back "JOHN" There is a fictional world in which there is a fella who exists. He has a goofy smile——a gap in his front teeth——but he always seems to be smiling. Always smiling, always looking off to the side. He was found dead under the roof of his own barn, and it took them a couple months to find him. By the time the second week of the search rolled around, people started saying, “He’s definitely dead. He’s the type to just up and die, you know.” Every town has those people who you wouldn’t be surprised if they died, went missing, etc. But you always remember his damn smile. Except sometimes he wasn’t smiling. He didn’t smile all the time. You can’t keep up that kind of happiness forever, and especially not as the end of his life neared. We still don’t know what happened to him, and the work of this story is not to prove what happened to him. It’s not to find out what happened, it’s not some kind of whodunit story; it’s, instead, a portrait. This is a portrait of the man himself. No, it’s actually not that either. It’s not a whodunit, and it’s not a portrait, but something else entirely. It is about dragons, actually, come to think of it, and all of the dragons we face, even in our nonfictional, non-fantasy world. We all face dragons, and this character (named John) happened to face a lot of dragons as well. His dragons took the form of personal inner demons, such as Satan and depression. Yes, satan was his biggest gripe with life. He found Satan in more places than anyone should ever find such a devilish figure. He found him in the sink in the morning when he would wash his hands after pissing and shitting, in that order. Every morning, he would piss first, then go back to his bedroom for a couple more minutes of shut-eye, until he felt shit pressing up against his hole, reminding him that now is the time to go back to the bathroom. So he would go for the second time, and only after that would he wash his hands, finding the devil in the....... Well, no, actually. Come to think of it, he would wash his hands after pissing, because he figured he didn’t know what his hands were doing in the night. He figured he was doing some dirty things with them, if only in the dream world, and at the first opportunity to wash, he would wash. So then, after he shitted, he wouldn’t wash his hands, because he figured they were still pretty clean from the first wash. The most he would do is to wet his hands so he could run his wet fingers through his dry, thirsty hair, and he would finally look in the mirror, and he would not smile at the devil looking back at him. When he smiled, it was for the sake of other people. He was not a smiler for his own sake. He was not one of those people who look in the mirror and give themselves pep talks and smile at their own reflections because smiling activates happy chemicals in your brain. He was a smiler for everyone but himself. When was the last time he was truly happy prior to being discovered under the roof of his barn, after months of searching? When was the last time he was truly happy? He doesn’t know because he’s dead. No one else knows because they all just thought he was happy all the time. But if you were to ask him, before he died, whether he was really happy, and you were someone he could trust, and you were someone he didn’t have to perform around, he would tell you that he doesn’t recognize the feeling. He doesn’t know the feeling well enough to say when, if ever, he has been happy. And isn’t happiness such a construct? Isn’t it one of those things that has seemed to lose all meaning? Hasn’t happiness lost all meaning by now? What does a word like that even mean? To be happy, he thought, is to ignore all kinds of stuff. “There is so much you would have to ignore to be happy, isn’t there? Is there not a whole shit ton of stuff to ignore in order to be happy? How can you be happy in the face of all of this?” Such were the talks he had with himself in front of bathroom mirrors. All of the world burningness of our time is not a recipe for happinesss for anyone, and certainly not for John. Not for John, not for John, not for John. John, John, John, John, John. I’m sorry, John. I do my best to honor your memory, and instead of honoring it, I disgrace it, probably. His mother is upstairs talking about raining, or coldness. She is talking on the phone, most likely, perhaps to a client. She needs to look at the weather for her job, so it seems. And John, already forgotten.