Grin Win
A short, silly, odd flash story
by Maggie Slater
Devon’s whole six-foot-two frame collapsed onto the kitchen stool, his gloomy eyes watching me. Where his mouth usually lay under the downy hints of his first moustache there was only blank skin. He’d lost his smile again. For the fourth time in three days.
I sucked in a steadying breath and tried to keep the irritation out of my voice. “Where’d you have it last?”
He shrugged and wilted onto the countertop.
“How about last night?” I prompted. “You were gaming, right? Did you smile then?”
Another silent shrug. I glanced at the oven clock. I had twenty minutes before I had to leave for work, and his buddy would be picking him up for school in ten. We didn’t have time for this!
“Why not wear Dad’s smile today?”
Devon held out his arms, hands wide. Too big. Okay.
“What about Nick’s? I’m sure he’d lend it to you for a day.”
Nick was his eleven year old brother. Not a precise fit, and missing some teeth, but better than nothing. Devon shook his head, holding up pinched fingers. Too small. Fine.
I couldn’t spare mine. Any other day, I’d have happily offered it, even though he probably wouldn’t accept it, but the Nielsons were signing on the biggest house I’d ever sold. It’d make our vacation fund. It’d make a good chunk of his and Nick’s annual 529 contributions. I needed it for this meeting.
Seven minutes until his car came.
“Okay, okay, let’s think.”
The coffee I’d chugged at 6AM to wake up was hitting my empty stomach hard. When was the last time I’d seen Devon’s smile? Not at dinner last night, certainly, when Brad made everybody grumpy and uncomfortable grilling Devon about his school day. Not yesterday afternoon, when I finally convinced him to bring the moldy dishes down from his room.
His room! He was always leaving stuff laying around on the floor. I bolted upstairs to the mountain of smelly laundry he called his bedroom. I picked through it gingerly, trying not to gag. Nothing obvious. I fled back into the hall and shut the door behind me.
Five minutes.
I ran back down to the living room and pulled up all the couch cushions. I found Brad’s sexy smirk and tucked it in my back pocket. No need for the boys to know we’d messed around on the couch after they were both in bed. They didn’t need the therapy fuel.
I searched through dog hair tumbleweeds under the other furniture, lifted the gritty edges of the rug to see if it’d slipped under the tassels, peeked between the books on the shelf in case it had gotten stuffed into the tattered copy of Hitchhiker’s Guide again: no smile.
I raked my memory for some recollection of Devon laughing. It felt like it’d been forever. He’d grown so sullen over the last few years as puberty hit home.
Then I remembered: last night, I’d heard that still-startlingly deep guffaw from Nick’s room. They’d been having one of those increasingly rare moments of goofy, brotherly camaraderie, curled up on Nick’s bed before lights-out watching silly cat videos and losing their minds.
Three minutes.
“I know where it is!”
I bolted upstairs to Nick’s room.
Nick was tangled up in his blankets, half-in and half-out of his bed, his head on the floor. He was undressed, unfed, half-asleep, but his bus didn’t come for another forty-five minutes, and anyway, it was Brad’s problem this morning.
“Rise and shine!” I sang, stooping to plant a kiss on his mussed hair. He grumble-mumbled, “Morning,” and then pretended to fall into a deep, snoring sleep.
That’s when I spotted it: Devon’s big, toothy grin tucked just behind the bedside table where it must have fallen the night before. I snatched it and ran back downstairs just as Devon’s friend pulled his battered Ford Taurus into our driveway.
“Here!” I tossed it to Devon’s outstretched hands. He slapped it on his face, and I saw those charming dimples that he had always been so embarrassed about.
“Thanks, Mom,” he said in that deep voice I was still getting used to, and gave me a bear hug before ducking out to the waiting car.
I signed the biggest deal of my life that morning, but honestly?
Finding that grin was the biggest win of my day.
Hi there! If you don’t know me, I’m Maggie Slater. I write speculative fiction of a variety of stripes ranging from outright horror, sci-fi, and fantasy to strange, humorous literary stuff. My work has appeared in genre mags like Apex Magazine, Metaphorosis (and even got translated into Mandarin for Science Fiction World), as well as in literary magazines like Redivider and The Core Review.
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