The Smile Thief – Book Number 12

The smile thief woke up in the middle of the night, got dressed in black clothing and grabbed a large burlap sack. Although it was dark outside, he wore a large mask. “Can’t take any chances”, he thought to himself as he slowly closed the door of his hut. The smile thief crossed the road and walked silently along the road to the next village. He returned home before dawn. His bag was full.

Meanwhile, in the next town, the villagers began to wake up to the new day. They stretched, they rubbed their eyes, they got dressed, ate breakfast and left their homes. The children went to school, and the adults left to work in the fields.

At the beginning, no one in the village noticed a thing. But slowly, as the days passed, they noticed that there was a difference. The people were not sad, but they were not happy, either. No one was smiling. No one told jokes, no one laughed. People were as serious as umpires at a football game.

The people of the village had an assembly. They realized that something was wrong, but what could they do about it? Finally they decided to hire Mason, the village detective. Mason would tell them what was going wrong.

Mason decided to spend the night hiding on the road to the village. For hours and hours, nothing happened. But then, out of the darkness, he spied a man dressed in black, wearing a mask and carrying a burlap bag. The man was heading straight into the village. He followed the smile thief as he stopped beside the first home in the village.

The smile thief took something out of his burlap bag. He waved, it, and went on to the next home in the village. So that was it! A smile thief! Somehow he was passing from home to home, extracting the smiles from everyone in the village.

But where was he taking them? The detective followed the thief at a safe distance as he collected the smiles in his bag and walked back silently to the highway.

“Stop!” yelled Mason! “In the name of the law, I arrest you. You have stolen all the smiles from our village!”

The smile thief stopped dead in his tracks. “Please do not harm me,” he said quietly. “I am an honest man. If you follow me to my village just down the road, you might understand. If you still think that I am doing something terrible, I will go silently back to your village and you can arrest me.”

There was something so sad in his voice of the smile thief that the village detective agreed to his request. Mason was curious, and besides, what did he have to lose?

In the smile thief’s village there was a small cabin. They approached it. A soft light shone through one of the windows, and both men approached. There, in the bed, lay a very sick girl. So sick, that her skin was pale as pastry dough and her breathing was shallow.

 “She is barely alive,” said the smile thief. “We are doing all that we can to make her happy. I thought that perhaps if I brought her many smiles from your village that it would make her happier and she would get better. So far it is not helping.”

“Is she related to you?” Mr. Mason asked.

“Yes, answered the smile thief. She is Miralda, my daughter.” And then he added quietly, “My only daughter.”

“Go be with your daughter,” said the detective, “and I will be back.” He went back to his village.

The very next day a whole class of children from the neighboring village appeared outside Miralda’s window. They sang, they played, they danced. The children’s parents brought Miralda beautiful cupcakes and tasty biscuits. Slowly the color came back to her face. And slowly, the smiles came back to the children of the neighboring village.

When Miralda’s health improved she asked to thank Mr. Mason and all the children. The smile thief realized that he had made a mistake. What Miralda had needed was not the stolen smiles – it was the cheer of the visitors themselves. The moment that they appeared, she began to get better. As soon as she was perfectly well she went to greet the neighboring village with a giant cake. She thanked Mr. Mason for not punishing her father. And as long as she lived, she never stopped sharing smiles.