The Gift

It wasn’t always like this—the wearing of the mask. It had just happened one day. Somewhere in the gray space that exists between childhood and adolescence. Her mother presented it as a gift, disguised in pretty blue paper with a dainty silver ribbon on top, and told her with her usual painted-on smile to open it. “Isn’t it beautiful?” her mother had murmured after she had torn the paper off and sat with the mask resting in her hands. She stared at it. Her breath caught in her throat, and bobbed her head in agreement. The mask was beautiful. It was perfect.

In every feature—the forehead, the eyebrows, the chin—the mask was an exact replica of her face down to the pattern of freckles scattered across her nose like stars in the night sky. She smiled, thinking of how much it was like looking in a mirror, and the mask too smiled, curving its pink lips into a quiet, gentle smile as if to agree with her thoughts. Giggling, she stuck out her tongue and wiggled her eyebrows up and down, waiting for the mask to reflect the movements back to her. But the mask remained unchanged. 

She frowned, knitting her eyebrows together in a look of intense concentration, eyes boring through the mask’s smooth skin as if she was searching and reaching for the secret that the mask possessed, the thing that gave it life. But the more she furrowed her brow and stared and reached out for the intangible thing that lay just beyond that smile, the more it slipped from her grasp. Suddenly, time was stretched thin and infinite, and she lost herself in that quiet smile. The two rows of tiny, pearl-white teeth, like the whites of a million empty eyes, grew sinister. The rose-petal lips curled and twisted into something cold and unfamiliar. 

“Is it broken?” she whispered, her voice shaking, tripping over every syllable. Frozen, her eyes glued to the mask as if by some magnetic force. The air rushed from her lungs as her mother stood for a moment, not speaking—letting the question hang by a thread and swing in the deafening silence. 

“No, it’s working just fine,” her mother responded mechanically. The question came crashing down, cut from its string by the razor-blade hollowness of her mother’s voice. Her blood turned to ice, unfroze, congealed, and rushed to her ears. It pounded throughout her skull as the mask locked its gaze upon her. And there, behind its quiet smile, a hunger loomed like a starving shadow, waiting in the darkness to devour her whole.

Her mother sensed the fear. It was the same fear that she herself had felt years ago. But it was part of the tradition, the routine, one as old as time itself—her mother had given her a mask and her mother before her and her mother before her, generation after generation, until there was almost never a time when the wearing of the mask hadn’t existed. With a machine-like coldness, she placed a hand on her daughter’s quivering shoulder. 

Her mother knelt beside her and took the mask from her trembling hands. “Here let me help you.” 

Her mother took the mask in her long fingers— thin, white spider legs curling around the cool skin—and lifted the mask up and over her daughter’s face, fitting it carefully into place. There was no room for error, for mistakes. The face must be hidden, concealed behind the mask. Nothing could ever be seen. That was how it worked—how it had to work. The face was weakness. The mask was strength.

When the mother had finished her work, she took a step back, admiring her the absolute beauty of the mask. “How does it feel?” she asked.

Without answering, the mask looked up and smiled that same quiet, gentle smile. The mother smiled back. It was perfect. 

“Good, now let’s try it out for real.” The spider legs spindled their way down on invisible webs and took hold of her daughter’s hand, clenching it tightly until the skin around the knuckles was taunt and white. 

“Will it hurt?” 

“Yes,” her mother answered, smiling a quiet, gentle smile. But that was what the mask was for, wasn’t it? 

Hand in hand, mother and daughter walked out the front door, down the steps, and trekked down the sidewalk in the direction of the park as a blustery winter wind tugged with greedy hands at their coats. It spiraled up and up, whistling like a ghost through the bare tree branches, rattled them against each other like old bones. The girl shivered against the cold. Her mother felt nothing. The cold passed right through her unnoticed.  

From the opposite direction, old Mr. Thompson, a decrepit man who was all wisps of white hair and pointed limbs was leaving the park and, seeing the mother and the girl, shuffled over to them. His cane clacked against the hard ground—the scythe knocking against death’s skeleton. The little girl shivered harder. She never liked Mr. Thompson. He was too thin, too old. He said the most horrid things, and she always told him so, proudly, sticking her tongue out at  him in defiance. I won’t be scared, not of him, she decided. She would be brave. 

When the old man finally finally reached them, he grunted in greeting and tipped his head ever so slightly to acknowledge them. “How are you today, Mr. Thompson?” her mother questioned with a polite smile.

Mr. Thompson, with a little difficulty, launched into an tirade about how dreadful the weather was, how his arthritis always flared up when the cold moved in, how he had not one but two burst pipes that had flooded his basement, how horrible the whole country was going to hell with the state of politics and not to mention today’s youth, how there was simply no hope for children, how it just wasn’t the same as back in the day. When he was finished, her mother nodded and smiled. 

