Cult of Personality

by Nick LeGrand

About the Author: After three years in the wild-adjacent city of Anchorage, Nick now lives in Connecticut with his wife and two dogs were he works full-time as a physical therapist. His love of the written word is only matched by his love of the outdoors, and when he's not writing he enjoys fly-fishing, hiking, and camping.

Excerpt

The man was built entirely of teeth, and those teeth lorded over the highway in neat, hyper-white rows, sunny yet somehow threatening to all the morning commuters forced to pass underneath. When the billboard first went up there were a series of accidents attributed to startled drivers, their attention diverted by the enormous smile hovering above the exit 41 overpass. After a month, the teeth were just another part of the landscape, no more noticed than the ever-changing graffiti that wrapped the concrete balusters of the elevated highway. More billboards went up. Pretty soon there wasn’t a spot in the city you couldn’t see the super-sized grin plastered on walls and rooftops. Thin lips, the suggestion of two hairless, clinical nostrils, and a simple message. The message was this:

WE’LL GET HIM FOR YOU!

John Fielding checked his teeth in the glass front of the office building and, finding them still crooked and a bit coffee-stained but otherwise passable, gave himself a reassuring nod. A taxi slammed to a stop at the curb and spit out three men in matching sunglasses and suits in slightly different shades of navy blue. Into the big revolving glass door they went and then gone without so much as a glance in John’s direction.

“You can do this,” John said to his image in the glass. His reflection gave nothing.

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