Giggles

Cynthia stood in the sick yellow staff bathroom of the pediatric wing of the hospital. She held a handful of lethal-smelling makeup wipes as she leaned over the sink and let her gaze drift to the dusty art piece that hung opposite the mirror, visible over her shoulder.  

It was one of those mass-produced canvases pumped out by big box stores. It depicted a terracotta wall behind a bowl of lemons sitting on a butcher block. One of the lemons had escaped and rolled artfully forward, almost touching the exclamation mark of the bold, black cursive letters that were suspended, forever just out of reach, in the foreground.

“LIVE, LAUGH, LOVE!” it declared. Or, more accurately, “!EVOL, HGUAL, EVIL”  

“I bet that poor lemon has had it with toxic positivity,” thought Cynthia.  

One of her teenage patients had introduced her to the term “toxic positivity.” Unlike some of her peers, Cynthia liked the youngs. They came up with cute names for the shit she’d been swallowing for years. She wasn’t sure what that did, but maybe naming the horrible things made them easier to kill. Maybe.

She dragged her focus away from that desperate, striving little lemon and back to her reflection.

“Jesus Christ,” she muttered as she surveyed the broken-down clown nurse that stood before her.

The greasepaint that defined her enormous red smile, lined in black, was sinking inevitably into her wrinkles. She got why women her age pumped their lips full of – what was it? Silicone? Botulism? Gluten? Those weird, bloated duck-lips might look cartoonish, but they hid the fact that you smoked in your twenties.

“Man, I miss smoking,” thought Cynthia.

She puffed out her lips in the mirror and uttered a sultry, “Prunes…” then laughed to herself.

To herself? It almost sounded like someone was laughing with her. A girlish voice, higher than her own grown-up tenor… “He-he-he-he-heeeee!”

Cynthia stopped laughing. She breathed softly into the quiet of the antiseptic room. She might need glasses to read these days, but she had excellent hearing. If someone was here…

Nope. Nothing. She was overtired.

The hospital “strongly recommended” the nurses in peeds each take a monthly shift smearing on clown makeup to “cheer up patients.”  

That was textbook toxic positivity. Wasn’t it? Especially when up to seventeen percent of Americans have a clinical phobia of clowns, according to Cynthia’s phone.

“You’re a kid with cancer? Well, I’m a fifty-six-year-old medical professional in clown makeup. Do you feel better?”  

They did not.

With or without the makeup, Cynthia knew how to get a laugh. Usually by cursing or telling a poop joke when the parents were out of the room.

This farce wasn’t for the kids. It was all for Jim Roberts, the hospital administrator who’d never stopped congratulating himself on his brilliant “nurses as clowns” idea. He liked to tell them, “It’s not mandatory, ladies! It’s fine if you hate fun.”

Fuck him.

“And fuck me I guess,” said Cynthia under her breath. Not for the first time today.  

The top of her scrubs, which were covered in balloons, stretched too tight across her bust. It had, over the past few years, simultaneously swollen and deflated. How was that even physically possible? She was a nurse and damned if she knew.

Her hospital ID had been shoved in her pocket, and in its place was a giant yellow nametag that read, “HI! MY NAME IS GIGGLES.”

The huge, curly rainbow wig was askew, and her coarse, silver roots poked out at random intervals. It was a losing battle at this point, but she kept trying. She patted her hair thinking, “I need to make a color appointment at Hairway to Heaven… Ridiculous name.”

“Hehehehe! Hairway to Heaven! Oh, that is TERRIBLE! Hahahaha!” the cutesy voice rang through the bathroom again.

Cynthia jumped! “What the hell?”

“Hahahaha! You jumped!”

“Where are you?” Cynthia knew she’d checked for feet when she came in, but now she rushed around, slamming open the three metal stall doors.

No one.

No one.

No one.

“I’m losing it,” thought Cynthia. “Did someone slip something into my coffee?”

She checked her pulse. Normal. Breathing? Steady under the circumstances. She looked at her pupils. Not dilated. If anything, her eyes looked brighter than usual.

Her color? Well, lead-paint-white, black and red. But that was easily solvable.

She forced herself to unclench her fist, and with one of the crushed makeup wipes, she gave her cheek a purposeful swipe.  

“I’m done with twelve-hour shifts,” she thought.

She studied the area she’d hit with the wipe. There should be a satisfying Cynthia’s-skin-colored hole. But it was still bloodless, unnatural white.

She swiped again, more forcefully. Nothing. Then a long, sharp draw across the exaggerated lips. But it was like she wasn’t even touching her face. The makeup was not coming off. She went from swiping to aggressively scrubbing to digging into her skin so hard it made her hands shake.

She turned on the water and tried re-wetting the makeup wipes. Another swipe. Another scrub, but the clown in the mirror just looked at her with the fire-engine smile, the hearts on the cheeks. The too-bright eyes.

And then it returned… full of so much terrifying joy, “Hehehehehe! Giggles, you’re hilarious!”

“My name is not Giggles!” she shouted at no one.  

“But Giggles…”

She drowned out the voice by turning the tap to full power with one hand and loudly pumping gross pink soap out of its almost-empty sink-side dispenser with the other. She smashed the gummy liquid into her face, followed by a dousing with scalding water.

But what stared back was still the smiling, syrup-sweet face of a middle-aged lady clown. She wasn’t even wet.