BY SAM CRAIN
Copyright is held by the author.
NATALIE HAD just switched from Psych to English, and she was lucky enough to land a spot in the Ceramics course to satisfy her Fine Arts req, enabling her to be up to her elbows in nice, clean mud. The prof, it was rumored, had partied his way through Chico State, back in California, but no one could fault his artistic talent. A few might fault his temperament but what artist worth his salt had no detractors? He could throw a bowl on the potter’s wheel easy as lying, and Natalie could happily have watched him do it for hours. This bowl was already thrown though, and bone-dry for etching through its matte-brown underglaze. The prof’s hands made sure strokes: a large circle surrounded by smaller ovals. These ovals got curly line-tails — Natalie felt herself blushing and felt even hotter with embarrassment that she should be embarrassed in the first place. People were fidgeting a little in their seats as the prof etched away, a wry half-smile on his face.
No one was talking and the prof simply kept on. His smile might have widened a bit. He was relaxed and waiting and Natalie felt like this performance was a part of his art —
“Sperm and egg,” someone said. Natalie turned so fast, she cricked her neck. Just behind her, a young guy with dark eyes and rumpled hair caught her eye and winked. The Prof looked pleased. “At last,” he said, and set the bowl aside. “I swear that pause gets longer every semester.”
People chuckled in that way that meant they’d been caught off-guard. A titter. Natalie felt the boy behind her as a warm, crackling presence. A chair-creak as he leaned forward. “Just saying what everyone was thinking,” he said, stirring the hair against her neck.
“Class dismissed,” said the prof, so that Natalie nearly missed the boy asking if she were free Friday night.
“Yes,” she said, sure she blushed harder than ever.
“Good. I’m Max.” They’d exchanged numbers and that had been that.
***
They’d been walking along and a stranger had grabbed at Natalie’s arm so that she’d nearly fallen. “Your wallets and phones,” he said, yanking Natalie’s bag off her arm.
Max pulled the thing from his pocket and for one wild moment, Natalie thought it was an enema bulb. But it was a clown’s nose.
(Gotcher nose)
He clapped it to his face and met the mugger’s eye as he squeaked it. “What’s doin, good sir? Parlez-vous Français?” he asked, with such bizarre and deadpan naivete that the mugger dropped Natalie’s bag and backed up a step. Max grabbed the bag in one hand and Natalie in the other. “Run!”
Their feet had thundered staccato over the cool pavement and Max tugged them through a side-street and then another, until they finally hunched side-by-side in a well-lit bus stop in the town centre. Natalie took back her bag and hugged it tight against her. “Should we get a drink?” she asked, feeling sweat slick between her shoulder blades and breasts and chill on her face.
“I don’t drink alcohol but there’s a late-night coffeeshop near here.” He’d led the way.
That’s how Natalie found herself at a tiny table of scratched stainless steel with Max, caffeine and other things fizzing in her blood.
“A clown-nose?” she asked, as if she couldn’t help it.
Max clapped the nose to Natalie’s own nose. “What would you have said, then?”
It came to Natalie without conscious reaching and she let her face go still. “Mommy. Oh God, Mommy, I swear I didn’t mean to.” She should have felt disgusted, able to feel Max’s sweat mingling with her own in the clown-nose guts, only she didn’t.
(Fluid-bonded)
Way too soon to think like that.
She reached up and tweaked the nose so it would honk. Max was looking at her like he’d never seen anything like her. She was grateful, she was in love, she was lost…
***
How good those early days had been, like sweet wine on a summer evening, making her want to drink and drink until she was free and loose and drunk. Having him move in with her had been like breathing. How could you hesitate about breathing? He’d lost his job—a temporary setback, he’d promised, though he’d always stayed vague on why it’d gone down that way. She believed him when he said he’d been misunderstood, that his manager disliked him. Had taken his side almost without thinking about it, which would otherwise be unlike her.
When he’d moved in, Max had been flush with cash, literally. She had assumed it was busking profits or something, but he’d not done enough gigs for that—not enough to justify the wad of twenties she found on laundry day, rolled up behind his undershirts. Maybe he works at a strip club at night and he’s embarrassed to say, Natalie rationalized. Exhibitionists could have a shy, vulnerable side, she told herself, putting the rest of their clothes away.
