Faces

Ever since she was a small child, she saw faces.

She saw faces in trees, some watchful and wise, others wrinkled and grumpy. There were faces in brick walls, their smiles outlined by jutting stone and shaded with the colours of earth. There were faces in the clouds, though they never looked back at her – they were always occupied in some mighty struggle of their own. They didn’t have time for a wide-eyed child staring up at them.

She liked the car-faces best, with their winking headlight eyes and mouths made bucktoothed by the licence plates. Each one was different. The four wheel drives were bullies, short-tempered from being confined to smooth roads when they were built for rocks. The sports cars were flirtatious and arrogant, purring with admiration for their sleek paint. The VW’s bumbled along cheerfully, a wicked sense of humour flickering beneath their broad grins.

They were her friends, her constant companions. It was hard to be bored when there was always at least one face there to whisper jokes at her, or twist themselves into contortions that made her giggle even on the bleakest of days.

She wasn’t so sure why everyone seemed to find it so fascinating. The faces were simply there, or so she thought. But soon she realised that no one else saw the faces. She knew this, because if she pointed out a tree-face, or a brick-face, or a car-face, then the human-face would just look at her blankly. Sometimes there would be amusement, and her friends would giggle and laugh with her as they asked about the faces that hid in the backyard, but she knew they never saw them as she did.

Her parents, when questioned as to why their daughter would spend hours staring at cracks in paint and creases in wallpaper, provided explanations of ‘personification’ and ‘a vivid imagination’. At first they didn’t mind the faces, and even appeared to be proud; she gathered from their comments that they believed this ‘creativity’ was normal. That, at least, she thought, they had gotten right. It was normal.

But slowly and all too fast, they seemed to grow tired of the faces. She didn’t understand why her ‘creativity’ was no longer a good thing, why her parents no longer wanted to hear her explanations. It wasn’t just her parents either – her friends suddenly didn’t want to play her game (it’s not a game) or listen to her stories (they’re not just stories). As primary school ended and high school began, they no longer laughed at her description of the face that looked like Mrs Miller etched out in roof tiles.

Instead, they laughed at her.

It was a cold night when she decided to say goodbye to the faces. No one else saw them, and now no one else liked them – maybe they weren’t real. Maybe her parents were right, and it was just imagination. Maybe…maybe they were bad. If that were true, surely it would be better to let them go, let them fade back into tree and brick and metal, rather than become a lonely outsider with only not-faces at her side.

She stared up at the ceiling, and a face filled with sorrow stared back.

No.

She closed her eyes, squeezed them tightly shut. It wasn’t a face. It was nothing more than a darkish stain on the ceiling that had never come off, no matter how hard they scrubbed. It was a blemish, a blight, a fracture in the pure whiteness of the ceiling. It was not a face.

When she opened her eyes again, there was a dark stain on the ceiling and no faces.

It took a while, but she learned not to miss the faces. There was no need to, after all. There was real life, full of school work and friends and gossipy whispers and boys. There were still plenty of people and animals running around, so it wasn’t as though there was less life in the world. Just because she didn’t have a bunch of stupid faces smiling at her from everywhere didn’t mean it was a little emptier.

More time passed, as no one had yet worked out how to prevent it from doing so, and she found herself sitting at a little coffee shop, frowning at stacks of paper collected and bound together in a book. Her assignment was due soon, and she did not have enough words. Her teachers were forever telling her to add more words, to add more description, to add more – but how could she tell them that there was no more to see? They had their facts, and she had no more to offer.

There was a clink, and she looked up and over to see a smiling face – that of the waiter, bearing her drink. Her face creased into a polite smile of its own, and they made polite noises. She reached up as he reached down, and they collided in the middle.

She pushed back from the table with a short exclamation of dismay as the drink tipped, sending a splash of liquid down onto the table to act out a gory death, sprayed across the previously clean plastic. The waiter made apologetic noises, which she waved away, and pulled out a cloth.

And as he leaned down to wipe away the mess, he paused, and cocked his head as though pondering something. And then he smiled. “Looks rather like a face, doesn’t it?”

Though she was still certain no one had managed to stop time, the air surrounding her, encompassing her in a private bubble, seemed to slow, slow, slow down. “Pardon?”

“The coffee, it looks like a face. Two eyes there, and a mouth…” His hand moved, tracing the contours of the face like an artist casually sketching out a dream. He looked at her, almost expectantly.

She could not speak, and he just smiled again, made more apologetic noises, and wipes the face away.

No, the coffee. The face. The coffee. The face.

The face.

She stood, and she exited the small coffee shop. Her feet stilled themselves about two blocks down from the store’s warm glow, and her eyes lifted themselves from the pavement. She took one breath. Another. And then she smiled at the world.

And all the faces in the world smiled back.