The Fun Shop

I was in the happy place doing all the happy things and then I woke up and realized that it wasn’t real. The happy place wasn’t real and I hadn’t been doing any happy things there. That hadn’t happened at all. Tears slowly rolled down my face as I realized that the happy place wasn’t real and that I had never been in it. It was a very sad moment for me.

 

Perhaps if I imagined very hard, I thought to myself, then I could imagine myself back into the happy place and everything would be good again. Even before I tried however I knew that this would never work. Never work, never work, never work, I said to myself dolefully as the big fat tears rolled down my cheeks. I could never go back to the happy place because it wasn’t real…

 

Do you know that feeling you get when… No forget it – I’m only upsetting myself. I’m only making things worse for myself. I don’t want to go into it. I walked into the Fun Max shop all bright and breezy and told the man behind the counter that I wanted to max out the fun. Max the fun, max the fun, max the fun I said, tapping out the beat on the counter with my fingers. Some of my fingers. I’ve got hundreds of fingers. Possibly over a thousand – I’ve never counted them. I’m like a human centipede only with lots and lots of fingers rather than lots and lots of feet. I’ve got fringes of fingers all over my body and they never stop moving, not ever.

 

The Fun Max shop is real, not a dream. The Fun Max man was real too. Smarmy-looking but real. “Well you’ve come to the right place,” he told me with a big grin all over his smarmy face, “There’s no shortage of fun here…” Plenty of fun, plenty of fun, plenty of fun I sang out enthusiastically, tapping the rhythm out on the counter, my fingers fairly flying. The Fun Max shop was real but the fun it sold was of a very low quality. It was like the Pound Shop of fun and the fun you could buy there was cheap and trashy. It left a bad taste in your mouth. You’d feel contaminated, polluted, sickened. But you’d be addicted all the same. You’d be all hollow inside afterwards – hungry for something you couldn’t have. You’d be hungry for something that didn’t exist.

 

My mood grew ugly, thinking about all of this. The more I looked at the man behind the counter in the Fun Shop, the man with the big cheesy grin plastered all over his face, the uglier my mood grew. I hated the sight of him. I longed to tear him to pieces with my needle-sharp venom-filled mandibles but I didn’t dare because I knew he was the devil in disguise. I was full of fear and driven by a thousand nameless addictions. I was eaten up on the inside with them, contaminated, tainted and polluted. I felt sickened to the core – sickened by myself mainly but also by the man in the Fun Max shop. I wished heartily that I’d never come to the place but I knew that now I could never leave…

 

 

 

 

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