The money seemed to have dried up after a while though, and having never asked when he’d had it, Natalie, could hardly demand explanation of its lack.
***
That had been months ago. Summer had come and gone. Then fall. Max had done a little stand-up this, a little spoken-word that, but it netted him nothing but the feeling of Being an Artist. Natalie felt disloyal when she dimly sensed how she was subsidizing something illusive, barely half-there.
Now it was winter break of her senior year and instead of working on her Capstone project, she was picking up double shifts at the restaurant to cover rent, watching hollows carve themselves under her eyes as she ran short of sleep. He was taking hers—that was how it felt, watching him lie in while she got dressed in the dark, came home in the dark, ate instant noodles under the forlorn single kitchen-bulb and crawled into whichever portion of the bed Max hadn’t stretched across.
“We’ve got an opening at the restaurant for part-time,” she tried over a breakfast of cold cereal. “Hosting for brunch shift on weekends. I could get you in easily,” she said.
“Isn’t that when you guys do the bottomless mimosas?” he asked, pouring more mini-wheats into his milk-dregs.
“Yeah,” she said, trying not to wince. She hated them as much as anyone but drunks typically tipped well, catching her between disgust and gratitude.
“No thanks,” he said. “I saw people on Insta barfing over their tables there.”
“At my restaurant specifically?” Her voice got higher than she’d intended and she really did wince.
“Yep.”
She took a deep breath to try again. Best two out of three. “We could walk in together, though. Hosts don’t clean up barf. That’s for busboys mostly. And it would leave your evenings free if — when — you get gigs.” Don’t make me say money’s getting tight, she told him with her eyes. Don’t make me.
“Listen,” he said, eyes shining with sincerity. “I really appreciate it, but it’s not a good fit. You know me,” he added, with a sudden, devilish grin. “Clumsy.” He made as though to clear their bowls but upended both and fell backward.
“Max, quit screwing around — ” His head thwacked the lino. “Max?” The milk was dripping off the table to the floor, but she was busy tugging at her boyfriend, who sat up, rubbing his skull. “That was too hard,” she said. “Get your coat — I’m taking you to get checked out right now.”
Max smiled more sweetly now, getting gingerly to his feet. “Don’t worry. Something will come through. Soon.”
“Yeah,” she said, staring at the clown-nose that’d slipped from his pocket, willing herself to sound convinced. “Soon.”
In the waiting room while Max underwent a CT scan, Natalie couldn’t outrun the thought-question: Had he done that on purpose?
***
Money had started to trickle in again, to Natalie’s relief. A hospital bill was in the mail, headed their way, and her palms sweated to think of it. Max still said nothing of where he got his funds. Just be something artistic, not illegal, she thought. Max needed the validation even more than the pay. She was grateful she worked in a restaurant and more grateful still the head cook liked her enough to set aside leftovers for that cut down on the groceries she had to buy. Even slightly overdone, Reggie’s lasagna was delicious, and it kept her on her feet. “One day, you’ll tell me what you put on the garlic bread,” she teased, handing in her plate after break on what she devoutly hoped would be her last double for a while.
Reggie laughed. “One day, you’ll come to the dark side and I’ll teach you all my secret recipes.” He waggled his brows and she couldn’t help but giggle. “Just think,” Reg said. “I’ve got to be better to answer to than the customers.”
“Are you sure?” she laughed.
He only winked and shouted over his shoulder at the dishwasher.
Workplace jollity aside, Natalie’s feet were absolutely killing her as she untied her apron, shouldered her purse, and grabbed the bag of chicken cacciatore Reg had set aside for her. She wanted to eat in the bath. She was fantasizing about hot water, Epsom salts, a tasty supper, and a break from endless double shifts — an entire day before she’d need to explain to yet another customer that eggs were in fact not a dairy product. Surrendering to anticipation, she nearly breezed past the bar on the corner. The sight of Max’s distinctive leather jacket caught her peripheral vision and she froze. A half-full pint of piss-yellow beer sat by his elbow and she could see people jostling each other to be close to him.
