Snickerdrop
Snickerdrop
by Ramsés Dávila-Luna @ The Writer’s Cavern
In the warm glow of a backstage mirror, Dmitry Ivanov covered his facial scars with powders and greasepaint. Red lipstick traced a smile over his pout. Black eyeliner pencils pressed against the skin above and beneath his eyes until triangles formed. A jumbo rainbow wig hid the waffle-like ridges and discolored skin on his scalp. Two nights a week, Dmitry transformed into Snickerdrop the clown to entertain the masses.
An old memory of how fresh buds eat swill.
Only to later realize real leather lives forever.
Housefire took original skin, and human sin followed.
Dmitry sat on a red bench during his high school lunch breaks. Jessica, a popular athlete in the same grade who donned a varsity jacket, plopped right beside him. “I’d like you to be my prom date,” Jessica told Dmitry. He had been chosen in the wild by elegance. Dmitry saved the date. A sense of ease washed over him. He was eager to get home to tell his parents about victory.
Later that night, the fire came by accident, and the prince awoke in bed, charred.
Lass forgot about the summons when she saw the meshed skin on the stallion.
Sight fluttered to another stable.
The sea of old friends parted, and Dmitry spent the last year of high school in isolation. The students came to recognize the red bench as his marked territory. Mr. Ellenbarger, his English teacher, invaded the damaged space to hand-deliver a polaroid picture. “Someone in class took this, and you showed up more than the person they intended to capture. I thought I would give this to you before you head out into the real world,” Mr. Ellenbarger told Dmitry. The teacher’s hands fidgeted, burdened by the classmates’ hesitation to pass the photo.
Print marked eyes that never wanted to be found.
A quiet grimace surrounded by loud smiles.
Dmitry’s harsh reality began after they put out the flames that destroyed his skin. Whatever job he held, the mistreatment kept Dmitry shut out – strange glances, whispered jokes, and unspoken walls. He meditated in alleyways after his work shifts to recover his crown. Then one day, a little person leading a troupe of misfits stepped into the passageway and pressed a calling card into Dmitry’s hand. That moment inspired Dmitry to pack his bags, and he ran away with the outcasts. “I am your tree and its roots. I will snicker at your pain until you find a way to welcome it to stay,” the little person told Dmitry on his very first day.
Thirty years later, Snickerdrop playhouses sold out. The clown took his show on the road, which drew the normal and the disfigured to his mending sound. A balance beam or juggling trick hardly pronounced. Last act on the red bench silenced the crowd. With a bucket of water and a sponge in hand, the performer scrubbed off his bonfire. Spotlight revealed true fleece and taught the audience to love the underneath without bounds.
At a spectacle near Dmitry’s hometown, Jessica ran past the security guards and made it onstage so the full up could present her frown. The left side of her time-worn face drooped down in permanent paralysis as she screamed to the world about her past foul. Lights dimmed for an orchestra to frame the old account: an owed dance between the two that even the flames couldn’t put out.
Copyright © 2026 The Writer's Cavern by Ramsés Dávila-Luna at The Writer’s Cavern LLC. All rights reserved.