But the girl was ready. She would tell him that he was wrong and that there was no hope for him. What did he know, he was so old. How could he know anything about her or the world? If he didn’t want his basement flooded then he should get someone to fix his pipes.

But when Mr. Thompson looked down at her with his watery eyes, her lips, the mask’s lips, were stuck fast together, and to her horror, she found them curling into that same quiet, gentle smile. “Delightful, absolutely delightful,” he rasped, and paused as a cold, wet cough overtook him for a moment. 

“How marvelous. Absolute perfection. No thoughts in that pretty little head, and no need for them either!” The words landed like a smack across her face, a stinging blow that nearly sent her reeling back. It was as if he had not merely spoken but balled his leathery hands into fists and pummeled her right then and there on the sidewalk. The old man laughed dryly at her obedient silence and at his profound cleverness. Pulling a faded handkerchief from his pocket, he waved the mother and daughter away as he coughed the better part of his lungs into the cloth and disappeared around the corner.

“I think that’s enough for today,” the girl heard her mother say, but her mind was far away. From behind the mask, she imagined herself swimming in the ocean, felt the waves wash over her. Sink down. Rise again. Looming, high and dark over her head. They towered. They fell. They sucked her down into the murky depths, and suddenly she was struggling back towards the surface. But there was nothing there to save her. Drowning and choking, salt crystallized in her lungs, the water flooded her senses, and, as she plunged into the black, she felt the mask—the smile—watching with that sinister quietness as she was dragged down deeper and deeper… 

The girl’s mother squeezed her hand in her spider grasp, and the girl snapped back to reality. “Let’s go home.”

The girl nodded, and the mask smiled. Her mother couldn’t see her drowning. 

~

That night, when she sat alone in the darkness of her bedroom with the door locked, after her mother had praised her for what a good girl she had been, she removed the mask. It sank like a weight in her hands and fell with a dull thud. Had it always been that heavy? she wondered as she stared at the face that lay on the floor. The mask stared back at her with empty, gaping eyes that looked but didn’t see. 

It was revolting—the worst thing she had ever seen—maybe worse than Mr. Thompson.  She kicked it across the room, listening to the crash as it ricocheted off the wall. Hoping the force had been enough to shatter it, she crossed the room to assess the damage. 

Suddenly, the mask, the perfect mirror image of her own face, shifted and twisted itself all over again. The skin was pulled too tight at the corners of the mouth. The eyes and teeth glowed with a ghastly whiteness. The lips curled complacently like two blood-red rose petals. In another instant, the features swirled, grew out of proportion, and shrunk back down again. Everything was distorted. The mask became alien and sinister. It taunted her. She heard it laughing, the same dry, rattling laugh that Mr. Thompson had laughed when she stood frozen in place by invisible forces while she smiled. It echoed in her ears, grabbed her by the throat, and squeezed the oxygen from her lungs. The laughing grew louder until it wasn’t in her head anymore but filled the entire room with the sound of death and the rattling of dry lungs, the sound harsh and deafening. She was sure anyone could hear it. Her mother would fly to her room any moment now and rescue her from the laughter that rasped on and on. 

But her mother never rushed to her room to throw open the door and whisk the mask away, to take her daughter in her arms and hold her tight. The house was silent except for the laughter that threatened to suffocate her if she didn’t stop it. 

Grabbing the mask from the floor, she flung open the closet and threw it in, slamming the door on the cruel laughter. The laughter slowly faded until it stopped altogether. Tears, hot and stinging, sprang to her eyes as she collapsed onto her bed, falling into a deep sleep where she knew that smile couldn’t reach her. 

~

When the pale rays of winter sunlight woke her in the morning, a pang of fear gripped her heart as she slowly opened the closet door and peered inside. But the mask was gone. It had vanished in the night, simply as a bad dream is vanquished by the dawning of a new day.

The girl laughed as she raced to find her mother. She couldn’t wait to tell her that the mask was gone, that it had only been a horrible figment of her imagination, that she was free, free, to do and say what she liked, that—

Her mother was waiting for her at the kitchen table with the mask resting in the invisible web stitched together by those thin, white spiders. An icy silence hung in the air as mother and daughter stood perfectly still, as if any movement would shatter the silence into a thousand piercing fractals. At last her mother spoke.

 “Sit.”

The girl sat, trembling as tears sprang to her eyes. 

Silently, the  spider fingers meticulously lifted the mask up and over the tear-stained face, and fastened it back into place. The mother smiled as she worked, for she knew that her daughter would need the mask for the day ahead. 

About the Author

Abby Worthington is a sophomore English and French major with a love of reading and writing short stories. In her free time, she enjoys traveling the world and going on cool adventures with her friends. She also enjoys embroidering and taking care of her many plants.