"Laugh Like a Baby" is a short story about Charles, a man born with a strange condition. He emotions are mixed up--literally! As a baby, he cried when his diaper was full and bawled while playing pattycake.
When Charles was born he came out laughing, not crying and from that day on, he wasn't like any other person he knew until he finally meets someone just like him. His dad.
Charles grows up with a loving mother who tries her best to help him live as normal a life as possible despite his rare condition. And when she dies, he feels he has no one left in he world that will love and understand the way his mother had.
The idea for this story actually came from a commercial. The ad was about people who have a condition that makes them laugh at inappropriate times. The condition is called Pseudobulbar Affect.
After watching that I thought about how difficult a person's life could be if his or her emotions were not like everyone else's. What if a person was born with a different way of expressing joy and pain. That's when I came up with Charles, a person born with an unexplainable condition that made he laugh during sad times and cry during happy times.
I'm not giving anything away, so you'll have to read the story to find out what happens to Charles and how his life turns out.
You can read "Laugh Like a Baby" in Flashes of Fiction: Volume 2. You can also listen to it with audio books from iTunes and Audible.
Happy Reading! (And listening!)
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