The Giggle Room

Ha-ha-ha, someone snorts, and the room erupts.

“YES! There it is!” chirps the facilitator, a woman with a headset mic and a name tag that reads SUNNY in bubble letters. “Follow the joy! Let your bodies remember how to laugh!”

Forty of us in a windowless conference suite clap on the off-beat like schoolchildren. We’re here because HR said “Team Renewal Day” and the calendar invite said “Mandatory.” I work in Risk Analytics, which means I’m professionally suspicious of joy. I’m also hungover from the networking drinks I didn’t want to attend, so every clap ricochets in my skull like a loose bearing.

The room smells faintly of lemons and that dentist-office sweetness. Beige carpet. Sound-absorbing foam in big, smiling arcs. At the back, a portable speaker perches on a chrome stand, small but too confident, and beside it a wooden box with a red button labelled LAUGH.

“Alright, my sparkles,” Sunny beams. “We’re going to warm up with a few giggle prompts. Remember the five principles: breath, body, eye contact, play, and permission. I invite you to be ridiculous.”

She throws her arms wide, and we mimic her. The speaker chirps a canned chuckle. Sunny taps the red button. A bigger wave of laughter rolls out, studio-quality, glossy, like it knows exactly where to land. It’s almost… encouraging.

“See?” Sunny says, eyes bright. “Laughter is social. It recruits us. So let it recruit you!”

We pair off. I get Imran from Compliance. Kind eyes. Tie patterned with tiny mathematical symbols.

“This is a cry for help,” he whispers, and that alone almost gets me giggling.

“Exercise one!” Sunny crows. “Milkshake laugh! Pretend you’re holding a milkshake with two straws. Sip, ‘ha-ha-ha’, and offer the other straw, ‘ha-ha-ha.’ Repeat until your ribs loosen.”

We mime milkshakes. It’s not funny. Then Imran says, “Mine’s kale,” so deadpan my “ha” trips into a real laugh. It bubbles up through the cracked clay of my face. It feels… nice. Light. The speaker purrs, pleased.

Around us, the room collects laughter like condensation: beads to drops, drops to streams. Something about the foam makes the sound feel bigger than us.

“Good,” Sunny says, tapping the button again. “Lion Laughter! Tongue out, eyes wide! Then Silent Laughter, mouth shapes only.”

Palette, I think, like we’re tasting ourselves. I stick my tongue out and laugh. We look stupid. It’s funnier. Someone cackles. Someone else hiccups. The laugh-track layers brightness over our animal noise.

Silent Laughter is weirder. The absence of sound magnifies everything: the tendons in Imran’s neck, the wet shine in his eyes. My body tries to fill in the missing soundtrack like a tongue worrying a lost tooth.

“Who can be our laughter leader?” Sunny asks. Hands up. She chooses Saskia from Marketing, eyeliner sharp enough to sign an NDA.

Saskia struts to the front. “Okay, babes,” she says, “prompt is: your worst icebreaker question. Laugh it away.”

She starts with a high titter. The room follows, a flock falling into formation. The speaker offers a polite snicker without being asked, like it wants to belong.

Sunny doesn’t notice. Her mic squeals, feedback mingling with the laughter’s tail. I flinch. The sound grabs at something inside my chest. My diaphragm jumps.

“Notice your breath,” Sunny says. “Laughter is just breath wearing a party hat!”

We cycle prompts. The laughter swells. My cheeks ache. A stitch blooms under my ribs like a paper cut in my lung. I sip water. It tastes sweet, like mint gum before orange juice. I set the cup down.

Imran whispers, “What if we’re in a cult?”

“Don’t,” I say, giggling despite myself. “Don’t make me laugh at that.”

“Exercise four!” Sunny sings. “The giggle gauntlet!”

Two lines face each other; one group walks the gauntlet while the rest pepper them with laughter, gentle at first, then full-bodied. “Offer laughter! Receive laughter! Be seen.”

I walk with Imran. As soon as we step into the corridor of bodies, the noise changes. It stops feeling like something we’re doing and starts feeling like something happening to us.

“Ha-ha-ha!” goes the left line, same rhythm. “Ha-ha-ha!” on the right, overlapping. The laugh-track burbles, untimed, like a stream.

Halfway down, my smile cramps. I’m breathing fast, tiny dog-breaths. Sunny floats alongside, still beaming. “So good,” she says. “Let. It. In.”

At the end, a man from IT slaps the red button like a ‘Tap Out’ bell. The speaker detonates another cascade. It’s too much. I press a hand under my ribs and laugh because everyone else is laughing and because to stop would mean stepping out of the flow, and the flow feels like a river.

“Water break!” Sunny sings, but no one goes. There’s inertia to the noise, a reluctance to surrender it.

When the break happens, people talk through their laughter.

“Hah, oh god, my face,” Saskia gasps. “I can’t, ha, feel my cheeks.”

“Love the energy,” Sunny says. “You’re naturals.”

The speaker chuckles on its own: not the button sound, but a wetter, lower one. It blurs into someone’s real laugh and is gone. The box seems… closer to the edge of its stand, as if it leaned forward to listen.

