They Do the Same Things Different There by Robert Shearman

and dreams that they have the power to fulfil. Maybe they’ll find some other comic strip to knock about in. It’s up to them.
    And Charlie Brown, one morning, is excited to find something growing on his chin. “Look, boy, it’s stubble! I think I’m growing a beard!” He’s spent so many years trapped as an eight-year-old, and now even the banalities of aging seem wondrous to him.
    You wrap up your storylines. Snoopy the would-be novelist puts aside his typewriter; he finally has to admit that he was never good enough to get published. Snoopy throws away his tennis racquet, his Joe Cool sunglasses, his stash of root beer.
    You put on your goggles for the last time, and climb aboard your kennel. It’s time you put an end to the Red Baron once and for all. The engines roar into life, and you can feel the Sopwith Camel speeding up into the clouds. Kill the Red Baron, shoot him in cold blood if you need to, and the war will be over. You circle the sky for hours, but you can’t find anyone to fight. There’s no enemy aircraft up there. Because the First World War was such a long time ago. And the Red Baron, if he even existed, is dead, he’s already dead—maybe he was a dachshund, or a German shepherd, and he was a dog in Berlin who used to climb aboard his own kennel and fantasize about being a hero—and by now the poor animal will be long dead; maybe he died of old age, maybe he died peacefully in the arms of some round-headed little German boy all of his own.

    Panel one. And you’re indoors. And your head is on Charlie Brown’s lap. And he’s scratching at your ears, and you like that. It makes you feel dizzy, it makes you feel you could just let go of this world altogether and drift off somewhere magical. And Charlie Brown says to you, “It was never what I wanted. I didn’t want fame. I didn’t know what I was agreeing to. I was just a little kid. What’s a little kid to know? And do you sometimes feel that you just want to change, to be a different person, but you can’t be? Because you’re surrounded by people who know you too well already, and they don’t mean to, but they’re going to hold you down and keep you in check, there’ll be no second chances because you can’t escape their expectations of you—and the whole world has expectations of me, they’re looking at me and know who I am and how I’ll fail at every turn. And then the second chance comes. Impossibly, the second chance is there. I never wanted a dog who was extraordinary. I wanted a dog who was ordinary to the world, but extraordinary to
me
, who’d love me and be my friend. I didn’t want a dog like Snoopy. I wanted a dog like you.” And this was all far too much to fit inside one speech bubble, but it didn’t matter, this is what Charlie Brown said to you.
    Panel two. And he’s still scratching at your ears. But, no, now he’s tugging. He’s tugging at your ears. He’s tugging at your head. And you want to say, no, Charlie Brown, no, you blockhead! Because he’s going to ruin everything. Because Charlie Brown was never supposed to be happy, because this isn’t the way it’s meant to be—and he should leave your fake dog head alone, the two of you work like this, it’s
nice
like this, isn’t it? It’s neat. And if he pulls your head off and reveals the girl beneath there’s no going back, it’ll all change forever—and maybe the head won’t come off anyway, maybe it isn’t a costume anymore, maybe at last you’ve turned into a real dog—but still he tugs, he just keeps tugging, and there’s give, you can feel the weight lift from your shoulders—oh, you want to shout out, tell him to stop, good grief, Charlie Brown!—but you can’t speak, a dog can’t speak, you can only bark.
    Panel three. And the head’s off. The head’s off. The head’s off. And there’s your hair everywhere. It’s spilled out all over the frame, there’s so much of it, how it has grown, how ever did you manage to stuff it