baby teeth
by Ella Fairley
My mother kept my baby teeth in a tin when I was a child. It was red and old and the metal was tired. There was a design of bamboo on the lid, kind of badly drawn. Before it held my teeth, it held tea. It smelled like clinging ginger, or maybe fennel, and like the paling of passed time. My mother bought it in Taiwan.
When I insisted we keep the first tooth that ever fell out of my mouth, she stared at me blankly. I dropped the tooth into her outstretched hand and closed her fingers over it. She sighed. She was tired and too old for her age, but she took the tooth. She rummaged through the cupboards, placing empty spice jars and cans of beans on the counter, while the paint chipped on the doors and the radio creaked on the legs of its last life and the eighties wandered away from us.
A marble rolled out of the cupboard, rolled across the counter, tipped over the edge and fell towards the floor—
She found an empty tin, the red one, that used to hold the tea—
My daughter lost her first tooth one day, as all children do. She collected the mail from the slot in the door, slipped on the rug, and knocked it out on the floor. The trail of blood from the hall to the kitchen (seven steps) and the tear tracks on her face are etched into me like the day of her birth.
Money was tight and I assumed she’d be like me, wanting to save, wanting to keep pennies in the loose board above the heater and feathers and insects in a matchbox and pebbles under her bed and teeth in a tin. In my baby teeth, I saw salvation.
In hers, she saw tethers. She wanted to put them under her pillow, she told me, for the fairy who bestowed wealth on those who offered their beads of memory as sacrifice. Such belief. Such confidence in the face of my frailty, faith in the Fae. She knew we didn’t have money to spare— her shoes were falling apart at the laces, too. I nodded, bewildered.
I sat on the kitchen tile, listening to the motor in the refrigerator moan its dying breaths, and the click of the ceiling fan, and the wind on the fire escape rattling its chains, asking to be freed. I felt pathetic, being overwhelmed by a simple request. How do you handle, how do you balance your child offering you their faith on a plate when you are too hollowed to eat?
I felt incapable of telling her that fairies weren’t really, not truly, a thing, that I was a fraud, and that I didn’t have a dime to spare for the sake of the tooth under the pillowcase freckled with holes. I couldn’t tell her that, not when I’d duct-taped the window shut against the cold, not when the bed was splintering under her and her childhood slipped away with every passing breath. We were threadbare and broke.
So I went into my box, the softwood one with the faded carvings, that looked like it was made of driftwood and dreams. I got it at a yard sale when I was seventeen, perfect for my collection of penny savings. I found that lucky rose, the pressed flower, the one from the night I met her father. He was gone months later, but that was neither here nor there now.
I found the tin with my teeth, I found the marble with the cat’s eye through it—
I took the tooth, so round on one side, so perfectly sharded on the other. How many cells it took, how much time, how many teething tears to grow that little pearl thing. It was my bones, my flesh, my organs that gave root to a life, and from that life came the tooth, and the tooth was life—
I put the marble under my daughter’s pillow and took the tooth and put it in a plastic container that I got from the dentist and I threw out the floss (a horrible waste) and into my box placed both little boxes of teeth—one with many rattling around, the other just one, singular, all alone for now. But not for long. She was growing up and her grown-up thoughts would push out the teeth because there wouldn’t be room for them in her mouth alongside all those opinions.
I did not cry over the tooth, though I did feel sick. If she could trade a tooth, a chip of memory, for pocket money, what else would she be willing to hand over? I wasn’t like that. I did not trade my teeth, no more than I traded my knowledge, my pennies, my thoughts.
I’d put the tin away; I saved the castaway memories. They were treasures to me, what were throwaways to her. I put the tin which used to hold the tea and the clear plastic container shaped like a tooth in my wooden box with my penny collection, the rose, and the pebbles, and the matchbox with the dead bumblebee and the feathers.
In the night, I woke to the creaky radio from my childhood, the whirr of the broken refrigerator, the whine of the ceiling fan. I heard the fire escape rattling maniacally, the wind shrieking, shackled to chains, begging to be set free. Inexplicably, in my mind’s eye, I saw a pomegranate—those teeth-like seeds, cradled in fruit flesh, layers and layers, deep and red and bloody with life.
I tried to hear the fruit in my mind’s ears but I couldn’t. Instead, I heard the crash of my daughter’s window and I ran through thick, caliginous shadows that gathered in hostility by the corners where doorframes met walls. I screamed when I saw the flood of pearlescent bones that glowed in the moonlight and buried my daughter’s splintering bed in a mountain of decay.
There was the arc of a ribcage, the curve of a hip, the shrapnel of a jaw. A canine tooth gleamed in the stricken light. I stumbled forward and the ground dissolved.
I was standing at the sink watching the dishes. Those days, all I saw was poverty. The cracked china, that heirloom of my grandmother, already washed. Squeaking and dry. I glanced down at the drain—what was that?—but a tooth.
I stared at it for a long moment. I picked it up. I couldn’t bear to get rid of it. What a waste that would be. It bored into my eyes, my skull and my brain. If it read my thoughts, I can’t be sure, but I was certain that it had won this standoff, and I would put the tooth back in its place. Coward.
I was washing my hands in the big paint sink in the laundry room in the basement, when, in the soap dish, curled like an infant at the side of the baby-blue bar of soap, tucked in neatly, was another tooth. An incisor this time. I felt like someone had stabbed me in the ribcage with a pair of kitchen scissors. I wiped it off with trembling hands, pocketed it without a second glance. I felt ashamed.
