Teeth

When I was five years old I tied a loose tooth to a doorknob with fishing line. My brother kicked the door shut, and from that point forward that’s how I took care of all of the baby ones. After Mom’s funeral, Dad told me that bad things happened and part of being older was knowing that bad things happened. I remember sitting in my room staring at snowflakes through the window pane and blowing dust out of a GoldenEye N64 cartridge, still wearing the black suit we’d rented cheap from the tuxedo store.

That night Dad sat us both down and made us watch home videos from when Mom was alive, a family at Liberty Island, my brother decked out in blue CVS-brand sunglasses and green penny loafers, before white blood cell counts and radiation therapy and TV dinners. After the formalities of death were over, Dad sued the oncologist, quit his job, and spent his days watching sitcom reruns and reposting incessantly on Facebook anything that seemed to fit the narrative. The doctor was Nigerian and he made it a point to repeat this over and over to my brother and I. This sort of thing hadn’t been uncommon before Mom passed, but it came on hotter and more violently after she did. Dad pinned anything and everything onto anyone who didn’t look like us. I tried to tune it out, but my brother would sit there, nearly slack-jawed, listening intently to any of the rants my Dad went on about. 

One Christmas Eve we ordered General Tso’s chicken from a chop shop in Eatontown and Dad, in typical fashion, called the restaurant back and complained that the food order was wrong (it wasn’t) and that nobody spoke a word of English and that’s why they’d fucked it up. He was asleep by eight. My brother and I stayed up most of the night and snuck shots of peppermint Schnapps and watched It’s A Wonderful Life, “Auld Lang Syne” echoing throughout an otherwise quiet house, save the sounds of our Dad snoring. Afterwards, my brother showed me a video about a measles outbreak in Louisiana and the kids who’d died because of it. He said that the disease had been brought here from Somalia and that somebody was to blame and that somebody was always to blame.

“Just like that fuck that let Mom die,” he said. 

That night I lay in bed trying to sleep, tonguing an adult tooth that suddenly felt loose and out of place.

The next morning Dad told me that I was imagining the whole thing, that adults didn’t lose teeth unless they were sick or dying or hurt. He dropped a couple of Target gift cards on the kitchen table and wished us a merry Christmas, snagged a beer and put on the football game and shouted at the TV during the national anthem. My brother and I spent the day upstairs, watching YouTube channels of young white boys talking sharply and loudly directly into the camera, their faces drawing closer with each deep breath and full-throated curse. That was when I first saw the drawings in my brother’s notebook, the pictures sketched so harshly you could almost hear the pen ripping through the pages. Beside the images were all of the words I’d only heard in movies.

That night, on Christmas, I spit up that jangly tooth. I flushed it in the toilet and watched it trail threads of red, clink the porcelain and vanish out of sight. Inside, I felt that familiar emptiness creep back. I knew the feeling well: it inhabited that same pit in my stomach that I’d felt watching splashes of dirt land on Mom’s jet-black coffin.

Dad came into my room late, his eyes wet with tears and his breath soaked in alcohol. He muttered gibberish to himself over and over again, indecipherable words, justifying his sins, I suppose, in some tongue only he understood.

“I know, Dad…I know…” I said, even though I didn’t understand a word.

The next day he walked over to our neighbor’s house and tore down a flag he didn’t like.

In art class, I drew a picture of two boys wandering through a darkened forest, their flashlights barely creating enough light for them to see. When class let out, I stayed in the room alone, pulling at a slack molar in the back of my mouth until it dislodged: my second departure. The teacher, Ms. Falcone, pulled me aside and asked if everything was okay, and she said that you can, if you believe, take your pain and make it into something good and whole and tangible, the winter sun setting in the window behind her, illuminating her shape inside the room.

“Everybody hurts,” she said. “It’s how we channel that hurt that counts.”

I felt something in that instant that I hadn’t felt before: a kind of warm electricity inside me. I remember watching Mom make cinnamon rolls and spoon the icing on top when the dough was still piping hot.

That night my brother showed me a video on a school shooting in Montana and mumbled indecipherably about false flags, paid actors, and government-controlled weather. 

“Something’s wrong,” I said, pointing to the pair of gummy abscesses now occupying my mouth. He shook his head, opened his jaws and wiggled at a premolar until it came out.

“You’re just like me, that’s all.”

“Is it normal?”

“Who cares?”

“But how come it’s just us?”

My brother paused. “Because it’s supposed to be just us. Just you and me. Together.”

