Laughter is a distant memory for Jack, the clown. Life, as he knows is over for him. A prisoner by choice, will he find the will to live once again?

He was a clown. An ugly clown at that. With his face painted a sickly white and his nose a blood red; the pockmarks and scars were hidden, but not the wood-like hardness that had got permanently etched. He had yellow straggly hair, it's texture almost like the bristles of a worn out toothbrush. No one noticed much beyond his face, as it was enough to make one's heart start violently when it jumped at them from the darkness.

Jack meant to make people laugh. He really meant to. Not that he wanted this job. His wife had died due to a freak Nitrous Oxide leak in her lab and the laughing gas had erased any memory of laughter from him. He had quit his desk job and spent all his time at the bottom of a Jack Daniel's bottle.

'Several suicide attempts, a few drunken quarrels and a six-month jail term' later, his sister had persuaded him to take up this job. Her pompous boyfriend had set this up and that no-good nitwit had derisively commented that Jack's nose suited the job very well.

Her boyfriend's nose had never come down to it's original size, after Jack's neat punch had taken care of it.

The job itself was pretty easy. You had to doll up as a clown; wait backstage and on cue, appear into the pool of light from the darkness and jump stupidly. Then followed a series of foot taps and some embarrassing antics which supposedly made healthy and sane people laugh.

But try what may, Jack couldn't make people even smirk let alone laugh. His performance was always followed by a silence which lasted a good 15 seconds after which the audience broke into a scattered nervous applause. As if the audience was somewhat appalled by Jack's show. Like they were a bit scared.

The manager had initially shouted down Jack for his clear absence of enthusiasm towards the job and had threatened to fire him. Again it was his sister's nauseating boyfriend who had bailed him out. Jack had almost felt ashamed seeing his slightly bulging and crooked nose.

But soon, 'Jack - the loony clown' became 'Jack - the creepy clown'. With some menacing-sounding BGM and light & dark play, it wasn't bad at all. Some even started calling him Joker after the Batman's nemesis.

A steady job and income pushed Jack back into his bad drinking days but he kept it low to avoid being kicked out of his job again. On some nights, he remained sober no matter how much he downed cheap hard liquor. That was too bad because a delicate female tinkle of a laugh kept playing on his head in a loop which always ended in his uncontrollable dry sobbing.

He rarely left his room after the show and any semblance of cleanliness in the room had vanished; with an all pervading smell of unwashed clothes and stale food lingering in the tightly enclosed space. The only face the outside world knew of him, was the ugly scary clown.

On his 24th show, he even had a few fans. It was utterly awkward for Jack to try and sign the autograph books thrust at him after a show. Today was his birthday and he had completely forgotten it until his sister pushed a small gift into his hand. She had said that it was her boyfriend who had chosen the gift. Given Jack's previous animosity toward him and her BF's absolute forgiving nature; Jack had muttered thanks and gone back to his musty room to sink into his bed, as usual.

The 20 missed calls and an angry voice note told Jack that his sister was pissed that he hadn't called and thanked her boyfriend for the gift. With mounting irritation on being woken up, he uncovered the wrappings and found a plain wooden box with a shiny gold handle on its side.

He fumbled to open it in the semi-darkness, cursing his sister and her stupid boyfriend for such childish gifts and out came something with a pop.

Jack jumped back in alarm and dropped the box. He didn't expect it and he could feel his heart thumping in his throat. An ugly clown's head was dangling from the end of a spring attached to the box. It was gently swinging to and fro from the spring's recoil.

It was a Jack-in-the-box.

As his heart beat came down, he realized how the clown's face was remarkably like his. Hard serious scary and ....lifeless.

Jack cried.

Not the dry hacking sobs he had when he thought about his young deceased wife. Hot tears rolled down his cheeks fast and hard and it was like he let open a closed dam.

It hit upon him that he was really living the life of a Jack-in-the-box, cooped up in his room and dead to the world except when he put on his facade of a clown.

The jolt had brought Jack back to his senses. He had a life to live. For the sake of his long-gone wife. For the sake of his sister. For the sake of himself.

He got up and pushed open the curtains of one of his windows and squinted as the light hit him like the spotlights in his show.

A long shaft of sunlight with swirling dust motes fell on the wooden clown's head and suddenly...

...it wasn't so scary.