Note from the author, a deviant soul who seems to like cherry tomatoes:

Many years ago, when I was a student, I had a teacher, a Mr. Hayes, though no one knew if his real first name was Rutherford, but his driver's license said Randall.

Mr. Hayes, when a student was being 'disruptive and deviant' to his standards of education, would drag said student to what he called, 'The Happy Place' and close the door.

It wasn't a Happy Place at all, but an old coat closet that had seen better days.

"You can think about your actions and when you have decided to be a fit to society, you can come out!"

I spent many hours in the Happy Place, twiddling my thumbs and playing games inside my head.

"You're a tough brick to break, Mr. Williams!" Mr. Hayes told me numerous times as he let me out of the Happy Place after class was dismissed.

I would nod and whistle a tune as I left.

This chapter in the saga known as 'How to Train a Dead Canary in Seven Days' is dedicated to him...

CHAPTER 876.12

THE HAPPY PLACE

We were standing on the corner of Eastern Arizona when the world began to die.  The bus driver, a fine fellow by the name of Robert, had stopped the bus and walked outside.

"Strange there, fellows!" he said pointing towards a flock of birds falling from the sky, "Dos ya think they meant to do that?"

"What, die?" I said as they hit with splendid power, exploding in a tribute to blood and guts.

We decided it was best to wander off inside, a small bookstore, misplaced among the hustle and bustle of a dead industrial town, bars and misfits too stupid to leave for better grounds dotted the landscape.

“Didja see them birds a dying out there?” the bus driver said to the clerk.

“Them ain’t birds, them are corpses, dead they are.  The birds done left hours ago for their heavenly reward.” She replied, spitting out some tobacco juice into a can of Diet Pepsi.

“Strange though, what could kill a flock of birds?”

“The lack of oxygen, them birds stopped breathing ya fool!” the clerk replied, taking a drink of Diet Coke.

The bus driver nodded and walked back outside to piss on a dead dog lying on the sidewalk.

“That dog is taking a break from life, like we all should do before too long!” the clerk said, pulling at some dead skin on her wrist.  “There’s a pimple on our butts and we’re beyond sure it’s probably cancer, but the doctors swear we’s got a nasty cold instead.”

For some reason, I sat down in a soft, overstuff chair and waited to die. 

I did not die, but awoke, from the dream, or a memory of a childhood trauma I had blocked from my mind, possibly during the time I was molested by my babysitter in 1978.

“You’re a good boy!” she had said, pulling down my pants, placing her hands down there, where I showed on the doll in a public court to a judge who was half passed dead three centuries before.

I was in a room; tiled floor, the nurse was standing in the room, shaking me, and then smiling.

“It’s time for a sleeping pill…”

I took the pill, like a good boy, drinking down the water, which seem to be the temperature of piss.

The nurse moved on to her next victim, or as she called them, patients.

I knew she was sent by government agents to kill me for I knew things, terrible things and they, Company Z, did not want those things out to the public.

I drifted back to sleep.

Agents of death to the left of me, Communist traitors to the right of me, and in the middle, dressed in a white wedding dress, complete with veil and white stockings, was Richard Nixon.

Not the former president of the United States of America, as that would be strange and delusional, warranting an extended stay at The Hospital’s Ward B, but my high school football coach.

“Do you Richard take this man, Rutherford B. Hayes, to be your beloved husband, in sickness and in health, as long as you both shall live?”

A strange silence filled the Church that Susan B. Anthony had built with Ronald Reagan and Cher.

Then the answer, “It won’t work! We won’t have a winning season!” and my old coach, wedding dress and all ran from the altar, tears in his eyes.

And President Hayes died once again on a sunny day in Hell.

In the morning, I was sitting in the therapy circle in the dayroom of the ward, Doctor Lipschitz, or Randall, as he insisted everyone call him the first day, stood in the middle smiling.

“Is everyone doing OKAY?” he said.  We all nodded. A few smiled that drugged up smile they could muster instead of the nod.

“Good! Good!”

The group smiled.

“Who wants to start?”

James, an ex-lawyer now mental patient, raised his hand quickly.

“I do! I do!” he said, almost child like, if he was not past fifty. “I had a break through last night!”

The group again nodded. 

James smiled, burped and then rubbed his hands together.

“I seen my mother, in my dream, she was carrying a large rock up a hill and asked her if I could help her!”

“Good! Good!” Randall said, almost dancing in the circle, clapping with great delight. “And then what?”

We all drew closer in our attention, both patients and doctor.

James once again smiled, and his hands continued to rub together, performing some ritual unbeknownst to us.

“She told me no, I was furious, I pulled a gun and shot her.  She died…”

Randall frowned.

“Not good at all!”

James frowned.

“But she made me mad!”

“We don’t kill people, even in our dreams, who make us mad!”

We, the group, nodded and James cried. 

“But she wouldn’t let me help her!” he bawled out, great rivers of snot flowing from his nose.

The nurse, a gentle soul, came out, as if by magic and led James back to his room; a shot was all it took to take him back to his ‘Happy Place’ as the staff called it.

“Do you need to go to your Happy Place?” they would say to us if we got, ‘Too Insane’, the patients’ term for such events.

We would shake our heads no.

Happy Place, you would think would be a nice place to go, a place someone would say with joy, “Yes! Yes I do!” but Happy Place was not a nice place, it was a horrible place, nightmares of tiled floors reaching up and grabbing our feet, to pull us down into our madness.

Poor old James would be in his Happy Place, losing whatever mind he had left, the poor son of a bitch.

“Now, anyone else had a breakthrough?” Randall said, as if nothing had happened.

The group shook its head, none of us wanting to go to our Happy Place…