Every day in class, I made more art: more pictures of wandering and loneliness and searching and flashlights and sometimes I drew pictures of Mom and sometimes I just scribbled black and red and blue and green onto the page without any semblance of order or purpose or reason, and Ms. Falcone told me, many days, that what I was making was beautiful and purposeful, even when I knew it wasn’t, and she said I had talent and that things were going to be okay one day. I kept most of my teeth during this stretch.

But Dad found one of my pictures and some of the comments that Ms. Falcone had written on it, and I remember sitting at the top of the basement stairs, my ears on the door, listening to him on the phone call asking what kind of a school was he sending his son to and what kind of taxpayer money was he coughing up for faggy artwork.

I fell asleep that night with my tongue lodged into a loose molar, and in class the next day, I asked Ms. Falcone what I should draw and she shook her head and said that it was up to me, and that she was sorry she couldn’t help anymore.

“No, but help me,” I said, as if the alternative was impossible.

She shook her head. “You draw what you want to draw. Whatever you need to. I just can’t anymore. I wish I could.”

“Help me,” I said, this time more pleading. “Please tell me it’ll get better. Please.”

She wiped her eyes. “I can’t…I have a family to feed, too.”

Then she walked to the other side of the room with the boys painting pictures of their favorite football players. She stayed there for awhile, and from where I sat, I couldn’t hear what any of them were saying.

So I stopped drawing, and my teeth starting jangling out yet again. Each tooth that came loose brought that same empty feeling.

“Does it ever get better?” I asked my brother one night, sick to my stomach, my words almost a hiss with all the empty spaces.

“It will…I promise it will,” he said, his eyes red with blood, fixed on a video of a building being lit on fire, the sounds of screams.

I started a collection in my room, matured canines and molars and incisors collected like jewelry on that same fishing line hanging above by bed. My brother mounted his collection in a broken ant farm he’d long since stopped using. I showed him every single one and he did the same—we were nearly neck and neck in our losses. The emptiness that grew with each new absence was only offset by the knowledge that we weren’t alone. We compared to see whose damages were larger, whose were anchored more deeply, and whose came out with ease. Every tooth that fell into our palm was another reminder we were decaying as one.

I withdrew from people: stopped going to middle school dances, stopped texting buddies to play basketball, even slowly stopped talking at all to anybody that wasn’t him. Ms. Falcone ceased quietly wishing me goodness and light and hope; in fact, Ms. Falcone stopped speaking to me at all, and at the end of the year, I watched her collect her bags and books and paintbrushes and walk out of the school slowly, sadly, turning around to catch one last glimpse of whatever this place meant to her.

As my brother and I got older, we spent most of our nights in the basement smoking weed, listening to Dad curse at the television before he was drunk enough to go to bed. My brother showed me videos about mass conspiracies and chem trails and population control, fake news and censored facts, newspeak and cameras embedded in water bottles, rubber bullet-ridden corpses mimicking the dead and how easy it was to make blood out of Karo corn syrup and red food dye. One night we watched a video of an extremist group in Iran sawing through the neck of an American journalist. I kept waiting for the video to cut out or the images to pixelate but the entire thing kept rolling on and on, through the flesh and the sinew and the sound of bone and the screams turned to gurgles and splash and horror. The camera even seemed to get closer when that first jettison of crimson sprayed into the air. My brother cursed and spit under his breath the whole time. I pulled three more teeth out that night.

The more teeth I lost, the less I wanted to speak, the less I wanted to tell jokes in the boys bathroom or whisper about the girls who sat in front of me, and when I did, my voice would come out distorted and alien and people would look at me funny, and those same girls would laugh and pass notes about the way I spoke, and I’d try to explain to them that it was a joke or that I was just asking a question or I was just telling them my fucking order for Wendy’s but nobody understood, or nobody bothered to understand, and at some point I just stopped talking altogether. 

Most nights I fell asleep with my ears on the wall that separated my brother and I, trying to catch anything from the other side—the sound of raised voices and gunfire and unmuted pornography. I still could picture him at seven years old, holding our mother’s hair back as she got sick. 

“One day, it’ll just be you two,” Dad said at breakfast, his mouth full of half-chewed beef jerky. “You’ll have to carry on the family legacy. Carry the torch.” He kept chewing and kept eating and kept speaking, and each time he stuffed his face more, his words got more and more indecipherable. 

“Carry the torch,” he said again.

“Carry me,” Mom whispers, near the end, when she can’t make it to the bathroom.

In high school, my psych teacher lectured about male dominance in the animal kingdom and Jungian archetypes, and how teeth were a symbol of primitiveness and power. When I dreamt that night, I was standing naked on the side of the highway, spitting up white into the palm of my hand, hailing anybody who drove by and begging them to stop and take me away. In the dream, no one ever stopped.

