The Billboard Man

My father, Roland, was a sign painter in a dusty Texas town. He could turn a blank plywood board into a lurid sunset or a grinning cowboy in a single afternoon, his brush strokes as confident as his laugh. He died of a sudden heart attack in the sweltering summer of 2004, and the whole town turned out for his wake. We held it in the old VFW hall, the only place big enough for the crowd of ranchers, waitresses, and barflies who’d loved his stories and his freehand lettering on their storefronts.

We took shifts watching over the casket, as was the custom. The air was thick with the smell of wilted carnations and whiskey. After two sleepless nights, my younger brother, Danny, decided to go home for a few hours of real rest. He drove back to our childhood house on the outskirts of town, where the mesquite trees leaned away from the wind. He collapsed onto his old bed, the one still covered with faded Star Wars sheets, and fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.

Our housekeeper, Rosa, was downstairs folding laundry. She heard the front door open and close, then heavy footsteps on the stairs. A few minutes later, she heard a strange sound from Danny’s room—a rhythmic scraping, like a dry brush being dragged across paper. She thought nothing of it, figuring Danny was moving furniture or something. But then it stopped, and the house fell silent.

Danny woke with a start. The room was dark, the only light a pale sliver from the dusty window. His throat was parched, and his heart was hammering for no reason he could name. He sat up and noticed something on the wall above his dresser—a smear of white paint, fresh and glistening, in the shape of a crooked smile. He blinked, and it was gone.

He dismissed it as a trick of the light and trudged downstairs. Rosa handed him a glass of iced tea, her face pale. ‘You were talking in your sleep,’ she said. ‘You kept saying, ‘Wider, wider.’ It gave me a chill.’ Danny laughed it off, attributing it to the stress of the wake. He chugged the tea and headed back to the VFW hall.

That night, the vigil continued. A few old friends recalled how Roland would paint billboards on the highway, sometimes working through the night under a floodlight. ‘He always said the highway was his canvas,’ said a grizzled old trucker. ‘But he had a strange habit—when he finished a face, he’d step back and talk to it, like it was a real person. Said he had to let it know who was boss.’ The room chuckled, but Danny felt a cold knot in his stomach.

By the third night, exhaustion had everyone on edge. Danny’s sister, Maya, was napping in a corner when she jolted awake, covered in a cold sweat. She swore she’d seen Roland’s casket lid move, just an inch. But when they checked, it was sealed tight. Danny decided to stay at the hall for the rest of the wake, too spooked to go home.

The funeral was held at dawn, under a slate-gray sky. As the priest droned on, Danny noticed something odd about the billboard across the highway—the one Roland had painted last, a faded soda ad with a smiling man’s face. The man’s smile seemed too wide, stretching beyond the edges of the billboard’s frame. Danny squinted, but the image held.

After the burial, the family gathered at the house. Rosa had prepared a feast, but no one had much appetite. As the afternoon wore on, Danny heard a faint scratching against his bedroom window. He went upstairs and found the window covered in a thin film of white dust, as if someone had been painting it from the outside. In the dust, a message was scrawled: ‘SMILE FOR THE CAMERA.’

That night, Danny couldn’t sleep. He lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, when he heard a sound from the hallway—a soft, rhythmic scrape, like a brush being dragged across wood. He crept to the door and peered out. There, in the dim glow of the nightlight, he saw a figure crouched over the floor, its back to him. It was dressed in a paint-stained coverall, just like Roland’s. The figure was meticulously painting a grin onto the floorboards, its brush moving with deliberate strokes.

Danny’s breath caught. ‘Dad?’ he whispered. The figure paused, then slowly turned. Its face was a blank, smooth white, featureless except for a wide, painted smile that stretched from ear to ear. The smile was too perfect, too fixed, and it glistened wetly in the dim light. The figure raised a hand, and in it was a paintbrush. It gestured for Danny to come closer.

Danny stumbled backward, slamming his door shut. He pressed his back against it, his heart racing. From the other side, he heard a low, familiar chuckle—Roland’s chuckle. Then the scratching resumed, not just in the hallway, but across the window, the walls, the ceiling. The entire house seemed to be alive with the sound of brushstrokes.

At sunrise, the family found Danny huddled in his closet, shaking. The house was spotless, no sign of paint or disturbance. But when they looked out the window, every car in the driveway had been painted with a wide, grinning face on the windshield. And on the front lawn, standing in the dewy grass, was a life-sized cardboard cutout of Roland, his arms outstretched, his smile enormous and painted in garish red.

They moved away shortly after, selling the house cheap. But Danny never forgot. Years later, on a road trip, he passed a billboard with a faded advertisement. The face on it seemed to smile at him, and for a moment, he swore the smile grew wider, stretching into a grotesque, knowing grin. He floored the accelerator and never looked back.

The last thing he saw in his rearview mirror was the billboard’s face, now fully painted, its eyes tracking him as he sped away. And in his mind, he heard Roland’s voice, a happy, teasing drawl: ‘Wider, son. Always wider.’