Birds Don't Have Teeth

Birds should not have teeth. This is a well-known fact, and has ingrained itself so deep inside the human conscience that it hardly needs to be said at all. Unfortunately, repeating that did not make the crow’s smile go away.

It had been sitting on our porch for five minutes. Perhaps longer, but I’d only started looking when it squawked. I didn’t think a bird so unimpressive would’ve had room in its beak for so many teeth. Incisors, bicuspids, some molars jammed in the back; they were gleaming white and all there, in better health than most people could say for their own.

“Mommy!”

I pulled the blinds closed and told myself again that birds could not have teeth. “Coming, baby.”

My son was upstairs, standing on his stepstool, leaning into the bathroom mirror with his mouth open. I could see the saliva coating his fingers, bubbly, thick and wet from his obsessive toying with a tooth.

“It’s loose!” he said. “See?” He stretched his jaw wider and turned to me so I could. “It wiggles when I touch it! See? See?”

A thin line of spit bridged his lips. He was breathing almost like a dog, excited and wide-mouthed in a way that, had he actually been a dog, I might’ve embraced with the pity-love of its owner. But his breath still smelled unbrushed, wafting out warm and sour and making my nose recoil with half-instinct, half-intention. I tried hiding it with a smile.

“Your first loose tooth—that’s big!”

But he wasn’t going to let me off the hook that easy. He insisted I touch it, pleading with those two clueless eyes of his while he continued to make his gums bleed. They were his father’s eyes, not mine.

I barely poked it. That seemed enough to sate him, though, feeling it lean back in its socket like a poorly-grouted brick. His spit on my skin was familiar—almost unwelcomely so—lukewarm and sticky just as it was when he was born, when I would prod his milky lips with my finger until he unlatched. He’d been stubborn, a ferocious drinker, and I could still remember what ran through my head those late nights when he’d cry for more and more and more. It wasn’t hate—I wouldn’t want to call it that. But it wasn’t quite love, either. It was something that stung in the liver, like overindulgence, or regret.

He beamed and went back to staring in the mirror. “So when’s the Tooth Fairy gonna bring me money?”

I told my husband about the crow that night. He was reclined on his pillow, chest sweaty and face numbed from sex. “You’re imagining things,” he said. “Birds don’t have teeth. It’s a biological impossibility. You’re so worried about Dylan’s loose tooth that it’s seeped into your head.”

I was sweaty, but not numb. I kept my eyes trained on the oscillating fan in the corner of our room. Its cold couldn’t reach me. “Yeah,” I said, “you’re right. I’m just stressed.”

“You’re always stressed. That’s what I’ve been saying: you need to loosen up.” He took a second to look me up and down, eyes lingering on the parts I kept covered by the blanket. “Not too much, though.” He weasel-laughed and I rolled over.

“Oh, don’t be like that,” he said. “You overreact to everything.”

I sighed. “Sorry. Don’t know what my problem is.”

“Well, I’ve got a good idea,” he said, and for a moment I glanced at him as if he, just once, had something of substance to say. “Your biological clock. You’re getting older, you know, and you’ve only had one kid. Makes sense your body’s begging you for another. Making you all emotional and shit.”

I was quick to turn back to the wall.

“Come on,” he persisted. “You used to be so happy. When you were pregnant with Dylan, I mean—don’t you want that again? We were happy. We weren’t even married then, and yet you acted more like my wife than you do now.” He let the fan’s humming swell up in place of words. “And don’t get me started on the sex.”

“Is that what this is about?”

“No. But it’s certainly a perk. You used to act like you actually wanted it. Shit, you used to make the first move.”

Another sigh and I closed my eyes. “I’m done with this. Goodnight.”

“Carolyn, come on. You seriously don’t want another kid?”

“No.”

“A little girl? A mini-you?”

I stayed wordless on my pillow. Even if I hadn’t, even if I’d spoken up and said “no, hell no, never,” he would’ve buried it beneath his own booming insistence that I did. “You love being a mom,” he said. “Remember when Dylan was born? You two were inseparable. I couldn’t get you alone for a good year.”

My eyelids tightened, turning the shadow of my pupils bright in their dark, pre-sleep void. “Goodnight, Phil.”

I could hear his face go gnarled. “Whatever.” He was asleep and snoring in minutes.

I saw the crow again the next morning. 

Dylan’s bus was swallowed by the fog. Our street had never been a busy one; cold mornings like this would come and go without noise, no traffic but a mail truck and, once Dylan had turned six, the bus. Today was one of those days Phil left early for work, off to some meeting he never brought up and that I had stopped caring to ask about. I enjoyed the peace of an empty house, empty street—it was like there was no one else in the world but me.

Me, and the bird.

It was perched atop our street sign, toothy-smile wide. It had been silent until I met its gaze, squawking once—“ha!”—like a laugh. I tried briefly to convince myself that its teeth were just a trick of the light. It hadn’t worked yesterday, and it didn’t work now.

