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.
Add comment