He knew he was unhappy, but he kept his mouth shut to keep his boss from wheeling around his head like a street merchant with his eyes on a tourist. "C'mere, c'mere!" the boss would say, "you look like you need some Fairy Dust! Boo-boop-a-dee-doo, and happiness flies to you!"

     Happiness was good and all, but it didn't come cheap.

     It was one of the periodic lulls in activity around the shop. His boss walked over to his station behind the cash register, rapped the counter by means of a greeting, leaned forward--he flinched. "Robert," the boss said, "I've got a job for you."

     "I think I knew that already," Robert responded.

     "Ah! Touchy, are we. Well I know just the thing for you--"

     "So what's the job?" he asked, trying not to sound desperate. The boss raised his eyebrows.

     "...Ahem. You know that toyshop, recently opened a little ways down the street?"

     "Yeah. Madame Jeaux's."

     "Precisely. That tiny, tacky, home-grown toyshop is somehow managing to damage our business. Kids have stopped buying."

     "Ooooh. Bummer."

     The boss raised his eyebrows even higher.

     "Sorry, sorry. Um, so you want me to close her shop?"

     The boss slapped the desk. "No, no, I've got a better idea." He grabbed one of the rainbows-and-unicorns candy packages from a rack displayed on the counter and handed it to me. "Take this and let it work its miracle on her. Get her hooked on the wonders of the world. I don't just want her to close shop--I want her in my company. The woman must have some kind of magic up her sleeve to beat our Fairy Dust. Think you can handle it?"

     Robert gazed at the colorful plastic clenched in his hand. It was hard not to drool.

     "By the way," his boss added. "I'm cutting your pay if you bomb the job."

     These were all the accepted Fairy business tactics: bribe where the profits are greater than the cost, strike where it hurts the most.

     So he went.

     On the way, It was a crappy catchphrase for a crappy product. But people suffering from depression and abuse and whatever crap they'd gotten themselves into didn't care about words; they just cared about the happiness, and they'd pay good money to get it. In this line of business, dough flowed in backward rivers from the bottom rungs of society toward the preened celebrities at the top, all slaves to a dream of paradise. Some crappy world we've spiraled into.