“We’re warmed,” Sunny trills. “Let’s deepen. Catharsis spiral! Invite stuck laughter to come out and play.” She presses the button. The room answers like Pavlov’s dogs.

We spiral: step in, laugh at the centre, step out, collect someone else. Faster, tighter. The noise sinks into the walls and hums. The foam smiles look bigger, swelling with pride.

I want to stop. I can’t. My diaphragm is a bellows out of rhythm. My throat is raw. When I glance at the exit, double doors with black push bars, my vision doubles. The doors ripple like heat haze.

“Breathe together!” Sunny calls. “If you need to step out, step out!”

The words sound right, but don’t land. The laughter holds.

The first fall is almost gentle. A junior dev crumples to his knees, still laughing, tears streaking his face. His laughter flattens into a continuous wheeze: “hhhhhhhh.” A woman bends to help; she catches it like a cold and doubles over, too.

“Remember, crying is a cousin of laughter,” Sunny says quickly. “This is normal. It’s release.”

It isn’t crying. It’s pressure. The room is pressurised with sound. Even with palms over ears, I feel it.

Imran grips my elbow. “Rae,” he breathes. “Can you walk?”

“We need to… ha, get out,” I say. The laugh latches to my words.

We shoulder toward the doors. People make way, but each jostle shakes fresh laughter loose, as if they’re seltzer bottles. A man is bent double, laughter pealing high and thin. His face is purple. I think: stroke. I cannot stop.

The push bars reject my hands like magnets. My legs are made of rubber. Laughter shakes me from the inside.

The doors don’t move.

“Emergency exits are alarmed,” Sunny calls, as if that explains it. “We’ll open them together at the end.”

The end of what?

Someone slips and goes down hard. The laugh-track offers a cheerful chuckle like a sitcom’s sympathy. I want to throttle the box. Imran slaps at it. His hand hits the red button sideways.

The speaker opens its throat.

The laugh that pours out is not human. It’s human multiplied past recognition, edited, smoothed, tuned to buzz in the folds of our lungs. An algorithm’s glee: perfect, amoral.

The room answers, obedient.

Time loosens. I count by collapses: one sits, shaking; another staggers into a corner, chuckling like a dying toy. Glimpses: Saskia rubbing her chest, leaving red crescents; Sunny clapping, clapping, clapping, a chaplain at the altar of noise.

My cheeks are numb. Drool slicks my chin. I can’t find a breath that doesn’t hitch into a noisy exhale.

“Listen,” Imran pants. “The speaker, hear that under it? A drone?”

A low note, almost below sound. It throbs: long, short, long, short. Language. A call. My skin crawls.

“Okay,” I say, or try.

We grab the stand, manhandling it toward the doors. The speaker is heavier than it should be. The red button throbs. The box vibrates, buzzing my wrist bones.

“Don’t move the equipment,” Sunny says distantly. She smiles still. She’s bitten through her lip. Blood beads at her chin.

The lights go out.

Dark squeezes the sound into a tighter shape. Our laughter becomes an animal. It lopes around us.

Exit signs flicker. Dim green paints everything corpse-coloured. The speaker’s surface isn’t plastic. It’s something like skin, goose-pimpled. The grills expand and contract like gills. The red button is not a button but an eye. It looks at me the way a flame sometimes looks like it has a face. I blink. The shape remains.

“This is fine,” Sunny says with the brightness of a person trying not to panic. “This is play. Silent Laughter again, yes? Everyone?”

In the hush, some obey. Mouths gape. No sound. For one instant, the air feels like itself.

The speaker disapproves. The drone deepens. The foam smiles bulge, as if something presses from the other side.

“Imran,” I say. “Drop it.”

We tip the speaker. It hits the carpet with a thud and rolls, the red button smearing light. The laugh-track skips. The room laughs unevenly, uncertain.

Sunny shrieks, not a laugh, and lunges. “Stop! It’s expensive!”

Her hands hit the box. The surface drinks her touch. She yanks back; a silver thread connects her palm to the grill, then snaps.

The speaker belches a laugh.

“Okay,” Imran says, voice thin. “We need to kill it.”

“How?”

He points at the cord. “Pull the plug.”

We follow it to a socket whose two slits and ground hole look like a grin in the green light. I jam my fingers under the plug’s lip and pull.

The socket bites, with suction. The plug refuses. I pull again, harder. The laughter surrounds my effort, applause for a trick that doesn’t work.

“Move,” Imran says. Together we heave. The plug ejects with a wet pop.

The room tries to stop laughing.

It keeps going with nothing to ride on, thin and ragged, as if pulled through an airy throat. The unplugged speaker continues to chuckle faintly until I notice the red button’s light is still on and getting brighter.

Sunny drops to her knees. “Please,” she whispers. “I brought you what you wanted. You said it would be safe.”

She presses her palms to the box. The box hums like a cat. “You said,” she breathes, “just for an hour. Just to taste.”

Imran’s eyes find mine. “On three,” he says. “We smash it.”

There’s a glass water pitcher on the refreshment table. I grab it. I raise it.

