Happiness

Happiness
By Marie Thorsen.

‘Samuel, your breakfast is ready; get down here!’
‘Coming,’ he grunted and slid into his T-shirt; ecologically produced of course, as were all his clothes, and a big stiff label in the back of the collar was surely designed to remind him of that at all times. His parents wouldn’t let him cut it off because someone might mistake them for being uneducated. Education was a big deal to his parents; especially his mother to whom it seemed that the only thing more important than being educated, was appearing educated. However, Sam was ten and didn’t care much about environmental education or ecological produced clothes. What he did care about, though, was the constant itching on the back of his neck.
         Sam’s father and sister were already seated around the table when he came down from his room. His mother was walking to and fro, setting the table with glasses, while his father pretended to be preoccupied by the newspaper and Tina poked tiredly at her breakfast. At least breakfast was what Sam’s mother had decided to call it, as she felt it added a nice, cosy ring to these morning gatherings. In actuality, it was like most other families’ morning meal; a feast of protein, vitamins and assorted herbal medicines. For each member of the family small hills of colourful tablets lay circled around the big pitcher of vegetable juice.
‘So, what did the scale tell you this morning, son?’ His father asked above the newspaper. It was his most favoured accessory at the table and, as characteristic for accessories, only existed for the sake of appearance. This is why he never actually read the paper, but only stared at the headlines, while following the conversations going on at the table from behind the sheets, giving them a good rustle every now and again - for effect.
‘42 kg.’
‘Good, good.’
Sam’s mother poured him a glass of slimy-green juice and gave her son a worried look.
  ‘Maybe we should measure you when you get home from school. Tina only weighs 41 and she’s still a bit taller than you.’
‘Do I have to?’
‘Yes, you have to. We cannot let ourselves go like that. We simply can’t afford it. Do you have any idea of the illnesses connected to obesity? It will peel decades off your life. Not to mention the increase in household taxation: Point five percent for every two kilos overweight, Samuel, do you know how much money that is?’
Samuel shrugged. His father had dived down behind the paper again. Tina quickly swallowed her breakfast and tried to sneak off before the unavoidable speech, but their mother caught her with a stern look, bidding her to sit. So she sat, obedient as she was, and joined her brother in his shrug. They had both heard the speech many times before and had learned that the best way to react was with the ambiguity of the simple shrug. Other than that, there was nothing to do but to wait until she ran out of words.
***

Sam didn’t much like school. He was quite a normal kid in that way, except perhaps that he would have liked it if they had not taken all the fun out of it with their fancy technology. He never had to do anything. His calculator did his math for him, his computer wrote for him, spelled for him, it even corrected his grammar, and the Internet knew far more about everything than any of his teachers. All Sam had to do was to show up and eat his lunch.
         This morning, however, his mother had run out of time to finish her speech and, promising them a continuance, hustled them out the door. So today he was quite happy to stay at school for as long as possible. Although this was something, he thought, his teachers were certain to make him regret. For it was a commonly known fact that the teachers at Sam’s school possessed a superhuman ability to slow down time. Of course this was a fact only commonly known to Sam and perhaps a handful of his fellow students. In the eyes of everyone else, the teachers didn’t really possess this ability, at least not in any measurable sense, but the boredom they induced in Sam was so excruciating that they might as well have. And the chafing label in his shirt certainly didn’t make time go any faster; so he kept his eyes peeled to the clock above the door; just to make sure it didn’t stop completely.
***

After some extensive research in the neurological functions of Western European school children at the age of seven to twelve, the European Union had decided that the old school bell, with its high-pitched ring, was over-stimulating for the children and had therefore replaced it with a soft, electronic dong. Sam had been staring at the clock for a good twenty minutes when this soft tone finally reached his ear, indicating the coming of the lunch break as a welcome pause in his boredom. The new EU regulated bell seemed to have helped, for no running was to be seen nor laughs and cries to be heard. As a result, there always was an unsettling silence in the mass hall with just the muffled grinding of hundreds of kids quietly chewing their way through hundreds of fibre-bars and sugar-free apples.
         Sam glowered at his plate. The fibre-bar glared back at him. It was just lying there, dry and tasteless, waiting for him to take the first bite, so it could suck out every drop of liquid in his entire body. He would have to drink half his water just to be able to even produce enough saliva for the second bite.
         A teacher walked quietly towards him, almost floated, sending him a commanding look as she passed. He took the fibre-bar to the mouth and waited for the teacher to pass, then, as soon as he deemed her to be on a safe distance, he sent her his best, most angry scowl. Five teachers, all in all, were prowling the lunch hall this way, like vultures waiting for their carcass prey.

