The company Clinique offers the following two scents: Happy and Happy to Be.
My
pointed elbows swinging around in my haste to get ready one morning, I bump Happy off the counter and watch as he
topples off, onto my square-tiled ceramic bathroom floor. In the few seconds
before impact, I secretly pray that Happy
might make it. Maybe, the bottle won’t
break. Catastrophe averted, I will smile and think: yeah, how lucky am I?
The
glass smacks to the floor and I watch as the bottle splinters into a jigsaw puzzle
of bits of smaller and larger pieces.
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great
fall.
Sadly, Happy to Be suffered a similar fate months
earlier.
The overwhelming scent of too much Happy burns my olfactory senses, smothering me.
I see my reflection in the bathroom mirror.
Lines cross my forehead, laugh lines flatten, nostrils burn, eyes run cold with
this thought: I’m not even allowed to own a bottle of perfume called Happy! I am pissed with the irony of it all.
This reckoning causes the image in the mirror to begin
another transformation. A new set of lines map a different network on my face. I
break into pieces like Happy,
scattered at my feet. I can’t watch it happen and for my own protection; my
head falls forward avoiding my reflection.
I sob, wishing for
happiness instead.
___
Penelope S. Hawtrey is a Canadian woman with unrelated degree, with ever-patient husband and dog neglects domestic duties to try her hand at writing. Success includes a published story with Potluck Magazine in July 2015 and her own website www.1500wordsorless.com. She is also currently in the process of self-publishing a collection of stories called, 1500 Words or Less. She has several other writing projects on the go with perhaps in the next 5 years, a very remote chance of completing one of them. She can be found on both Facebook and Linkedin under the name Penelope S. Hawtrey but both of these are under construction as she just got connected (properly).