My brother moved out of the house after he got kicked out of community college. He took a job painting houses and put up Facebook videos about cell phone surveillance and carcinogens in FDA-approved antidepressants. He joined every Facebook group that vacuum-sealed his opinions, retweeted anything that dripped with venom, reposted every snake-oiled thought that held the world in contempt. He texted me sometimes and told me he’d skipped work again to prepare, and that the world was changing and I had to be ready for it.

By this point my mouth was completely empty save for one: a wisdom tooth lodged in the back corner of my mouth, still entirely clean and untarnished. When I thought about that last tooth all was quiet, and when I didn’t, the screaming inside my head got unbearably loud, so loud that I wanted to take that sound and transform it into something myself, something tangible, a scream or a punch or a hit.

I had gone silent in class, silent at home save for my brother (when he visited) or my father; silent in everything, despite that loud incessant wail inside of my head, that siren telling me that it was all a curse, it wasn’t a consequence or a decision or a lesson learned, it was just a curse put on me by some unseen force in the world that didn’t understand me or look like me or care about me and the more I fed that thought the less I wanted to speak and the more I wanted to hate and seethe and drip suffering down the throats of everybody and the more I wanted to watch people writhe and twist and shriek in the same ways that I had writhed and twisted and shrieked watching bloody, frothy tubes ripped out of my mother at the finish line in a vain attempt to give her another five minutes to blubber and how I’d howled and screamed when that Hollywood flatline drone had echoed throughout cold white-walled hospital walls and how I’d felt the veins above my eyes pop and the way I didn’t want her back so much as I wanted everyone in that fucking room to feel a loss in their life the way I felt her loss in mine.

And so I noticed, each time I tongued that tooth, I could hear the faint sound of my mother calling me inside on a summer night to tell me that dinner was ready, or that the sunscreen had worn off, or that my brother was looking for me. I wanted to inflict so much pain, but I wanted her voice in my head forever.

At some point, I stopped trying to get rid of it and accepted it as the last reminder of some forgotten life, some anchor to something that once was. I started spending minutes and hours tracing my tongue along that tooth, hearing my Mom whisper to me the night before she died, her voice now some washed out, sepia-toned photograph from another time: a reminder that there were days and weeks and even years when things weren’t festering and blackened, and every second was a push and a pull between the bludgeoning that I wanted to dish out and the sleep, just the quiet sleep, I needed to live somewhere inside of peace.

It was Christmas again and my brother had come home. “They’re all gone,” he’d whispered from behind me as he was walking in. When I turned around, his mouth was shut. 

He kept his mouth shut as my Dad told us to clean out the fridge and make due with whatever we had in there, fucking figure it out. My brother waited till Dad turned on the TV and then he walked me down into the basement. He made a point to stop me on the stairs, and that’s when I saw them. Inside his mouth, clear as anything, sat a pair of brutal, pearly fangs, inhumanly sharp, clean on the edges and filed to a nightmarish point at the tip. My tongue retreated to that single tooth I had left, rubbing it excitedly. My brother was terrifying in the purest way. I wanted that kind of purity and terror.

“Where’d you get those?” I asked breathily, borderline aroused.

“I’ll show you. But we have to wait till he falls asleep.”

We sat in the basement drinking warm Dewar’s and watching videos of hyenas and wild dogs in Africa ripping apart giraffes and zebras and warthogs even while they were still alive, Nazis tearing apart infants with machine guns, and videos of blue and black and cracked skulls and splintered doorframes and splattered grey brain matter and meat and shit and piss, and we watched pleas for forgiveness on the side of the street, soaked in red, pastel-suited nothings whispering for empathy in Senate chambers, those same chambers splintered brown and red with a rush of sinew and sputtering gore. Each video grew more extreme than the last and my brother clicked through clips with increasing intensity, and I could feel my blood boiling, my skin tingling, that lump in my stomach growing, my crotch tightening and a feeling I couldn’t pinpoint beyond the lust and rush of pure, unfiltered rage. Nothing seemed to satiate his desire and, for the first time, nothing seemed to satiate mine. I ran my tongue along the edge of that tooth for comfort, to hear the sound of my mother’s voice once more, but her voice was quiet, a receding echo in a chamber hall.

When we heard the television go silent, my brother took me by the hand and walked upstairs, past the couch where our father lay, out of the house for what felt like the last time. I stopped to stare at him, my father, that obese husk draped over the puke-green upholstery, an image of a game of catch in an autumn backyard now a fabricated fiction.

“Where are we going?” I asked my brother, suddenly scared.

“You’ll see.” 

The car ride was quiet. He made it a point to turn off the radio as soon as we started driving. 

