Still Life
Christopher Linforth
Hastings, M. “Fruits arranged to form a man's face and hand.” Library of Congress
The face shows little expression. Smooth and tan. Serene, some would say. Students on the teaching evaluation say resting bitch face. But the face belongs to a man. Resting stud face seems more appropriate, echoing the language of animal breeding, yet the equivalence falters, falls short.
*
A past girlfriend once diagnosed the man as existing on the spectrum. High-functioning, of course. She had no medical degree, no training. She had only seen Asperger’s on day-time television. You’re so impersonal, she said. You’re like those strange men.
*
In his early twenties, the man wrote a novel exploring the idea of anoesis—a passive form of consciousness. The main character, a stand-in for the writer, could not understand the world he lived in. He spent his days reading philosophy and moping through the streets at night. Publishers deemed the novel an existential mess.
*
Years before, a car crash blinked out his mother's existence. Her death calcified his expression of nothingness—his jaw set, lips stuck together. Your face is a shield, a friend said years later. No, he replied. It’s a lack of protection, of anything.
*
The muscles at the sides of his mouth rarely flex enough to draw out a smile. His two zygomaticus majors lack the innervation of nerves. Or so he feels. Childhood pictures depict a host of vacant faces. One or two photographs show rictuses, stiff grimaces, half-smiles of disgust.
*
To live in a world of over-expression is a state-of-being the man must deal with. At the beginning of the new semester, he writes stoicism on the blackboard and underlines the word twice. The students look blank. He tells them he is smiling on the inside, and that must be enough, for now.
Christopher Linforth is the author of three story collections, The Distortions (Orison Books, 2022), winner of the 2020 Orison Books Fiction Prize, Directory (Otis Books/Seismicity Editions, 2020), and When You Find Us We Will Be Gone (Lamar University Press, 2014).