The Mask of Hollow Grins

In the autumn of 2007, my family moved into my late grandmother’s farmhouse, a sprawling two-story structure that creaked and groaned like an old ship. My mother, her two friends, my two brothers, and I settled into the first floor’s modest rooms, while the second floor held five bedrooms, a bathroom, and a dusty living room. The staircases stood at opposite ends of the long hallway, their banisters worn smooth by decades of hands. My brothers and I shared a room at the top of the east stairs, and our mother’s room was directly across, next to the playroom where old dolls and toys sat frozen in time.

It was during that first winter that I found the mask. It wasn’t mine; it was a cheap plastic skeleton face, with hollow eyes and a grin that seemed too wide. I used to wear it at night, creeping down the halls to scare my siblings and my mother’s friends. Their screams were my delight, and I thought nothing of the way the mask seemed to cling to my skin, or how the air around it grew cold.

One night, after a particularly good scare, I left the mask on my dresser and went to sleep. I dreamed of a figure standing at the foot of my bed, wearing the mask, but the figure was taller, thinner, and its movements were wrong—like a puppet with tangled strings. When I woke, the mask was on the floor, cracked, with one eye socket splintered. I shrugged and threw it in the trash, but it reappeared in my room the next night, mended, the grin somehow wider.

Weeks passed. I began to see the figure more often—in mirrors, in the corner of my vision, always wearing that mask. It never moved, but the mask’s grin would subtly change, as if it were alive. My brothers said they heard whispering from the playroom, and my mother’s friend, a woman named Clara, swore she felt cold hands on her neck while sleeping. I dismissed it as old house tricks.

Then the mask started speaking to me. It wasn’t in words I heard, but in feelings—deep, pulsing dread that washed over me whenever I was alone. I tried to leave it in the attic, but it always found its way to my nightstand. One night, I woke to see the figure crouched by my bed, its mask inches from my face. I couldn’t scream; I could only stare into those hollow eyes as the grin stretched impossibly wide, and I felt the mask’s cold lips press against my forehead, sealing me with a kiss of winter.

From that night on, my skin grew pale, my smiles felt forced, and I began to crave the dark. I’d catch my reflection grinning even when I was sad. The mask had chosen me, I realized, not as a wearer but as a vessel. It wanted to live through me, to feel the rush of blood and breath. The figure in the mask was my future, a hollowed-out version of me, forever frozen in a silent, eternal laugh.

I tried to destroy it—burning it in the fireplace, burying it in the yard—but it always returned, and each time it did, my reflection grew more distant, less like me. My family grew frightened of me, whispering that I was ‘possessed,’ but I couldn’t tell them the truth: that I was being replaced from the inside, my essence leeching into that plastic grin.

On the last night of that year, I woke in the playroom, the mask on my face. My hands were thin and gray, and in the mirror I saw the figure looking back at me, not apart from me but as me. I laughed, a sound that wasn’t mine, and I knew the transformation was complete. The original me was gone, trapped somewhere behind those hollow eyes, while this new me began to scheme: who else could wear the mask and keep the game going? I smiled, and the grin was not my own.

The mask now hangs on my bedroom wall, but it’s never still. It watches, and it waits. Sometimes, I hear my own voice calling from inside it, begging for release, but I can’t help but laugh—because the mask already has a new face in mind: my younger brother’s. And I know, soon, he’ll find it on his dresser, and the cycle will begin anew.