One and half hours later, the art and craft’s teacher stood before her class:
‘We are going to try something new today. It’s a bit of an experiment, so at the end of the day, I would like you all to fill out these questionnaires.’ The teacher waved a bunch of papers at the class and continued, ‘I am going to play you a piece of music and I want you to draw whatever it makes you feel. Just listen to the music at first, and don’t begin your drawings until it stops. Any questions?’
         In the teacher’s cupboard stood an ancient tape recorder. It had always been a mystery to Sam how, in all the years he figured both his teacher and the tape recorder had been connected at this school, she had still not learned how to operate it. However through trial and error, she finally managed to start the tape and the swirling tones of Vivaldi’s Strings in C major soon filled the room.
‘Try and close your eyes and really listen to the music,’ she called through the flutes.

Throughout the classroom, the children closed their eyes and let Vivaldi whisper to them through the rasping speakers.
         Samuel closed his eyes.
At first he saw nothing but colours; a lively yellow for the flute; red, blue and purple waves for the strings. Flowers blooming and rainbows galloping across eternal green. Colours everywhere he looked; they danced around him, tickled him, exploded and imploded. Vanished and reappeared to his touch. It was beautiful. They leaped and twirled, in waves and curls; red, blue, purple, green and then…nothing. A quiet darkness ruled.
         A small light appeared, shimmering distantly in the black. When he narrowed his eyes, it appeared to be winking, inviting him closer still. Slowly, he approached it, and with each careful step it stretched; stretched out long and thin; stretched into a string of light. To the soft rhythm of the cellos, he walked even nearer still, hardly daring now, to take a single breath and soon found himself close enough to touch this magic light. With a trembling hand he reached out, and saw it sway gently to his touch. A soft curtain hung down before him. In the faint light he could just detect the lines of separate leaves gathered in making up the softly settling curtain. The light shone through the closest, painting them a flushing red and revealing the branching patterns of their frail anatomy. Carefully, he pulled aside the curtain and the light flooded through. He blinked against the sudden brightness, shielded his eyes with his open hand and entered.
         A breathtaking sight unveiled before his eyes: A quiet lake, though, silent not at all. Cello tears of weeping willows giving rhythm to the scene. And in the centre of the lake, on the water lily leaves, stood a fairy tall. The smallest creature, pressing hard against the green. Apple cheeks and apple thighs, a belly round and soft. Tiny wings like butterflies’, and the most lively eyes.
         In a flutter, she took to the sky, then dived for miles – with twirls and pirouettes of course. One splash and she was gone.
         Once again the lake was still, if only for a moment. For with a titter so lively, the waters were torn. In laughter she appeared; up she rose to greet the dawn. Bursts of giggles now spreading out as ripples, through both water and skin. She is the chubby one – she is Happiness.

The music stopped.
Reluctant to let go of these beautiful images, Samuel slowly opened his eyes. He had expected the world to be dull and gray in comparison to the fairy lake, but was far more ghastly than he could have imagined.
         Everywhere he looked, the emaciated shapes of his classmates stared with hollow eyes and, one by one, turned to face the blackboard. He followed their gaze and there stood, grimmest of them all, the teacher. She was but an echo of something once human. From deep within dark sockets, she peered at the class with yellow eyes; her hair was long and thin, drained for colour, and her skin white as chalk, was clinging helplessly to her bones. As she opened her mouth to speak, the pale skin stretched across protruding cheekbones, conjuring the image of a face frozen in screams.
‘Now, Miss Amber, if you will please pass out the pencils, you can all start working on your drawings. Paper is on the bottom shelf and do remember to put all the pencils back in their boxes after use.’
These were certainly not the words he expected to ooze from the jaws of a living skeleton, but how much could you really expect from those? Sam could feel his jaw drop as his classmates began an eerie dance between the desks and the storage shelves. Floating, like the teachers in the lunch hall, in and out amongst each other in quiet despair. Suddenly a bony shape appeared in front of his desk. Samuel started and nearly ran away before he recognised the shape to be Amber’s, who was waving a box of pencils. She placed it on his desk, took a long step to the side and repeated her gesture at the next table.
         He took the box in his own scrawny hands and opened it. Inside it were pencils of all the colours of the rainbow lighting up the classroom, and just for a moment, the sweet smell of Vivaldi’s melodically induced lake spread through his nostrils.  He could almost see the fairy bathing in the colours of the pencils; see her dancing on the water lilies. An overwhelming sense of relaxation filled him with these images, leaving no room for fear or doubt. He looked at his class again, the sad expression on their faces and with every second grew more certain. He knew what he had to do. He felt like was he only a cape and a jumpsuit from being one of those comic-book superheroes with a mission to save the world. Of course he had no special powers and he wasn’t about to embark on a quest to save the world, but rather just his classmates, and maybe his sister too. It was a mission, though, none the less: He had to wake the fairy up and show to everyone how beautiful and filled with joy she was. Maybe by greeting her on paper, they would be able to travel to the lake like he had just done. He had to draw Happiness:
         Circles and ovals, an arm here and a big smile there. Yellow for her hair and pink for her skin, round and round on her belly and thighs. And last but not least, a pair of lovely, purple wings of butterflies.
***

