Weekly Prompt Story: Happiness

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Happiness

By Christopher Munroe

If you’re happy and you know it, weep some tears.

If you’re happy and you know it, shriek with fear.

If you’re happy and you know it, and you really want to show it, if you’re happy and you know it, it ultimately doesn’t matter, nobody will hear your screams, will ever find you down here, not ever. Not until my work is finished.

Why are you crying? Are you not happy? Do you not know it?

My attempt at a children’s television program, I’ll be first to admit, was ill-conceived, and it ultimately probably did deserve to be cancelled.

Meanwhile, in a room without a roof...

…and, for one perfect, joyful hour, I truly knew what it was to feel alive.

Every one of my problems fell away, each trial, pain, ordeal and indignity of modern life, and I lost myself in bliss unlike any I’d ever known.

I managed, for sixty glorious minutes, to forget that I was nothing more than another cog in an unspeakably horrifying machine, an identity-less drone in a hideous, dystopian world beyond any understanding or control. I felt, if briefly, like a real live human being.

I felt hope.

And then “Happy Hour” ended, and back to work I went…

Happiness

Smile and the world smiles with you. This is not simply an expression, it’s verifiable fact. When a human being is exposed to generally contented people, he’s statistically more likely to be content. In this way, happiness spreads.

However, the opposite is true also.

And you, I fear, aren’t happy. I’m not sure what’s bothering you, but you’ve seemed somehow… off. Preoccupied. You’ve been this way for weeks. It’s as though something you can’t control is weighing on you. Making you miserable.

Thus, you are sentenced to solitary confinement until such time as you cheer up. Bailiff, take him away.

Happiness

Smile and the world smiles with you. This is not simply an expression, it’s verifiable fact. When a human being is exposed to generally contented people, he’s statistically more likely to be content. In this way, happiness spreads.

However, the opposite is true also.

And you, I fear, aren’t happy. I’m not sure what’s bothering you, but you’ve seemed somehow… off. Preoccupied. You’ve been this way for weeks. It’s as though something you can’t control is weighing on you. Making you miserable.

Thus, you are sentenced to solitary confinement until such time as you cheer up. Bailiff, take him away.