Always Smile

Always Smile is a scary story about a young girl who remembers seeing weird and disturbing things when she was a child.

I remember that, when I was a child, I was treated for an extreme fear of the dark. My mother and my aunt took me to see an old lady who lived in a big old house. They brought me into a darkened room with candles all around. The old woman whispered something in my ear, then they performed some sort of occult ritual and blew out all the candles.

I do not remember the procedure itself, but I still remember it happening. The memories were sealed away in a remote corner of my mind, but recently I have begun to remember… and I’m horrified by what I recall.

My memeory is not very clear, but I must have been about 4 years old. I was sent to live with my aunt for a while. I don’t know why my parents sent me there, but they would come to visit me from time to time.

One day, I was sitting alone in a bedroom, playing with some toys, when I heard the sound of strange whispering behind me. I turned around and saw something that made me very uneasy.

On the bed, there sat two young girls, about 12 years of age. Their faces were pale, their eyes were wide open and their mouths were twisted into the most disturbing smile I had ever seen. It was not a smile of mirth, but of malice and malevolence. They were smiling from ear to ear, baring their teeth.

They spoke in whispers to each other, though their lips never moved and their teeth remained firmly clenched together. It was as if they were talking through those creepy smiles.

Then, the girls turned to look at me. They simply turned their heads in my direction and stared. What was even more strange was that their pupils were not moving. They seemed to be staring right through me.

I was so scared by these disturbing apparitions that I stopped playing with the cars and ran from the room.

I recall something that happened later. It was evening and I was sitting at the table with my aunt and my cousins. All of a sudden, I noticed a strange woman in the kitchen. Nobody else seemed to notice her. She was tall and her face was very pale. She had the same disturbing smile on her face, grinning from ear to ear and baring her teeth.

She came towards me and seemed to smile even more broadly than before. Then, the two smiling girls entered the kitchen and stood behind her. It seemed like they were her children. The woman whispered something to them, then crawled under the table and pulled out a tray with a few plates on it.

I watched them as if I was spellbound, not paying any attention to my aunt, who was calling my name and asking what I was looking at.

The woman pulled out the chairs opposite me and her children sat down at the table. She put a plate in front of each of them. Then she put another plate in front of me, saying: “Bon appetit!”

Slowly, my eyes went down and I looked at the contents of the plate… After all these years, I can remember it so clearly… It’s a memory that still haunts me and I see it every time I try to fall asleep…

On the plate in front of me, lay a part of the human face. The skin was boiled and mushy and the eyes were still in their sockets. All around the edge of the plate, there were severed fingers. I screamed.

I screamed so loudly that my aunt grabbed me by the hand and tried to calm me down and ask me what was wrong. Sobbing uncontrollably, I told her about the face and the fingers on the plate.

I was still shaking when I heard one of the smiling girls ask, “Can I have her eyes, Mom? She doesn’t want them.”

The girl reached across the table and started plucking pieces of flesh off my plate. Once again, I began to cry. I was afraid to tell my aunt about the strange woman and her children who, it seemed, were visible to no one else but me.

The smiling wretches never left me alone. At night, they sat on the floor of my room and played some kind of game and the disgusting smile never disappeared from their faces. I cried myself to sleep, as quietly as she could, hoping that I wouldn’t see them anymore.

As the days passed, I confessed to my aunt about the woman and her children. I told her about their terrible smiles and how I would wake up at night and see woman standing at the foot of my bed. I told her how every evening, they dined with us at the table and ate human flesh. I told her that the children would even play strange games with their food and when their mother saw these games, her smile seemed to get stronger.

At first, my aunt refused to believe what I was telling her. She cursed and screamed and said it wasn’t true, so I stopped talking about these horrors. However, something happened that convinced her I was telling the truth.

One night, the woman pulled me out of bed and said she wanted me to play a game with her children. They were rolling eyeballs around on the floor like marbles. I screamed and struggled and her nails dug into my skin, leaving terrible scratches.

Hearing all the commotion, my aunt rushed into the room and saw me lying on the floor with tears flowing from my eyes and blood flowing from the long scratches on my arms and legs.

She called my mother and together, they took me to see the old lady who treated me for a fear of the dark. I think she knew something about the inhabitants of the house and they performed some sort of exorcism. After that, I was sent back to live with my parents and I never saw those vile smiling creatures again.