All Smiles Bleed

Our forefathers sprouted broad asymmetrical bodies with leathery skin that cracked open at the joints. Their smiles launched a hail of hard lines cutting into otherwise motionless sloped brows. The brevity of joy was such a facial interruption that it would take the better half of a day to reconfigure back to flint. Stoic faces that got worked over by the elements had little give to them. Inquisitiveness, fear, and pain did not register on these megaliths. Yet if one of these lumbering cinderblocks got hold of mirth, even for a moment, the earthquake it left on their countenance would set them apart from tree stumps and dirt clots. Very little was artistic about their proportions. Jutting chins, distended bellies, crocked noses, and sunken in eyes gave them what manes gave lions. Just as a cobras hood, our ancestors unnerved stalking predators with the discordant noise of laughter. Frivolity bluffs hunger. Play is a storage of fatty reserves. Happiness is a kind of color blindness. We can barely detect the hues of roving monsters that doubled our size and weight. What is this hallucinogenic mist we breath in to make tooth and claw disappear? One beset by disease and arrow is no closer a perilous distance than a fawn has between herself and a wolf. Yet the hardest laugh beasts the quickest run time.