It is cold in the factory where they print smiley face potatoes. Piles of potato march behind piles of potato in a river of starch. His job is to turn those potato’s into smiling faces. His hand goes up. A potato pile comes into view. His hand goes down. A smiling potato face is born.

Before the smiley face potatoes mature they are a sickly pale white. Like a wet mushroom sucked of its pigment. Before the smiley face potatoes mature they smell like a decaying wet dog caught dead in a deep bog. After they mature they smell like that whiff you catch as you walk past the air vent behind the back of a busy restaurant kitchen. The mature smileys smell good. One time a premature smiley fell off the carousel he was in charge of. When he picked it up to return it to its place the pile of smiley dripped through his hand, clinging like webbing between his fingers. It turned gray. When a smiley falls off now, he is always careful to leave it to for the cleaners. Matured smiley’s feel good. This he knows because at twelve o’clock each day he has his lunch break. Thirty minutes are allotted for him to eat a plate of thirty smileys. Usually his is finished by twelve fifteen.

The other employees in the factory are always smiling, just like the smiley face potatoes they print. Maybe he also smiles, but he hasn’t looked in a mirror in a while. There are no mirrors in the factory. Sometimes he even forgets he has a smile. Or a head. The rhythmic stamping of smiley’s is a tactile mantra and he feels himself disappear for a while inside the chanting. He forgets where his head is, whose hands these are; sometimes even loses track of his nose. The smiles that float by are adopted by his neck. They are his smiles. He feels battered and warm, just like a potato smiley face. The factory isn’t cold anymore.

Printing smiley faces onto piles of potato isn’t the only thing he does. A customer that prepares a fresh pack of smileys enjoys the confidence that ever smiley is uniform and mutations-free. Like soldiers they must be presentable subjects to friends and family. He isn’t just a printer. He is also a hunter. His eyes he puts in charge to scour up and down the starch stream and detect anomalies – bastardizations of the mathematical perfection that is the potato smiley face. Fourteen years of research and development has produced an expression optimized for consumer copulation. Yes, the scientists of this product designed a smiley face that guaranteed their customer count never dwindled.

Smiley face potatoes love to be eaten. Close your eyes and imagine eating a face. The whole thing in one big bite. Destroying a perfect visage with the clench of a jaw. What face would you enjoy shredding with your sharp enamel mouth points? Perhaps a screaming face with a third eye that is slightly smaller and grows just above the left one? Or may I recommend an inversion: mouths where eyes grow and an eye where the mouth sits? Maybe a face that is dented with eyes ablaze, of sizes small and large, some winking, some squinting, some glaring? Have you ever had a frowning face in your gob? Or a winking face with a cheeky tongue? An indifferent face tastes awful, that is for sure. No satisfaction is gained from a face that doesn’t care about whether it feels teeth shred its potato visage apart. No, none of these have ever been, or will be, pleasing to chew on. Only the smiling face will do. That’s why he is a hunter. Hunters seek those smileys that might try to adjust the theoretically perfect smiley. The ones that might try to add a hint of character to their vanilla existence. Mutations of the smiley’s are at first imperceptible, like the unchecked freckle on a newborn. But a thousand generations can grow the simple freckle into a distasteful third appendage. The margin of error for a smiling potato face is zero. This is why he is a hunter.