“Seriously…where are we going?” I hushed, somewhere between curious and terrified.

He turned to me, “Just relax.”

I reached into my mouth to make sure I was still intact.

The ride was over in what felt like seconds. We parked in an oversized lot near a football stadium, the entirety of it decked out with cameras and spotlights and risers supporting men screaming into megaphones, PA systems blaring the sounds of syndicated talk shows, cigarettes burning and beer cans raised. Someone held a sign that said that the end was coming, another guy shouted about Jews running the media and queers getting married and smallpox-infused Gummi bears. When he opened his mouth I saw the inside was just like my brother’s, decked out in sharpened fangs and dripping with saliva and mucus. They were all like that: the woman brandishing a swastika and gnawing at the open air, the heavily-built old man with a shaved head and a set of skull rings on both hands, the obese woman gesticulating wildly to anyone who’d pass her by, and a boy, maybe fourteen years old, smiling and barely showing two tiny fangs, the babies being passed around and cooed at the pinnacle symbol of nightmarish climax, some feigned symbol of normalcy crashing up against a black wash of helter skelter. 

“What is this?” I asked.

My brother put his arm on my shoulder.

“It’s where we belong. People like us,” he said, serious and deliberate.

The boy with the fangs came up and asked me if I was new here and I told him that I was.

“Are you with him?” he asked, pointing to my brother.

“Yeah.”

“He’s one of the good ones,” the boy said, grinning and baring his teeth. “Hey,” he said.

“What?”

“Do you trust me?”

“I don’t even know you.”

My brother eyed me forcefully. “Answer him,” he said.

I stayed silent for a beat.

“I don’t trust anybody,” I whispered.

He smiled.

“Then you’re in the right place.”

I felt my brother move behind me.

“Open your mouth,” the boy said. He peered in and grinned and yelled to the small crowd that had gathered that he’d found a “virgin.” Then I saw him pull out a rusty pair of pliers from his pockets.

“Just one left,” he said.

“Please don’t.”

“Come on.”

“Please don’t do this,” I said.

“Trust us. Trust me,” my brother whispered into my ear.

“Please…it’s the last one. It’s the only one that’s special. Please.”

“It’ll be okay. I promise.”

I jerked away from them both and felt that flash of ecstasy—the possibility of escape, run away, retreat back upstairs forever, out of the basement. 

And so I did.

I started to sprint, lightning pace through the packs of fangs and claws, out into darkened streets, past the school where I learned and past the place where my brother showed me how to ride a bike and past the baseball field where my dad once hung a ball so lightly in the strike zone that I hit my first one over the fences. When I got home, away from the edge that I’d just teetered on, the door swung open in bright light and sepia tones and my mother, standing at the kitchen counter, beckoned me to follow her, into the backyard, into the light, telling me that she loved both of us more than she loved anything, and that there was never anything that would break that, even death.

But I hadn’t even moved a step.

“You okay?” my brother asked, his hands gently on my shoulder. 

Mom asks me the same thing the first time I see her without her hair.

I turned to face him once more.

“I know you’re scared,” he said.

I shook my head. “You don’t know how scared,” I almost cried.

“Be like me,” he said.

“Be like us,” the boy from behind him echoed.

“Please,” I whispered. “Just stay with me. Please.”

My brother smiled, his teeth wet in the light of the moon.

“You’re my guy. You always will be. It’s just you and me. Together.”

“Let’s go home. Please. I want Mom. I want Dad. I want to go home. Please take me home.”

My brother considered this for a second, eyes on me. He smiled the same smile he used to flash when he knew it was time to stop wrestling me to the ground.

“Okay,” he said.

Then he was on me.

“It’ll be okay. I promise it’ll be okay,” my brother said gently, wrapping his arms underneath my armpits and bracing. I felt his body tighten up as the boy with the pliers approached. I pushed and pulled and twisted but it didn’t matter. Even as I tried to resist I knew that it was all inevitable. I felt the cold of the metal and that first swell of nausea as he started to pull. Little by little it loosened, the pressure inside my mouth becoming unbearable, the pain excruciating and only getting worse. Tears welled in my eyes and blood started to flow. I swallowed vomit and prayed that I would pass out. The boy cranked at it again and again and again, each time tearing it just the slightest bit more. I could feel the skin splitting and cracking, my gum’s resistance growing less and less and I’d never admit how much I wanted it, that splitting nerve and those sinews pulling apart and that splash of warmth on the inside of my cheek.