When he got home, Samuel hurried to his room. His mother would be back from work soon and he was in no mood to hear the rest of her speech today. He rummaged through the drawers for crayons and paper. Then he crouched under his desk and closed his eyes to find the little creature again. Most of the afternoon he spent in just that position, although his had travelled far away from his tiny body, to the fairy lake.

‘Samuel, get down here. Your father and I want to talk to you!’ Sam’s mother was not one to let her voice go unexercised, but as he descended the stairs he hoped that it was too worn from the morning’s lecture to give the full throttle now.
‘Sit down,’ his mother commanded. She stood leaned against the kitchen counter while his father had taken his usual place at the round table. Samuel pulled out a chair on the opposite side.
‘I got a call from your teacher today, asking me to come down to the school to meet her.’
Samuel sighed; his teacher had not been infected with the fairy’s laughter when she saw his drawing. Rather the opposite. He hadn’t even been able to show the drawings to his classmates before he had to watch his teacher stowing them away in her drawer for confiscation.
         His mother slapped the drawing on the table.
‘Do you care to explain this?’
‘Well, it is a fairy and she’s taking a bath in her lake. She’s the queen of the lake, and when she plays, the weeping willows cry with laughter so their tears make music in the water. Her name is Happiness because of her laugh, see?’
         But Sam’s mother did not see and she did not get infected with the laughter either. She just stared at him, her index finger still pressed against the drawing, now trembling slightly with anger.
‘Wait here,” Sam suddenly exclaimed and ran up the stairs before any of them could react. He came back into the kitchen not a minute later, with a stack of colourful paper sheets.
‘See here, her smile is a lot bigger here,’ he explained and looked expectantly at his mother, but still no reaction came, ‘and here, here she is flying across the lake, her belly almost touching the water,’ he giggled and his father joined him with a smile.
‘She is flying?’ Sam’s mother exclaimed, when she awakened from her shock, ‘Flying? A fat, little beast like that? What are you thinking, Samuel? Haven’t I raised you better than that? And even after our talk this morning? Oh, I am very disappointed in you. It is not even realistic! I mean, anyone as paunchy as her should be happy just to be able to get one foot off the ground, but both of them is simply unthinkable.’
Samuel looked down at the table; his eyes glazing over. Soon the tears started trickling down the cheeks and dripping from his nose and chin.
‘Fat fairies fly,’ he sobbed.
‘They don’t, Samuel, and I don’t want to see anything like this ever again, do you hear me?’
‘Fat fairies fly.’
‘We have to get those disgusting thoughts out of your head.’ With rushed movements, she gathered the drawings in a pile, ripped them up and threw them in the trash, like they were nothing but old envelopes.
‘Now go wash up and come help me with dinner, Samuel.’

That night, when all had gone to bed and Sam’s tears had dried on his sunken cheeks, a figure came to his room. Carefully, it stepped over scattered drawings on the floor; all with purple wings and blurred in stains where tears had fallen in the evening light. It kneeled by the side of the sleeping child’s bed, kissed his cheek and tugged him in. On the moonlit windowsill, the figure placed a taped-up drawing, and whispered to his sleeping son, a hope of Happiness.