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?”