I was reading a tattered magazine with my feet propped up on the coffee table, a tower of empty cardboard shoeboxes. I drank from my mug deeply, and spat out the tiny seed that clinked against the stale tea in the bottom. A molar among my tea leaves. Revulsion coursed through me; that seed of life was a curse. I spat in the mug, placed it gently in the sink, put the tooth back where it belonged, pressed the palms of my hands into my eyeballs until spirals of purple blossomed and erupted under my eyelids. Punishment.
I was standing in the shower when from the black mold and grout grew teeth. Three balanced on the rubber duck, one on the rusty tap. In between my fingers and my toes. In the corners. Giving stingers to the scrub brush. Scratching my skin and boring into my nails. Ignoring them, I turned to face the showerhead. The pipes whined. The water was cold. I closed my eyes, trying to touch purity. From the showerhead came a flood of teeth, with the sound of nails on a chalkboard, nicking my skin, my lips, my eyes, finding their way to my ears and the backs of my knees.
I turned off the shower and stepped out, brushing teeth like ticks off my body. I crushed them underfoot as I walked to the sink to rinse the harsh soap from my eyes. There, lining the drain, I could see them in the darkness. Poised like cockroaches, prepared to strike—rows and rows of teeth. Ready to swallow my arm like a predator with a vise for a mouth, a piranha in my own house. Lying in wait. Watching me with milky eyes. Benign and inanimate, yet, paradoxically, parasitic.
I stared into the mirror, opened my mouth— what did I think I would find? My daughter brushed her teeth silently beside me. Her toothbrush was white, mine red. She gave me a wary look.
What are we going to do about all these teeth?
I ignored her like I ignored the teeth; she went to bed. I stood at the counter for a long time as the tile turned into a mosaic and I wondered if I would wake up in the morning with the throat of a shark—rows and rows of needle-like fangs.
That night, on a bed of teeth, with blankets of teeth, and bones made of teeth, I dreamt my mother standing in front of me, holding a red tin in her hands. She shook it like a maraca, but as she did, rather than music, I heard the tiny shrieks of my teeth, a chorus of pain, little hearts beating fiercely, parasites with no names. Twenty voices pierced a melody through my tongue and unfurling from my fetid throat was a general plea for freedom, and through that, I heard the wind in the fire escape outside, moored and desolate, anchored to a shallow bay.
In their horrible cries, the eerily harmonized voices of those inanimate parasites, callow and crushed, I cowered in the gallows of the back of my throat. My mother’s back split open into mechanical wings, creaking on and off, a possessed version of the fairy said to bestow wealth in exchange for a sacrifice. Was this the sacrifice?
In answer, I awoke on a sterilized table in a cold room smelling of hospitals and the tired bite of anesthesia. It reminded me of innocence lost. I knew what I had to give up. I glanced down at my chest, which was at first obscured by a white mist. I felt a stirring in my chest, something strange and otherworldly, some shred of reality holding onto my heartstrings. I sat up, only to find myself cut open in several places; sewed with toothfloss; empty arms; and abdomen—eviscerated.
I was unconcerned. How many times had I pictured this form of suffering? I felt a tremor in my arm, as if my elbow joint was weaker, changed somehow. I reached for the curtain of skin which veiled another world anatomically. What would I find in my arm but—
The tendons were cut. So with no arm at all, I reached for my sternum, cracked it open, lifted up the shroud hiding my eyes, my burial/marriage/afterlife veil and it was as if I were an onlooker, staring deep into the dark red circle of my own empty chest. Empty of all but a beating heart, purple and desperate, connected with wires and chains of breath to my veins. Moving towards it, ever so slowly, like shards of glass or porcupine quills, marching inexorably towards the last remaining tie to mortality, were rows and rows of—
Teeth. Baby teeth. Buried in my flesh, lodged there like stones in clay, a pass undauntable and steady. I watched them in surprise, not fear. There, hundreds of teeth. I was teeth. Teeth were the life I breathed into my daughter. Teeth was me; life was teeth; I was life. I watched the teeth bury their roots in me, suck all my blood, drain my life; the teeth were already the life; and yet we take life.
I became the stainless steel table, the table became the counter with the old radio and the cans, became my mother, standing over me with a red tin empty but for the smell of travel and tea. It had a design of bamboo on the cover. She bought it in Taiwan before I was born. I am saying,
This tooth is salvation.
She is rolling her eyes. She sighs.
My daughter says, This tooth is a tether.
I am bewildered. I sit on the kitchen floor and cry over—
A tooth. A baby tooth. There it lies, castaway, on the floor beside me on the white linoleum among chipped china, while I claw at my adult skin and listen to the refrigerator motor drone on its dying song beside me, see the moonlight light up the ceiling fan into chips of bone, hear the wind beat at its chains on the fire escape.
A red tin, upended, on the floor—
A clear plastic container, shaped like a tooth—
There are baby teeth everywhere. They no longer bloomed from the gutters. They have been released from their tethers. Benign teeth, my house unweaponized, my brain full of knives. There are pearls mixed in, altogether. I no longer know which is the one I was supposed to give to the fairy, in exchange for wealth, a sacrifice on behalf of my daughter.