Happy?
Happy?
Happy now?
I hear it like a drum beat each time the circus music plays. I hear it before I plaster on that smile and make the audience go wild. It’s like my lifeblood pumping through my very veins.
Happy?
Happy?
Happy now?
I feel it coursing through me like a poison. Infecting my very soul, spiking each good thing with bad things.
Happiness doesn’t come with a smile for some.
A dilapidated house, falling about in front of our eyes. Some sort of record player playing a loud happy song, not unlike that you’d hear at the circus, bouncy and joyful.
“Are you happy?” a voice asks, calmly at first. Silence.
“I SAID, ARE YOU HAPPY?” the voice is louder now. It belongs to a man built like a bodybuilder, muscles upon muscles. In front of him, curled on the floor, a young boy, thin and weedy, cowers. He has bruising peeking our from under his tatty clothing, and he has a fear in his eyes.
Silence.
Suddenly, the boy makes a break for the door.
“Where do you think you’re going?” the man asks, and drags him back like he weighed nothing. “If your mother were still alive, I’d kill her,” he continues. “I’d kill her for cheating on me with a fucking dweeb. Look at you…”
He gestures at the boy.
“You think you could come from my DNA? You think YOU COULD BE RELATED TO ME?” he gets angrier and angrier. “But I have to take care of you. I have to provide, for a wretch of a boy who I share nothing in common with. You don’t look like me. You don’t act like me. And everything you need? All the CREDITS I have to spend to keep you alive?”
He walks around the room.
“This is what it gets us. This rotting pile of bricks. No food in the fridge. My reputation in tatters. THE FUCKING DEBTS I’M IN!?”
He comes closer.
“Are you happy?”
A dull thud as the man hits the child, who offers no resistance.
“I bet you’re happy now, Klaus…”
When you’re told to be happy all the time, don’t you find it has the opposite affect? Doesn’t it bug you? Doesn’t it remind you of when your PARENTS used to say “Oh don’t be in a mood!” and you’d tell them you weren’t and they’d insist you were. Manipulate you into feeling the way they wanted you to feel?
Mr. Sunshine is exactly the same. I see it. He manipulates people into this false happiness, just to please him. So that he feels he’s not a scumbag. So that he can look around and say “look at all these smiling faces”. But those smiles are painted on. Covering scars. Covering bruises. Covering tears.
Nobody is happy. Look at the state of Arcadia. Who would be happy at this?
What you are doing is abuse, Mr. Sunshine. And you’re about to catch some karma.
Happy? Thud.
Happy? Thud.
Are you happy? Thud.
And if you’re not already…
I BET YOU’RE HAPPY NOW.