what’s a fish with no i’s?
richie, he was a comedian. he stood on stage and spoke into a microphone for a million, maybe a billion, people to hear him.
they laughed. the jokes weren’t his.
he wouldn’t let them write about clowns or gay people. told them they were too much of a cash-grab, too overdone, too...
but he lied. so many of his other jokes were the same thing—cheesy, overdone cash-grabs. why did it matter?
he scratched it into his school notebooks, in the margins and around the notes he jotted down in his messiest scrawl, but this, these, they were delicate. he used his best pens and nicest handwriting.
how gay did that make him sound?
it was a rough draft before he put anything into stone—or wood, maybe, in this case, and into the history of derry.
shouldn’t have messed with his cousin i didn’t know i didn’t know i didn’t know i didn’t
there were enough r’s and enough e’s in derry for the idea—a stupid idea, really, that had popped into his head in the middle of one of his stupid daydreams—to not scare him anymore.
(richie and eddie eddie and richie)
r’s needed their e’s—e’s were meant for r’s.
woodhsvaings at his feet, fear lodged in his throat, glancing over his shoulder and listening hard for any footsteps on the asphalt.
his mother would be wondering where he was. with all the missing kids
the clown clown the clown no no the statue no please
she was more nervous than he’d ever seen her. he hadn’t missed curfew in weeks.
twenty-seven years, and richie, he was a comedian. he stood on stage and spoke into a microphone for a million, maybe a billion, people to hear him, and he was the joke they laughed at.
bev told him he’d grow into his looks, but he didn’t think he had.
(he didn’t remember when or why she told him, but the thought felt right in his head even though it made him want to throw up again).
he didn’t know younger-richie before, forgot him. but now, he had images of some kid that must’ve been him, his glasses and his pants both far too big, his hair cut awkwardly over his forehead and his mouth too big for his cheeks.
with the images came a feeling he forgot, too, but it was a different kind of forgot. like, in twenty-seven years—or maybe more because the feeling was there in all these new memories—he grew used to the feeling. it simmered until he forgot it was there.
he ran his finger over the wood and the carving, the twenty-seven-year-old carving, long since faded but still there for his fingers to find.
he didn’t want to think it.
they could’ve gotten a dog. not a pomeranian because the sounds they made, and they opened up into something tall and looming and decrepit, smelling of death and they didn’t need that smell in their couch and not scary at all.
maybe a cat. cats didn’t smell like death, but the hair might’ve driven eds crazy.
what’s a richie with no e?
nothing. he’s nothing without his e.