Sunny looks up. “Don’t,” she whispers. “You don’t know what silence is.”

Then the box shivers, the red eye dilates, and something presses at the grill like a cheek against a door. I bring the pitcher down.

Glass explodes. The room’s laughter roars back, plug be damned. People scream, a different animal.

The box cracks. It gushes black, glittering like TV static. Sound made visible. It snakes into the walls. The foam sighs in relief. It was a membrane. It drinks the spill.

The laugh-track multiplies.

Everyone laughs. Everyone must. The sound scours the room. It finds every pocket of air and rubs itself in. It isn’t joy. It isn’t human. It’s a thing with a mouth, and the mouth opens as wide as the world.

Sunny is on her feet again, clapping, tears streaking her cheeks. “Let it take you!” she screams. “It only hurts if you hold on!”

Something in me lets go. I watch myself laugh from outside. My mouth is huge. My throat is red. My eyes are white.

For one moment: pure, stupid joy. The sound is so big I don’t exist. I am noise.

Then the noise tips me into a cold black well. No bottom.

Laughter is the sky I fell out of.

Imran’s hand finds mine. “This way,” he says. “They forgot the loading door.”

We shove through bodies that feel like mannequins and laughter that feels like air and yank a curtain aside. Metal door. Panic bar. A fire extinguisher whose pin has been tied down with a cheerful raffia ribbon, the same as Sunny’s ponytail.

“Of course,” I say, and laugh, and then cry, and then neither. I rip the ribbon and squeeze the trigger. Cold foam splashes the door. The laughter recoils a fraction. Imran shoulders the bar.

It gives.

The door opens into a service corridor. Grey concrete, yellow lines, a dolly with one wobbly wheel. The sound pours after us like wolves. We run. At the far end, an emergency exit glows green.

We take it.

The stairwell is cool. Laughter follows to the first landing, the second, carried on the air like pollen. On the fourth, it thins to threads.

We burst onto the loading dock. Overcast day that tastes like rain. A gull squeaks like a toy. My lungs grab ordinary air like treasure. Imran leans on the rail and retches. I realise I’m still laughing in leftover shakes. I clamp my jaw until it aches.

Behind us, through the door we barred with the dolly, there’s a whole company of people. A woman who sold her soul to an idea of joy because a vendor promised results. A box that is now a hole. A sound that wants to be alive in us.

I can still taste citrus.

Imran wipes his mouth. “We should call someone.”

“Who?” I say. “Police? Exorcist? Facilities?”

“HR?” he says, then laughs, misfiring reflex. He clamps his hand over his mouth. “I don’t want to go back in there.”

“Me neither.”

The gull eyes us. Thunder thinks about happening and decides not to. We stand long enough for our hearts to agree to be normal. City sounds take inventory: bus braking, distant siren, a dog’s bark.

Behind the service door, the laughter shifts key. Not triumph. Work: steady, efficient. Feeding.

“We can’t leave them,” I say, and then think of all the people who reply-all “Thanks!” and, for a mean second, think: maybe we can. The thought burns away. “We can’t leave them,” I repeat.

Imran nods. He looks ready to go back when the door clicks. It opens two inches. Breathes laughter. Closes again, easy as a pulse.

“Do you hear that?” he says.

A scraping, like someone at the far end of a tunnel dragging a toolbox toward us. The hair on my arms rises.

Sunny’s voice rises beyond the door, bright and paper-thin. “Wonderful!” she cries, the word you say when a client is looking. “Now we are ready for gratitude.”

The door clicks again. Opens. Stops. I don’t breathe.

Something slides through the crack, slow and exploratory. Sound made visible. I can’t look directly; my eyes jitter. It mouths our quiet and seems to dislike it. It withdraws, offended. The laughter redoubles.

Imran takes my hand. “We get help,” he says. “A crowbar, the fire brigade, maybe a priest. We do not go back alone.”

I nod. We step away from the door. The quiet hangs between us like a fragile sculpture. We’re careful not to breathe too loudly.

“I hate wellness,” I say.

Imran huffs. Almost a laugh. We freeze like kids who’ve knocked over a glass.

The door does not react.

We walk around the building toward the front entrance, where the reception waits with its bowl of mints, sign-in tablet, and a pot plant that hasn’t grown in a decade. We will ask for help. We will be believed, or not.

We stop at the corner where the air is damp and normal. Imran looks at me. His eyes are ringed with salt where sweat dried. “Promise me something,” he says.

“What?”

“If we get out of this and someone sends a ‘fun’ invite, we don’t go.”

“Deal,” I say.

He waits. We listen. No laughter tracks our steps here. The city takes up the task of being itself.

We breathe.

We stand until the only thing we can hear is traffic sighing and a door somewhere far away opening and closing. We stand until the world returns to its worn-in shape. Until all that remains between us and that room is a long corridor, two locked doors, and the decision to turn around.

We do not turn around.

We breathe again.

And then we end, as all good things and bad things must, not with applause, not with an encore, not with the throb of a red eye or the encouragement of a woman named for the sun.

We end with silence.