Happy Day

Hiller scrutinized the label, bristling with umlauts, graves and serifs, and failed, again, to discern their meaning. Each morning followed this same progression: Hiller would pour out the contents of the “Happy Day” box into a glass and linger over the incomprehensible labeling before crumpling up the container and throwing it onto the summit of recyclables that was mounting in the corner of the kitchen. Buttressed by the refrigerator on one side and a kitchen cabinet on the other, the burgeoning mass of land-fill-to-be was spilling out, onto the kitchen floor. As part of a winter doldrums, Seasonal-Affective-Disorder prevention promotion, the “Happy Day” boxes were festooned with rubberized labels that could be peeled away to reveal promised loot, mostly home-based audio-visual equipment, but sometimes deliverance from the enveloping grayness of exhaustion and dissipation of winter in Zombograd. Deflated and flattened, a home theatre system, a moped, an all-inclusive trip to Goa and a three week, intensive program of Zomborian lessons laid beneath the un-peeled labels, unclaimed and awaiting recycling. Hiller returned to his inescapable daily miasma.