The Last Laugh

A Short Story

It was four in the morning, and I couldn’t sleep. My mind wandered to a box of slides I’d recently found among my mother’s keepsakes. I must have left them at her house years ago, and—like the good mom she was—she kept them safe until I claimed them again. Then I forgot about them, tucked away and waiting, until I found them while cleaning out her home after she passed.

Restless, I decided to look through them. Maybe the nostalgia would help me drift back to sleep. I grabbed one of the small plastic boxes, lit up my iPad, and began holding the slides to the screen.

“Oh, these are old,” I said out loud. “1984 old.” Back then, labs stamped the processing date on the film mounts—and sure enough, each one read APR 84. I was young, living in Brooklyn, working at an ad agency by day and attending school at night. On weekends, I’d take the train to my mom’s house, and we’d drive to Atlantic City. We’d walk the boards, have lunch, and visit my grandmother at the nursing home before heading home.

I had my Canon AE-1 in those days—still one of my favorite cameras—and it did a fine job on these slides. Lucky me. There they were: boardwalk scenes of pizza joints, Italian water ice, and glittering casino façades, every frame alive with light and memory. I could almost taste the sweetness of the cherry-red salt water taffy from those afternoons—sticky fingers, seagulls circling, laughter tangled in the wind.

And then, I saw the clown.

Something about that image stopped me. I remembered taking it—aiming the camera upward at an angle, trying to frame it just right—but I hadn’t expected it to still feel alive. The sad eyes, the cracked grin, the sign that once promised joy. It was all there, perfectly preserved in Kodachrome color.

I smiled, feeling both comforted and uneasy. “That’s a sight for tired eyes,” I murmured. “Mr. Sad Clown Face.”

I set the box aside, meaning to look through more later. In a few hours, I’d be on the road again, heading down Florida’s Forgotten Coast for a few days of landscape photography. I took one last look at the clown slide glowing softly on my iPad screen—then turned out the light and drifted off to sleep.

The air changed before I opened my eyes. I could feel it—thicker, cooler, carrying the scent of something sweet, like cotton candy left too long in the sun. A carousel tune drifted through the air, faint but wrong somehow, looping in uneven circles.

When I finally looked around, the van was gone.

In its place stretched the Atlantic City Boardwalk, glowing under a haze of sodium light. The old planks were wet from a mist that didn’t belong to Florida, and every sound—gulls, laughter, footsteps—felt a little too far away, like an echo trying to remember itself.

And then I saw him.

The clown.

He stood beneath the Central Pier Amusements archway—no longer flat and faded on paper, but solid, breathing, impossibly alive. His paint was cracked and flaking, his grin crooked but steady, and his eyes glimmered with something that might have been amusement or a warning.

“Well, well,” he said, voice low and cheerful. “You finally came back.”

The words stopped me cold. I still had my camera—the same old Canon AE-1 from the slides—its leather strap warm against my hand. I tried to laugh, to say something rational, but nothing came out.

He took a slow step forward, boots scraping against the damp boards. “You took my picture once,” he said, tilting his head. “Captured me good, didn’t you? Locked me in that little frame of yours.”

His grin widened—not menacing, not kind. Just too much.

“You photographers,” he continued softly. “Always freezing people. You ever wonder if the pictures remember you, too?”

My pulse quickened. I looked through the viewfinder out of habit, needing a layer of glass between us. The clown was gone. The archway was empty.

But from somewhere behind me came a whisper, warm against my ear.
“Go on,” he said. “Take another. Let’s make this one count.”

The shutter clicked.

And then—silence.