The Happiest Town On Earth (Fiction, 2005)

At the end of a desolate, potholed, two-lane highway exists a small town of threadbare, commonplace people. In that town somewhere on the outskirts can be found a workhouse, painted a garish pink, its interior seemingly permeated with shopworn words and trite phrases. The cut out letters on the sign above the awning bear the words, Social Club, but no one in town admitted to knowing anyone who was a member.

Throughout the main floor of this prison were hundreds of desks, piled high with reams of paper and row upon row of fountain pens...and, at each desk, a worker applied the stock and trade of the workhouse...writing tried-and-true compositions.

Next to life's necessities, this tiny village thrived most, upon the daily output of the poorhouse scribes. Their lives were dictated and given emphasis by the words emanating from that glowering prison. Without the pamphlets daily distribution, housewives knew not to smile at the drudgery of their daily chores, and workmen, lost in the mire of their squalid working conditions, knew not to whistle to and from their work places.

The week could not begin without Parson Adams reciting to his congregation the tenets printed from the workhouse. The townspeople who piously attended the early nineteenth century church, prayed and praised the Lord like so many other communities do, and then after congratulating the Parson on another "Hell Raising" sermon, wandered home where they found on their doorstep bundles of homilies, household hints, and words of daily wisdom printed from the workhouse press.

Husbands and wives spent their weekday mornings catching up on town news and reading the reminders of their duty as citizens and children of God...and the parent's children learned the same lessons hours later when they arrived at school.

The words continued to flow, being printed in longhand and by printing press. Murderers, rapists, pedophiles and arsonists spent their days publishing the words by which the hamlet should live.Each morning the townspeople awoke, read their papers filled with moral and ethical solutions, memorized them and recited them among their kind, while the police kept arresting armed robbers, anarchists, wife beaters and the indigent. In fact the hamlet police arrested so many wrong doers that a new, larger workhouse was being built, clear on the other edge of the town by a small group of whistling construction workers. Finally, smiling sign builders and lighthearted painters were hired to disguise the building to look like something it was not.

Soon the town would be the proud owners of a large, brightly colored
billboard with a picture of a happy family holding hands, saying Grace at the dinner table. Under the graphic, a caption will read:

Welcome to Sunnyvale, The Happiest Town On Earth!

When completed, It will be the first thing visitors see...like the painted smile on a desperate woman's face.