Dead Smiles


There are smiles that ruin faces. Nice faces or plain, beautiful, ugly— it doesn’t matter. As soon as they smile, it’s over; you close some kind of mental door on them. Whether because it’s a false smile, or cold, strange, crazy, calculating— in an instant it tells you a great deal about the person who created it. Whether it’s fair or not, there’s something in you that pulls back no matter how attracted you were to them moments ago.

Email me when Jonathan Carroll publishes or recommends stories