Smile

by Tom C. Underhill, Nick Wisseman

While Tammy, a teenage soccer star and budding writer, contemplates her adolescent problems and waits for her flaky mom to pick her up from practice, a stranger takes a secret picture of her. Tammy shivers as the camera captures her image, but she doesn’t notice anything else out of the ordinary until the next day, when the stranger starts to develop his film.

Then her life begins falling apart.

Piece-by-piece, the things that make her Tammy are parceled out to other girls, and she starts to feel more and more invisible, fading from real life as her image comes in to focus on the stranger’s light-sensitive paper.

"Smile" first appeared in The Cynic Online Magazine, volume 10, issue 10, October 2008 and Bewildering Stories, issue 335, May 2009, under the pen name Tom C. Underhill.

Genres: Short Stories

ebook

First published August 30, 2011

About the author

Tom C. Underhill (real name: Nick Wisseman) lives in Bear Lake, Michigan with his wife, daughter, fifty cats, twenty horses, and ten dogs. (Okay, so there are actually ten times less pets than that, but most days it feels like more). He's not quite sure why he loves writing twisted fiction, but there's no stopping the weirdness once he's in front of a computer. Eventually he hopes to merge this stubborn surrealism more fully with his academic training to produce something in the historical fantasy line. But for now, he's content with the purely speculative fiction he's published in magazines like Allegory, Battered Suitcase, Bewildering Stories, The Cynic Online Magazine, and Mysterical-E.

Reviews

[Heather Boustead · Rating 4 out of 5]

Smile
By Tom Underhill
Tammy is an ordinary high school girl who goes about her day waiting for her mother to show up, late again, to pick her up from practice. Then things turn for the worst when it seems that everyone at school has forgotten her and he life is not her own.
At first I was a bit confused, the short story by Tom Underhill did not seem like his others that I have previously read, reviewed, and enjoyed, but then he did not fail in twisting things around to piqué my interest and hold it in his clutches. Once again Tom Underhill has created a brilliant short story that is definitely worth the read.

As always if you have any requests or recommendations email me at:
Reflections.of.a.BookWorm@gmail.com
Be sure to visit my blogs at:
http://reflectionsofabookworm.wordpre...
http://bookwormrflects8.blogspot.com/
You can even follow me on Twitter
@BookWormRflect

[Yianna Yiannacou · Rating 3 out of 5]

I knew right away that I was going to like this story. The author has a way of getting your attention with the first words he writes. This story is being told from two perspectives. It starts off with a photographer who takes a picture of a high school student while she waits for her mother to pick her up from school. It then goes to the high school students’ perspective. She feels alone and forgotten while her mom is late and then as time goes by, she realizes that people are really starting to forget who she is. I was a little bit confused but what is a story if it doesn’t make you think about it in the end. I loved the way it was written and it was a great short story.

[Jennifer Steen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Smile took me on a mental adventure. Giving me the perspective of a photograph being developed by a twisted photographer, we see how memories are captured and imprisoned, and how that Native American maxim is true, that we loose a piece of ourselves with every snap shot. We also see how one second - one passing thought - is only the surface of what we feel and desire at any given moment. Great story! Underhill displays literary skill in the telling as well.

[Kelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

This one gets the three and a half for just beautiful writing. I read this as part of Underhill's short story collection "Outcasts" and this is one of the ones that least captured me. It left me with too many questions, but the storytelling, the world-building was sublime, so real it could happen to anyone, anywhere. It was definitely better than the "it's okay" 3-star rating, but didn't capture me deeply enough for a complete four.

[Infinite · Rating 3 out of 5]

Smile is a haunting and yet confusing short story. The engaging plot, almost cryptic writing style, and inspired storylines are there, but in the effort to maintain suspense, the author leaves the reader very much in the dark. Even with these problems,Smile still is a good read though and for fans of suspense, the author surely delivers, creating a work that will have you reading till the last page.
Disclaimer: PDF was obtained from author for review.