Oh no, I don’t drink, he’d said, before they’d even begun dating. And yet here he was, holding court in a dive bar, looking perfectly at home. Feeling both drunk and masochistic herself, Natalie went in, standing in the shadows, needing to see him take a drink of that beer. Until he did, she could believe this had all been a mistake — a nightmare she’d had with her eyes open, triggered by overwork. A lapse of faith on her part. The smells of fruity booze and old beer mingled with cheap cologne and something unfamiliar. Ice dropped into glasses, empties echoed as they were dispatched behind the bar. Chatter reminded her of ducks quacking. She inched closer, keeping her head down.
“It’s quite simple, really,” Max was telling his audience. “I call it disarming. You use the ridiculous to maintain the upper hand, you see. Never be afraid to say what others don’t dare. It is the ultimate power move because almost no one can handle it.
“Can you give an example?” an overly-coifed young man in a tight t-shirt asked.
Feeling the hairs knife up on her arms, Natalie watched Max reach into his pocket and don his red nose. “Probably I can, but it’ll cost you, sailor,” he said with a kind of leer. “I never work for free.” Nose still on, he took a gulp of beer and belched loud. “Any other questions?”
“Will this help get women to sleep with me?” a guy asked, sweat glittering on his upper lip.
“Certainly, if you master it.” Max winked extravagantly. “Would I lie to you?”
Natalie got out of there without being seen, falling over her own feet, or going blind though all those had felt equally possibly in the moment. She stumbled into her bathroom and locked it, food forgotten on the kitchen counter, along with her appetite.
Who the hell am I living with? She found her own scared eyes in the mirror, shivering as though suddenly taken ill and turned on the shower as hot as it would go. The spray reddened her skin, but she couldn’t feel it.
Max came home with a bag full of groceries, no liquor on his breath at all — Natalie had inhaled deeply but silently when he’d bent over to kiss her forehead before climbing into bed himself. She let on she was asleep as he got settled, even as she doubted her ability to sleep ever again.
Sometime before dawn, her eyelids must have finally slammed shut because she dreamed — of a clown-nose with barbed teeth, dripping blood. She snapped awake, shaking.
Natalie eased herself out from under the covers but Max was snoring like a lawnmower. She tiptoed to the alcove where Max’s desk lay, buried under project paraphernalia, and opened his laptop.
It didn’t take long to find: Maxwell’s Workshop: Disarm Others to Empower Yourself. A sort of sales video she refused to click on, and a link to a flyer, promising Results or Your Money Back, Guaranteed! Bullet points of promises, hints of what the workshop could enable, all superimposed over a clown-nose logo he’d likely designed himself —
Natalie forgot where she was for a moment and shoved back from the desk, seeing barbed teeth again in her mind as she inadvertently overturned the desk chair.
“Nattie?” Max was there in moments, breathless, disheveled, the silhouette of his face suggesting only concern. He saw the open laptop and paled. “No — Natalie, you weren’t meant to see that, God.”
“Sure. I was supposed to believe your stand-up career had really taken off, right? That’s why you had cash again?”
Max looked perilously near tears in the laptop’s screen-glow. “No — I only went back to this because I knew how much we needed money. Don’t you think it killed me, thinking of your wiping up puke and catering to people barely smart enough to function?”
“It all comes back to puke with you, doesn’t it?” she asked, feeling outside herself and mildly nauseated though it would be too on-the-nose to say so.
“Be serious, can’t you?” Max said, reaching for her hand.
“Can you?” she asked, evading his touch and backing away.
Max clapped on his clown-nose. “Maybe I can’t,” he said, taking a step toward her.
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***

Sam Crain lives in Fremont, CA. Now that she’s finished her PhD in English, she’s free to return to her first love, writing stories, which she does whenever she can steal her pens back from her cats. She has published a handful of short stories and flash fictions to date, most recently “Magic Mushroom” in Space & Time Magazine, “Cadre” in Neurodiversiverse, and “Frank the Dragon” in Sheila-na-Gig.
Wow … what an exciting tale. I even feel as though the ending is open enough to let us guess the next steps.
What a great read. Unique, believable characters. Captivated by the pace and the mystery behind Max. Well done.