The Clown On The Lid

I turned a corner and there it was, waiting, and my ears rang like a tent pole in wind. Across the front was a hand-drawn clown, upside down. It wasn’t decoration. It felt like a voice from a lost world. Not a lifeless box, a splinter of that wandering life. I watch memory get a new job as furniture. People use them at the end of a bed. Some call it distressed, but I call it still beating. A trunk keeps its place in the room. If you pass a market and the lid winks, don’t turn your nose at the scar.

Pick the trunk with a story, and let it carry you too. People now call trunks storage, but they carried lives before cheap plastic. They were built heavy and honest. Thick boards, stout hinges, stubborn locks. Some wore brass corners or painted letters. Lift the lid and you meet a story, you meet a journey. Latch it and it holds the temperature of memory. Years later, another memory took hold. Every year the circus rolled in like a quick storm, and handbills pasted to brick and lampposts promised elephants, fire breathers, acrobats — and always clowns.

Anticipation walked ahead of the drums. Horses clattered down the lane, and everything smelled of canvas, rope, and damp grass. It was chaos and colour and a kind of magic. My workspace smells of oil, wood, and patient repairs. I see it tucked beside a pole, stuffed with costumes and props, silent as a drum just before lights-up. Every dent and scrape hint at years of sidings and side streets. You can almost smell powder and cheap vintage trunk brass. Sometimes the sea and the sawdust share a bench.

One rolled across counties. I oil the hinges and listen. They don’t even sit in the same time, but together they settle the air. That’s how story learns to stand: in paint. So I let them live in my rooms, and I go about my day. Old paint softens. Whenever I glance over, the clown looks back, as if waiting for the drumroll. And when the window fogs and clears, I think I hear a dock call and a trumpet answer, and I repeat the truth one more time: a trunk holds a life.

And then a screen repeated the past. I saw a poster on ArtStation, and it showed a clown suitcase home storage solutions trunk that matched mine. The memory walked in wearing fresh boots. The tilt of the face, the paint bleeding into the grain were near-identical. I imagined the same trunk crossing two lives. Screen to wood, pixel to plank: the echo landed in the same room.