Free Tell My Sorrows to the Stones by Christopher Golden

Little Tramp. There were many schools of comedy, but Benny had never been much interested in telling jokes or doing stand-up. In his heart, he had always been a clown. Though some of them were probably quite valuable, none of the books Rose’s Mobile Book Fair had on her shelves were unfamiliar to him.
    He’d just begun to turn away when he noticed the frayed spine of a book lying on its side atop the dozen or so she had shelved at the end of her boys’ adventure section. The worn, faded lettering was almost unreadable in the shadows, but when he slipped his slender fingers in and slid the volume out, the cloth cover made him stiffen in surprise. The comedy and tragedy masks were there, along with the initials G.T.
    Quickly he leafed to the title page and a warm feeling spread through him.
Charade: The Secret to Being a Clown
, by Giovanni Tovolo. He had never even heard of the book, had not run across it in any of his reading and research, even in the biography of Tovolo he’d read. The famous Italian character clown had retired after a horrifying accident had taken sixteen lives in a big top fire outside Chicago in 1917. All but forgotten, Tovolo had been a particular fascination of Benny’s because the man had earned his reputation doing characters. Most of the famous clowns were whitefaces or augustes. Tovolo could do anything, at least according to what Benny had read . . . but now, to read it in Tovolo’s own words.
    Maybe Tovolo could help him figure out how he ended up spending four years at the wrong end of clown alley. He glanced up at Rose, unable to stifle his excitement and hoping she didn’t take advantage of him.
    “How much do you want for this one?” he asked.
    She took it from his hand, opened it to see the price she’d penciled on the first page. “Twenty-two dollars.”
    Benny swallowed hard, knowing his smile was too thin. Did she not realize that, to certain collectors, this book would be worth a hundred times that? Or did she simply not care, having paid next to nothing for it herself.
    He smiled. “I’ll take it.”
    Benny’s mother always thought he was funny. All through his childhood he had been encouraged by her laughter, egged on by the way her face would redden and she would wipe at her eyes when he made silly faces or did the big, galumphing walk that would one day become his trademark. At the age of nine he had begun rearranging living room furniture so that he could stumble over it, practicing pratfalls and somersaults and rubber-leg gags—anything that might elicit laughter from his mother. Once she had laughed so hard that she had to wave at him to stop so she could catch her breath. Her chest ached for days afterward, and she had joked often that if he wasn’t careful he would give her a heart attack.
    That’s how funny Benny Martini was as a kid.
    He loved to make her laugh. He watched the Three Stooges and the Marx Brothers and forced his friends into helping him reenact their gags. Mrs. Martini took young Benny to the circus every year, and when the clowns made the audience roar with their hilarious antics, he watched with fascination and a dawning envy. For weeks after a circus trip, he would mimic the clowns, practising the faces they pulled, their walks, their timing.
    In school, he put whoopee cushions on the seats of teachers and thumb tacks on the chairs of the girls he liked. In the eighth grade, he had taped a sign to Tim Rivard’s back that read HONK IF YOU THINK I’M A MORON. Only other jocks had been brave enough to make honking noises when Rivard walked down the hall, but it took the football player until fourth period to really start to wonder what all the honking was about. He’d slammed Benny’s head into a locker, but the sign alone hadn’t been enough to prompt the violence. That had come when Benny had pointed out that Rivard going most of the day without noticing the sign pretty much proved his point.
    When Benny told his mother what he’d