Roberto the Clown smoked his cigarette in front of the mirror, gazing somberly into his mottled painted face. Clown meeting at 10 AM on the Westside. Then he would man the afternoon shift at the corner of Swift and Ingalls and Amuse.

It was a deadly game. Three clowns has been killed this last month. The people were sick and tired and sometimes the laughter cracked something ugly. Just hold back a moment, let ‘em breathe…but it was the Clown Imperative to keep pushing, grow their ranks.

Roberto had broken a year ago, on a hot fall day on the downtown shopping strip.

“Gelato for you sir?” the clown had asked, spooning a tub of bright green gelato bit by bit onto the smooth bricked concrete. “Gelato for you?” He was a wry one, with piercing eyes. Roberto hadn’t meant to make eye contact, but something inside him twitched. “Gelato for you?”

Roberto stopped, considered, and took the tub from the man. “Gelato for me,” he announced. He could have walked on then, he was still safe. Tell his friends the story, over gelato. But something in him twitched again. He reached into his back pocket and felt his spoon sticking out. Why had he brought soup for lunch that day? He pulled it out. The clown’s eyes twinkled. “Gelato for you,” Roberto told him and dropped a spoonful of the green cream on the clown’s head. “Gelato for yoooouuu!”

Hours of hysteria later the spattered clown–Jerry was his name–took him back to Headquarters.

Roberto took another drag and blew the smoke on the mirror.

How now, brown cow?

Jerry had been killed in February–blew bubbles on the wrong suit and got a knife in the gut. But the clowns were winning. Only the dead could hold out. The wars. The plague. The alien attack. The weather shifts. The grasp on things was breaking apart. The Imperative was the only reply Roberto’s dwindling energy could summon. Shuffling through the street, chainsmoking, rasping out the ditties; dirty old clown.

He would try public indecency today. “Roberto for you?” he was considering asking, in tribute. He winked at himself in the mirror. A little stubble. A strong jaw. Sturdy suspenders. “For you, little lady?”

Robert for you. It was a death wish.