“Biologically impossible,” I said. “You can’t exist. It’s biologically impossible.”

Its feathers—just how could I do them justice? They looked like they’d be satin to the touch, the way they glistened matte in a day still unstruck by sun. I reached out to touch it (as if I could ever know such bliss), arm drawn up with the magnetism of two lovers embracing for the first time. It seemed to contemplate, with some vein of intelligence, bridging the gap.

But a trash truck barrelled by. A groaning, gnashing wall of metal—it sent the crow into flight. A flurry of black and it was gone, reduced to cawing in the treetops.

Hot water splashed me and stained my upper lip with the taste of soap. 

“Great dinner as always, babe,” Phil said. He was leaning in the doorway, watching me clean. “You know, it amazes me sometimes. I remember when we first met—god, you couldn’t even make toast right. But look how far you’ve come, yeah?”

“Didn’t have much choice,” I muttered. If he heard me, he didn’t show it—just clamped his hand around my waist. I, myself, didn’t hear him approach, the kitchen sink in my ear as it was. He changed the subject with that beer drunk bravado of his.

“So, did you give it any thought?”

“About what?”

“You know. About a baby.”

I squeezed the sponge tighter than I needed to. Soap seeped out, down my arm onto its rolled-up sleeve. “I already told you no.”

“That was last night. You’ve had time to think.”

His hand got even lower before I elbowed it off. “Don’t need to think about it.”

He huffed. “I don’t understand why you have to be difficult.”

I kept scrubbing—a bit hard, admittedly, to the point that my fingers burned. The steam rising from the sink basin offered a veil for me to hide behind. “I saw the crow again this morning.”

His bravado broke. “What crow?”

I dug the sponge into our cast-iron pan. “The one with teeth.”

“Oh, Jesus.”

He would’ve likely said more if Dylan hadn’t slunk in just then. I could feel him staring from the doorway, that place Phil had stood only a minute ago; the one benefit I reaped from maternal instinct was an omniscience as to my son’s whereabouts, that tingling hot static I’d get on my back whenever he was near.

“There’s my boy!” Phil said. I could hear Dylan protest as his father tousled his hair. “You know, your mom and I’ve been talking. ‘Bout growing the family. You’d like a little brother or sister running around here, wouldn’t you?”

“Leave him out of it, Phil,” I said. I had turned the water off, but it still dripped in short bursts from the faucet.

He ignored me. He was crouched down in Dylan’s face, smiling like something rabid. That smile fell when Dylan answered: “No. Not really.”

“What?” Phil said. “You’re joking.” He took a moment to reset his face before trying again. “Just think about it, kid. Of course you wanna be a big brother. It’s a huge milestone.”

But Dylan shook his head with more insistence this time. “Nuh-uh. ‘Cuz then you and Mom will spend all your time with them and not me.”

I couldn’t stop myself from laugh-breathing. Phil glared. Then he stuck his fat fingers in Dylan’s mouth.

“What the hell are you doing?” I tried pulling him back by his shirt collar.

“Back off, woman,” he said. “Give me a second. I just have to get a good hold.” I heard a wet pop and he retreated, bloody fingertips on a tooth. Dylan’s face was screwed up something primitive. He began to sob; the tears from his eyes mixed with his mouth-blood to make an off-pink vomit hue, gurgling and dripping down onto our floor and salting the tiles dark with droplets. He stood as soon as he was able—ran to his room, slammed the door. I could hear him crying through the wall.

My husband held my palm out and pressed the tooth into it. “There,” he said. “All fixed. You can shut up about that bird now.”

I pulled away. But he didn’t let go.

He squeezed tighter so that the tooth carved a crescent into my skin, so that my finger bones pinched and threatened to snap.

“You’re hurting me,” I told him.

He smiled and said “I know.”

He pushed me back against a counter. He used his free hand—the one without the tooth—to make sure I couldn’t yell.

 

When he was done with me, he left to go to bed.

He had kept the tooth pressed into my palm the whole time, and now it stuck there in a skin-pit of its own carving. The blood had all but dried. Watching it, I was momentarily convinced that the tooth was moving, shaking somehow by itself, but I came to realize it was, in fact, my own heartbeat, pumping so loudly it sent rattles through to the fringes of my body. Sickness hit me. I ran to the sink and threw up, all over the pans and plates I hadn’t finished washing.

And then the squawking.

Through my reflection in the window I saw the bird. Its smile was lit up by the kitchen lights, the night-coat of its feathers making it seem almost like two rows of floating, marble white, disembodied teeth. I forgot about my nausea.

