Today's little haul was an utter disaster. You bought a box of clown toys from a garage sale. Pretty good price for a bundle of possible goodies. But what you found inside honestly made your heart ache a bit.

They were pretty clown toys. Painted faces, puffy frills, and little bells that jingled so cheerfully. They would have been perfect additions to your collection. But sadly, most of them were already gone. Dry rot had gotten to most of them, with a few being so neglected that they seemed to have been gone for quite some time. It was grim to think that whoever owned them just tossed their dead bodies into a box without a care. And SOLD them. The audacity.

You sighed as you pulled out dead toy after dead toy. You were trying to figure out what you would do with them. Keeping them on a shelf would be traumatizing to your still-living toys. And using them for spare parts just felt wrong. But when he saw a little movement under the lifeless clown toys, you snapped out of your thoughts.

With a steady hand, you dug down into the box and grabbed the moving object. The moment you touched it, it stopped moving. You were fearing the worst as you pulled it out.

In your hand was a clown hand puppet in hues of blue and purple. Such a pretty little thing. And it was alive!!! Actually alive! At least this haul wasn't a complete loss.

But the way it looked at you....he was utterly terrified. His eyes were wide with fear, and you could feel him trembling. It was understandable, especially since you just fished him out of a box full of dead bodies.

You tried to calm the clown puppet as you gently carried him over to your bed and set him down. He seemed to relax a bit more when you were no longer holding him. But he wasted no time hiding from you. It was a little saddening to see the poor thing drag himself away and hide behind a larger bunny plush toy that was sleeping on your bed. Bingles, the bunny plush, yawned but allowed the clown puppet to hide behind her.