Countenance

Countenance- a person’s face or expression

Ex: It was time for the Jelly Belly factory food scientists to test their flavors on real, human people, with real, human palates. They had established a scoring scale based on the human subjects’ countenances. If the jelly bean taster smiled wide after popping a jelly bean, the flavor was marked “excellent”. If the taster smirked, the flavor was marked “good”. If they made no face, the scientists jotted down “needs reworking”. If the participant frowned or in any way expressed displeasure, they marked “Fail- either change entirely or remove from production”.

The first flavor on the docket was a classic orange. Nobodies favorite, but not a particularly flagrant flavor either. It was perfect to use as a control. As expected, the tasters ate the bean without any noticeable expression on their faces. Next up was very cherry, a top-tier flavor. Every single taster either smiled or wept tears of joy when biting into a very cherry. One participant even called up his estranged mother to tell her that she actually did mean a lot to him, he just never knew how to express it until this very moment. But the scientists already knew that would be the case. They were here to learn, they were here to find out which beans had to be sent back to the drawing board.

The final bean in the tasting session was the black beauty herself, licorice. Of all the tasters in the trial, only one had a positive reaction to this most challenging of beans. He was an old man from Tennessee with a pork pie hat, a frilly shirt, and an old brown suede satchel hanging down from his weak shoulders to his pronounced stomach. The scientists made a note, “Bean is quite popular amongst prohibition era speakeasy owners”. All other tasters’ countenances upon tasting the menacing, dark bean ranged from disgust to abject misery. One taster reported “looking the antichrist in his eyes while hearing the screams of the eternally tortured”. Another reported having a vivid vision of a post-apocalyptic America where a dense black fog hovered over the barren land, much like in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. The scientists gathered for a meeting away from the tasters. Despite all the input, they were going to keep the licorice bean as is. The section marked “rationale for this decision” was strategically left blank.