You stop in your tracks mid-aisle while walking through the grocery store. A large piece of marketing commands you to taste SOMETHING FUN. Your heart being pure and your mind being clean no dirty thoughts creep into your mind at the sight of the sign.
Pffft haha no you think about dicks and stuff.
Turning your body, but not your mind, away from the sign and back to the path ahead of you, you spot him. He stands dressed in ill-fitting polka-dotted pants, a bright red shirt and a comically sized purple bow tie. His candy-striped suspenders clash horribly with his oversized shiny blue shoes, but compliment his white face paint and red rubber nose beautifully, resulting in a fashion train wreck that you don’t want to look at, but can’t bring yourself to turn away from.
He is staring right at you from under the bundle of balloons he holds in his right hand. The clown at the end of the aisle is staring right at you.
He cuts his gaze on you just for a moment to glance at the sign that says taste SOMETHING FUN, then resumes his stare. He nods.
You look back at the sign, then at the clown once more.
He nods again.
The clown says nothing, but you feel him in your mind. He reaching out with his terrible clown powers and tells you to taste SOMETHING FUN.
You blink and he is five feet closer to you.
You try to take a step back but you are frozen, frozen in the clown’s gaze like the victim of the only gorgon that graduated clown college. You hear children laughing.
He nods. His balloons shift above him and take on an almost mirror-like sheen, reflected on them is taste SOMETHING FUN.
The scraping of balloon animal on balloon animal fills your ears and would make you cringe if you weren’t paralyzed but for your eyes, which blink again, allowing this jester of horror to creep up again. He is in front of your face now.
Against your will, your mouth opens and you realize the children you heard are no longer laughing, they are screaming.
The clown nods once more, and you are taken.