It didn’t fly off when I opened the door as most birds would, just sat there probing me with its amber-ringed eyes. I probed back. But the bird was a master of this game; I succumbed rather quickly to blinking and it crowed, as if to remind me of who between us was in charge. And then it spoke. Its voice was nasally, croaking in the same way as its birdcalls, only now with restraint enough to project meaning unmistakably. “Tooth,” it said. I didn’t question what I was hearing, whether it was real or not—I felt assured that it was, even though birds could not have teeth.

“Tooth,” it said again, and dipped a short bow to my fist. I paused, then unclenched it, catching the tooth still nestled in my palm lines with the cold night air. I held it out. The bird stretched its beak forward and picked it up like a seed, biting down with great care not to nip me. I heard it crunch, enamel-on-enamel, and on its black tongue I watched Dylan’s tooth be reduced to a fine white powder. When it had finished, it swallowed, and we were locked again in a duel of eyes.

Fireworks in my brain. A warmth, a softness, a rush: it hit me then, like I’d taken a shot of heroin to the vein. I didn’t have the time to feel self-conscious; my knees got weak and I hit the deck, but it wasn’t painful—if it was, I couldn’t feel it. I was too focused on how the air rubbed against me like satin. I was satin, all over, in my blood and lungs and under my skin. I could visualize it as a neural summer wind, hot gold lace intertwining with my bones and pulsing and filling and warming me from the inside out. Bliss. Drugs and sex held nothing to this, the flittering in my chest and the gasping.

And then it stopped. I was left with drool on my chin and my shirt stretched out from tugging, hair a mess from the crazed fingers I’d run through it. The bird was still there, watching me.

I asked if it could finish.

If it could, it didn’t. It didn’t answer, either, not with a squawk or one-word croak. Another minute of me on the ground and it flew off. Gone again, black in the night.

My husband didn’t ask why I’d spent the rest of the night on our couch. He woke me to the TV blaring, having turned it on to hockey with the volume as high as it could reasonably go. 

“Morning,” I said.

He grunted back. “It’s noon.”

Hockey retook the den.

“You making lunch?” he asked when the other team scored.

I listened to his lips smack against a coke can, his throat contract and squeeze as he swallowed. The nausea crept back into my gut. I didn’t answer his question. I asked instead if he’d seen Dylan.

“Probably still in his room. Pouting,” he said. “I bet he’d come downstairs if you made lunch.”

Back to hockey.

Then I sat up. “Birds do have teeth.”

He groaned. “You can’t possibly still be on this.”

“I saw it again last night,” I said. “It pleasured me.”

“It what?”

I went into the kitchen and opened the fridge. “Do you want eggs?”

He followed, brows knitted together in a look of concern-turned-contempt. “What do you mean, it pleasured you?”

I shrugged. “I’m not sure. I’ve never felt that way before.”

He looked me up and down. “You’re crazy, woman.”

“Maybe,” I said. I let the fridge shutter closed. “But I can show you.”

He was skeptical—I could see it in how his face creased downward—but let me lead him outside. He stood where I did last night: an arm’s stretch from the banister, gazing out at the treeline as if it shared his exasperation. “So what’d you do?” he asked. “Bend over and let the bird fuck you?”

There was a line of black watching from an oak tree, and I laughed. “No, of course not,” I said. “I would never embarrass you like that.”

The black shifted, grew into a bird with its wings spread. And then another, and another; it came out to four ravens shooting at us, bearing teeth.

“Hell are those, vultures?”

One came down to its perch. It was my crow. Phil didn’t step back, didn’t look at me or give any sign he was cognizant. He just stared straight ahead and said it:

“Birds can’t have teeth.”

But the bird did have teeth, and in a mess of black feathers it flew to his mouth like an arrow. He tried furiously to bat it away, though when their scuffle slowed it was clear who was winning; the crow’s feet were clamped down on his collar, holding itself up while it picked between his lips. I heard it chew and crunch, and soon the other three birds had swooped down to join it. My husband fell. His head hit the deck with a thud. The crows stood atop him, feasting, his jaw their new perch. He had stopped grunting.

I fell to my knees beside him, but did not wallow. I ran my fingers down my neck, let the heat flooding through me have its way. It was euphoria—a rogue wave I did not want to resurface from. I came to understand, then, the concept of heaven, the ecstasy old scribes must have felt when they dreamed of spinning angel wheels and burning bushes. I climaxed.

I laid in elation for some minutes. My mind was slow to come back to me, and when it did it was not entirely the same; there was a numbness there, a strange clarity wedged between me and the rest of my body—calmness, despite the heartbeat in my brain.

I stood, and at my feet he was splayed out like a doll newly broken. The crows had flown off and left his mouth a well of blood. His gums were fat and red and shredded at their sockets. They had taken his teeth. I looked back at the treeline and saw, just for a moment, those dark wings weaving through the branches, and in that moment I was with them; gliding on outstretched arms, hollow-boned and lighter than air. Free.

“Mommy!” Dylan yelled from the kitchen. “I’m hungry!”

The moment ended.

“Coming, baby.”