I felt the pop. I tasted the rush of blood that pooled between my tongue and gums, listening to the progressively quieter sound of Mom’s voice in the hospital room telling us both to be brave. The boy held up that tooth, nerve endings and flesh still dangling like frayed rope from its bottom. For a moment I just stood there. All was quiet. The voices in the crowd surrounding me grew fainter. 

And that’s when I felt it: a new growth pushing and breaking out of the hole where that tooth had just been only seconds before. The pain started to subside almost immediately. I dragged my tongue along the top of it, tasted the blood that was still flowing from the wound and felt something sharp and smooth growing there. It was coming in quick, milkweed growing in triple time. By the time I’d finished swallowing the last of the blood, that fresh fang was newly anchored, as if it had been there my whole life. I tasted the smoothness of it, the pureness of it, and even in a matter of seconds I’d forgotten what that last one had felt like. My brother gave me a knowing look.

“See?” he said.

My brother smiled, the fangs once again shining in the night.

“You had them all along. You just didn’t know,” he said.

He leaned in close.

“It only gets better,” my brother whispered.

The boy put his hand on the side of my cheek. 

“Now you’re one of us,” the boy said.

Then he suddenly thrust me back into the crowd, into the sea of teeth and tissue and rot. The people around me gnashed and gnawed and snarled, pointing and screaming and shrieking, dangling children in the air and grunting and chomping at the bit, singing songs in backward languages and speaking in tongues I didn’t understand, pools of saliva pouring out from their mouths. 

All of it terrified me, but even as I ran my tongue along the single tooth, I also felt something different, a path to wholeness that I hadn’t felt before.

My brother dragged me out of the crowd, into the back of a beat-up van where a googly-eyed old man with grey hair began to speak. More and more people came in and out and told me who they were and what they did and what the future held. They read me the script. They fed me the lines. They told me all the things I didn’t know I needed to hear. With each word they made me recite, I felt the first nub of another fang starting to grow in, and with each minute that passed, that awful nothingness that had been swallowing me for so long was replaced, brick by brick, by the knowledge that I wasn’t alone, that I never had been alone, and that I never would be again. I left the van with a full set of fangs.

By midnight, they brought some squealing nobody into the center of the circle who’d wandered into the wrong crowd, and it took me a minute or two to see that the squealing nobody was Ms. Falcone, her eyes beady and decked out in cheap dimestore glasses and her cardigan and boots and everything that just screamed mediocrity, and she caught my eye and I caught hers and she must have gotten a glimpse of the sharp, razor sharp teeth that I was baring now, that kind of bestial power surging through me.

“Please. Please. You were just a boy once. You are just a boy. This isn’t you. You don’t…you don’t even know what you believe. You just know what you feel. You know that it hurts and I know that it hurts too and I just want to help, please. Please.” 

I ran my tongue along the teeth, sharp as anything I’d ever felt in my life. I ran my tongue hard enough to cut it and draw blood. 

She looked at me, desperately cognizant of time.

“Please,” she whispered.

I paused.

“You’ll be okay. It’ll get better. I promise,” I said.

She stared at me confused, hurt, and then, suddenly aware. 

It happened quickly and dispassionately. The crowd cheered louder than she screamed, raw-throated and static, howling cries for mercy descending into blubbering and declining sobs. I knew it hurt at the end. I made sure of it.

So they brought more and more people. Each one followed the same final arc of terror, realizing that their pleas and gestures were trivial and useless, and their voices grew more panicked and frenzied at the end when we descended on them, and the promise of any hope or light in the future for them was snuffed out quickly, but not too quickly, so at the end they could feel the ripping and the tearing and the knowledge that it had all been for nothing. 

Eventually the crowd subsided and the blood on the asphalt ran like water into the sewers, the sound of it cascading into the abyss like the pouring of rain into a gutter during a summer storm, my mother flipping wet hair back and saying that she loved us in a way that we would understand one day.

My brother and I were the last men standing, standing shoulder to shoulder, chanting, torches in hand, telegraphing the truth into the dark. At some point he turned to me, as if to show me what to do and how to behave, but I didn’t need the help. I knew all the lines. Maybe I always had.

I took the torch and shouted and screamed and shrieked and waited for that final release, that feeling of escape, that escape that hadn’t come with Ms. Falcone or the one after her or the one after her, that thing I didn’t want to admit, but that I assumed was only just around the corner, any moment now…

“It gets better, right?” I asked in between shrieks, suddenly frightened again.

The voices around were too loud. I asked the question again, but my voice was drowned out in the screams, the blood, the teeth.

Andrew Cusick lives and teaches on the Jersey Shore. He’s been published before in Sky Island Journal (April ‘22), trampset, Flash Fiction Magazine, Blood Lotus, and Underground Voices. He’s working currently on a debut novel.