Aunt Betty's Mona Lisa Smile

A woman uncovers Aunt Betty’s eerie secret: a smile masking lifetimes of hidden emotion.

Aunt Betty did not die of a broken heart, or of loneliness, or of the quiet, consumptive illness the family had whispered about for years. She died of a perfectly ordinary stroke on a perfectly ordinary Tuesday while watering her philodendrons. The tragedy, my mother insisted, was that she died without ever having truly lived.

“She was a spectator,” Mother said, her voice sharp with a grief that manifested as criticism. She sorted through Betty’s vanity, discarding half-used lipsticks with a violence that suggested personal insult. “All her life, she just… watched. She never got angry, never got sad. She just had that same, placid little smile. It wasn’t natural.”

I knew the smile she meant. It was the kind of expression you’d find on a saint in a faded painting, or on a person who has just heard a secret they will never tell. It was not a smile of joy, but of deep, unsettling knowing. A Mona Lisa smile.

We were tasked with clearing her bungalow, a time-capsule sealed in 1978 and smelling of lemon polish and undisturbed air. The house was a museum of quietness. Floors didn’t creak. Clocks had stopped. Light fell in dusty, motionless slabs through the blinds.

It was in the hallway, beside a telephone table that held a rotary dial forever stuck on the number 6, that I found the first photograph. It was a black-and-white snapshot of Aunt Betty, maybe twenty years old, standing on a beach. Her head was tilted, and she wore the smile. But someone had taken a fine-tipped pen and drawn a single, delicate crack through the emulsion, right across the center of her lips.

A shiver, cold and precise, traced my spine. It felt less like vandalism and more like notation.

The next photo was in a kitchen drawer, tucked among tea towels that were stiff with age. A color photo from the seventies, Betty standing with my father at what must have been my parents’ wedding. She was looking not at the camera, but just past it, her expression that same serene, all-knowing curve of the lips. And again, the same fine, deliberate crack drawn across her mouth.

“Why would she do this?” I asked my mother, holding out the pictures.

Mother barely glanced at them. “See? Unnatural. Even her photos were strange. Probably thought it was artistic.” She dismissed it, and the subject, with a wave of her hand.

But I kept looking.

I found them everywhere. In books, between pages describing quiet storms and unrequited love. In coat pockets, folded into handkerchiefs. In the cookie jar, beside petrified shortbread. Dozens of photographs, spanning decades, each featuring Aunt Betty’s signature smile, and each meticulously scarred by that same inked line. A fracture. A fault line.

The house began to feel less like a museum and more like a sanatorium for a secret. The silence wasn’t empty; it was listening. The air grew thick, syrupy. Time, which had been still, now began to pool. An afternoon spent packing china felt like a week. I’d look up from a box of novels and find the light from the window had not moved at all.

I was in the bedroom, pulling a suitcase from the top of the wardrobe, when I found the journal. It was small, leather-bound, and smelled faintly of her rosewater scent. The entries weren’t dated. They were observations.

Watched a spider repair its web after the boy from next door destroyed it with a stick. It did not get angry. It simply began again. I have practiced the feeling in my cheeks. It is a small, tight feeling.

Mrs. Gable across the street cries every night. Her husband does not hear her. I can hear her. The sound is like a mouse scratching in the walls. I have practiced the shape of my mouth in the mirror. It holds the sound well.

The man at the grocery store dropped a glass bottle of milk. It exploded like a star on the linoleum. He was so terribly ashamed. I gave him my smile. He looked frightened. I must practice more.

The entries were a chronicle of a life spent observing the world’s quiet bruises and training her face into a mask of perfect, impenetrable calm. The smile was not a symptom of her placidity; it was a feat of engineering. A dam holding back an ocean.

The final entry was different. The handwriting, usually precise, was scrawled and urgent.

It is slipping. The crack is real. I feel it in the bone. Today, a child on the bus was laughing, a pure, bell-like sound, and I felt it—a terrible, wonderful ache in my jaw. I wanted to laugh with her. I wanted to weep for her. The feeling was too big. I held it in. I held it all in. But I heard it. A sound like porcelain breaking from the inside out.

I dropped the journal. The silence in the house was absolute. It was a held breath.

I walked to the hallway mirror, an old, foxed thing in a gilded frame. I looked at my own face, tired and streaked with dust. And then I looked at my mouth. I tried to form Aunt Betty’s smile. I pulled my lips into that gentle, enigmatic curve.

My cheeks ached. It felt alien, a grotesque parody.

I held it.

And then I felt it. A tiny, almost imperceptible spasm in a muscle beneath my left eye. A tremor of resistance. A minute crack in the facade.

A surge of something—panic, grief, a profound and terrifying empathy—rose in my throat. I tried to hold it down, to keep the smile perfectly in place, the way she had. But the feeling was too big. It was a wave.

The smile broke.

In the mirror, my face did something ordinary. It crumpled. A single, hot tear traced a path through the dust on my cheek. It was the most natural thing in the world.

And in the profound, listening silence of Aunt Betty’s house, I could have sworn I heard it—a faint, distant, and unmistakable sound.

Like a sigh of relief.

Word Count: 1023