The Pursuit (of happiness)

Even left to its own devices,

Tazmily will change.

(This is the tale of those

who raised their hands first.)

Part 1.

This isn't the first time she had woken up pale, sweating, her heart pounding as though it had been ruptured; she saw herself impaled by that drago fang in the place of a half-forgotten shade, her own terrifying nightmare.

For a whole, impossibly long minute, Abbey couldn't move. The imaginary fang held her down to her bed, pierced through flesh and heart and mattress, until she assured herself that it was only a dream.

Maybe the drago, that drago and its fang, was also an illusion, a monster from out of her imagination, something that crawled out of a fear she'd never even known she had.

Abbey finally turned over, fear gone enough that she could breathe and hear more than her heartbeat in her ears, and sat up on her bed with her bare feet lightly touching the hardwood floor. Abbot, next to her, turned in his sleep. Abbey wondered if her husband also dreamt of drago fangs.

Her toes curled at the cool sensation of removing her covers. A shiver, and then she stood up, walked across the room, and turned the Happy Box on.

Even months after the monkey had delivered it, after Mr. Fassad wove his tale of fortune and happiness, the Happy Box still seemed foreign. But Abbey had stopped questioning how it worked, just as everybody else had – it made them happy just as it was supposed to, and having one in your home repelled the lightning, and wasn't that enough? With the press of a button, the screen blared to life, glowing bright in the darkness.

The blinking light, a constant strobe of flashes, reduced the nighttime house to highlights and shadows: the back half of everything, uncast in light, was swallowed by the dark. There were no dragos. There was no forest on fire, no forest at all, no Tazmily or Nowhere Islands or endless ocean beyond them. Abbey leaned in closer to the Happy box without even realizing it – half of her was gone, too, and it must have left her unbalanced.

Abbey, for just a little while, felt happy; when she finally returned to bed, her dreams were contently blank. No drago's roar disturbed her.

#

A ruckus from the town awoke Abbey hours after dawn, a rustling unease she could feel even from beyond her walls. Abbot had already left the house, either forgetting or trying and failing to wake her, which filled Abbey with curiosity and a little bit of worry.

He hadn't been the same since that night six months ago, the night that she had to carry her husband home on her back. They had been a procession, a silent group carrying the victims of a righteous and misplaced wrath, the prelude to a funeral. And Abbot had been fine: but his head had been wrapped for the whole week after, and even now his eyes sometimes wandered and his words sometimes slurred together.

Abbey dressed quickly, tying the stem of a red flower to her headband. She grabbed a half-loaf of day-old nut bread and devoured it greedily as she opened her door, the day before her bright.

A crowd had gathered in Tazmily's square. They circled around a central point in much the same way as they did when Mr. Fassad would preach of happiness, but everybody mulled amongst themselves in various volumes of unrest. Abbey tried her best to weave through them, apologizing at every bump and misplaced step, until she heard a distinct, booming voice as she reached the crowd's center:

"I don't know about all of you, but I can't take much more of this!"

It was Bronson, his baritone always recognizable. He stood on an upside-down Happy Box crate, sturdy under his weight, which made him two heads higher than his audience. Abbey watched him from between the front row's shoulders; the stout man commanded total attention.

"I'm sick of all of it – sick as many others, I'm sure. But what happens if we sit around and let events take hold? Nothing!" Several villagers nodded, and several others voiced their agreement. Abbey, meanwhile, looked through the crowd for someone calm enough to explain to her what exactly had happened. She spotted Bateau, just to her right, and she pushed again through the crowd to reach him.

"Bateau!"

He turned, glasses reflecting the midmorning sun. He had never proven himself unreliable. Abbey trusted his word.

"Bateau, what happened?" Bateau leaned in close so that Abbey could hear him over the roaring crowd, the murmuring of so many voices.

"Lightning struck somewhere last night – scared my birds real good, too." He whispered almost conspiratorially. "Not sure where, though. Only Isaac was awake, and he's the one that saw the flash."

Abbey's heart panged with worry. While lightning was hardly an unusual occurrence anymore, each tale of a lightning strike struck just as much through Abbey as anybody else.

"But get this: sometime after, there was a drago at the Crossroads."

Abbey could have fallen to her knees.

"I haven't gotten a chance to see the exact damage yet, but I heard it was really bad. And it's gotten everybody worked up."

He motioned upwards at Bronson, who was still ranting animatedly. Abbey decided to put all of her attention on what was happening in the center of the circle, if only as a distraction from the sudden phantom pain in her chest.

She tuned back in to Bronson's words. "...do something."

Abbey had missed most of what was said, but Bronson's chest moved up and down with heavy breaths. The crowd, again, had erupted in whispers and sideways glances.

"And what do we do?" Isaac came out of the crowd, speaking to Bronson directly. "Lightning that strikes without thunder following it... It's unnatural. What's happening is beyond any of us, for sure."

Bronson jumped down off the crate. "Then do we just watch as out houses are destroyed? Our village? Our ifamilies?"

Realization dawned on Isaac's face; he knew exactly what Bronson was referring to.

"You live in the Sunshine Forest. You know, more than any of us, how dangerous things have gotten."

