits, clutching their mops. Stop your goddamn sniveling.
But nobody stops their goddamn sniveling. I mean, how the fuck can you even ask that?
Terrible noises shudder throughout their compounds. The lights flicker. Silverware rattles in their trays. Their Pekingese dogs yip and cower.
Some of us’ll make it out all right, they say.
And for once maybe the billionaires are right.
Brent Joseph Johnson was born and raised in rural Kansas. He was most recently the English editor for Heritage Magazine in Hanoi, Vietnam. His writing has also appeared in the Tampa Review, storySouth, Soft Skull Press, and a number of Texas journals. He now lives in South Austin and can be reached at bonemarimba@hotmail.com.
Check out HFR’s book catalog, publicity list, submission manager, and buy merch from our Spring store. Follow us on Instagram and YouTube. Disclosure: HFR is an affiliate of Bookshop.org and we will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase. Sales from Bookshop.org help support independent bookstores and small presses.
Heavy Feather Review 