Epilogue -- Part Two -- On Childhood Entertainment

It was a TV show confused about its audience, unsure of being for kids or for adults. The little girl in long curly brown pigtails coped with her life by juggling, and at other times grabbing her throat and burped.

She had hoped it make others laugh.

The government hated her burping so badly, they sent her to the guillotine. Her final farewell before the blade went through her neck, was the sound of sorrowful giggling like some child hiding sadness in her life. Her blues eyes in the basket stared off into forever, fading out for sixty second. Her last minute of vision was a gradually darkening skyline. I find myself playing the role of the clown girl, imagining myself in her role. And yet I never could juggle. I wondered if there was some untold story, the story of what the person she was based on really did to deserve to die.

Or why I mere child deserved to go.

That how I learned to never let things go. For those little baby faces, that hide hidden tears contain sorrows we may never understand. I imagine her joining her clown friends beyond the dreamer's edge playing their funeral tap dance, together as they ride their troupe beyond the light.

So I dropped every watching children's shows. The nature of youth had always given me mixed feelings, as it had been so long since I was a child. And yet at the same time I felt I never really grew up. I wanted to be like the girl on the television show, I wanted to rewind the movie of my life. I think of the older teen years she could have had, I think of the vacations she could have an enjoyed. I suppose one could suggest my empathy meant the writer did their job. Yet for me it wasn't that kind of empathy. It was the kind where I think of the kids that saw a head come off the first time.

I remember when I saw my first decapitation, I was in my early teens. I remembered how the first one I saw was lady walking up a scaffold, and how it cut to off screen whenever the head was about to come off, this was when I hand one of my first hard ons despite being a girl. Yet in a children's show, which the previous one was not, two girls would play with a girl's severed head like it was a volley ball, and there was no insinuation the girl with the removable head died.

But this girl with curly brown pigtails was no longer there.

Yet her smile never faded from my mind.

The thing about how gore is approached, I've never been certain how to handle beheading in a children's book. Especially if the girl died. My assumption for a long time how children's fiction was suppose to be whimsical. But when you grow up with a teacher making light of a puppy dog hung by the neck, you never really look at your childhood the same since.

I felt I'd be ruining a child's life.

I didn't want this, I was never a child at all. I wanted to give them that childhood that I never had. And yet at times I find myself going back to the show.

I listen to the clown troupes country song.

The cheerfully sad children's song.