"That's why I'm saying there's nothing we can do-"

"There is, if we work as a group! Right now, Tazmily is hardly united." Bronson, though not on the crate, heart-shaped emblem inverted like an arrowhead, spoke out to the crowd, who forced themselves in to silence.

"We look at our neighbor's house and see it crumbling, destroyed. We think: 'That was not me.' We are grateful that we had a Happy Box while that person did not. There are those that have and those that have not. But we should all be those who have! We all have the right to safety, to sleeping at night without lightning flashing through our windows and roars ringing in our ears."

Cheering; the crowd was singular. Even Isaac seemed to agree, fallen to Bronson's reason. Bronson returned to his spot on the crate, unquestioned.

"Tazmily Village should be happy."

For a moment, Abbey looked up and saw Mr. Fassad in Bronson's place, the two of them suddenly so similar, shapes transposed over the other. Inspiring, empathetic. A bringer of happiness.

A ripple ran through the crowd – the topic of discussion, now, was what the source of all their problems could be. Neighbor turned to neighbor, a unity unseen since six months prior. Something fluttered through Abbey as she saw her husband's hat somewhere in the crowd.

Happiness existed. Happiness was possible. It must have been like blooming flowers, only visible in the right season.

Somebody broke through the inner rim of the circle: Biff, his look of elation obvious.

"Guys! Guys! Hey, everybody! I think I've got it!"

He sprung in to the center of his newfound audience. He didn't stand on Bronson's crate, but was tall enough to be seen by everybody, regardless.

"Maybe," he said, turning to look at all of them, "the dragos make the lightning!"

Everybody there was struck numb. And then-

"Pffft! Ha!" Abbey couldn't tell who started laughing first, but soon the entire collective roared with Biff's hilarious recommendation. Only Bronson still looked solemn, as if he perhaps saw something that none of them noticed. A way for the two events to overlap.

"H-hear me out!" said Biff. "Let me explain what I mean!"

One by one, the villagers calmed themselves, but the occasional snicker still broke through the noise of light wind and ever-present apprehension.

"Lightning strikes, and then a drago attacks the Crossroads." Biff sounded completely serious. "It was after dragos got violent that lightning started striking, though! Dragos were always calm before, friendly, even, and lightning didn't hit houses, either. There has to be at least some kind of connection!"

"He has a point," said Bronson. Again, the crowd threw around the idea, small at first, until it grew, like a baby drago in to an adult, in to the most likely explanation.

"Of course! Lightning from cloudless skies can't be the same as normal lightning!"

"If they happen at the same time, it makes sense, right?"

"I can't think of any other explanation."

Biff beamed, as if Mayor Pusher had made him mayor for a day, or Mr. Fassad had praised him as a positive example.

"And dragos can breathe fire, too!" And lightning can cause fires," - Tazmily had seen enough of that to know it was true - "so it totally works! Flint knows; he fought a drago. He's the one who told us! If anybody can fight a drago again, Flint-"

Isaac put a hand on Biff's shoulder. "Stop, Biff. Nobody wants to talk about that."

"It's true, though! He-"

"All of you are being idiots."

Speak of the devil.

The crowd parted, and Flint emerged from the sea of people, his hands clenched in to fists. The crowd undulated and spread away from where he stood, leaving a path out of the village. They were scared to step in the shadows of his footsteps. Flint, Tazmily's pariah, scared everybody else in to silence with hardly a word, just by standing before them.

"Flint..." Isaac's arms went slack.

Abbey looked around at the sobered mass.

Again, she found her husband. He was seething, just to see Flint there. Abbot hid it well enough, enough that nobody around him spared him a glance. But Abbot was her husband, and Abbey knew that were she close enough to him, she would have been able to trace the lines of anger on his face, to offer him a sturdy hand to calm his own, shaking.

Abbey's forehead pounded with sympathy, in time with her heartbeat.

"What're you going on about? Fighting dragos? Running off in to the mountains, the lot of you? It's a fool's mission, and a fool's death."

Abbey stared. She wondered if he saw his son's receding figure in the eyes of the crowd.

Bronson motioned to speak, but it was Abbot whose outburst was heard, his anger exploding out and painting his cheeks red with fury. Even Flint, in all his measured cruelty, looked taken aback.

"An' so what if we are! Who're you to tell us how to handle ourselves?" Flint said nothing, not even forming a retort on the thin line of his scowl. Abbot's slur was particularly pronounced.

Abbot tried to speak, but his words got caught somewhere between being thought and spoken, as they sometimes did since the last time he had spoken to Flint face to face without Abbey beside him to calm him, his hand in hers, and what must have been a terrible, hidden hatred.

Abbey moved towards them; Abbot might take Flint's silence as a challenge.

She came up behind him just as he was about to pounce, twisting her arms around him so that he couldn't thrash out of her grip. He struggled for a full minute in Abbey's embrace, barely a meter from knocking Flint upside the head.

Though Abbot's body finally calmed, his eyes still watered with frustrated tears and sparked as if lit by reignited embers. Or lightning.

"...You hate dragos more than any of us. You have the right to." He said it, looking at Flint yet not looking at Flint, the rage still present in half-combined words.

Flint adjusted his hat. For just a second – maybe Abbey imagined it, or maybe part of her still wanted to believe Flint was more than just personified wrath – she thought she saw the trails of past tears dried down on his cheeks.

"All of my hatred has dried up."