Rae Rowe 

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The Currency Of My Teeth

My white baby teeth jangled in the pouch I had tied to my belt. I had carried them with me for my entire life, within my skull. As they fell out, they were gathered and stored in a box that held my mother’s engagement ring, until I was viewed as responsible enough to carry them myself. Each one was supposed to be a portal into a new life, a new world.

When our cat tumbled from the tower of our roof, we screamed because it looked like it broke. Limbs splayed like they were formed in a frog and not an upright creature with claws and teeth to bite into furred flesh. My brother and I circled and cried, mourning the loss of the cat that had come to us. Hearing our sobs, our neighbors, with perfectly placed hair that looked like shiny helmets coated in a dust of gold, rushed for comfort. As the cat popped back to life, they laughed. “Cats have nine lives, don’t you know?”

When I was told that each tooth could blossom into a new world, I imagined myself broken at the bottom of a stairwell, just like the half-dead cat or like the stories my mother would warn me about. My blood leaking from my mouth as my eyes burst out of my head. Thrown for being too mouthy or being too disobedient or too much. My father had hung me over the stair banister by my ankles, face-diving downward to ponder my own mortality on the occasions I sassed back, reminding me with one loose fist: I could end just like a legend. 

“Keep your teeth safe,” my mother told me. “Don’t let anyone else steal them for their own empty mouths.” We had so many gummy relatives who would bust into empty smiles with drool spooling out of their open mouths as they tried to tell me my futures, but in a language so garbled, that I only could make out that I would argue with my husband until he killed me by pushing me out of an open window. “Learn how to swallow your tongue,” they told me. “That will save your life.”

They told me I was born too wild, in a nest of ants. My mother dropping me from her body on a day when I wasn’t supposed to come. My father was too busy to prepare our home, and my mother spent the last hours before I broke into the world buying the accessories I would need to survive. A cradle picked up from a cousin of a cousin. Bedding rescued from the garage of an aunt. The only fresh things I was given were bottles I was told I refused to use and diapers which I used too many of. “So wasteful, even as a baby.” My family would shuck their teeth at me. 

As my teeth fell out of my head, the first one knocked loose from the arc of a ball which smacked my cheek, I was told they needed to be saved. Each tooth was preserved in an emptied jar that had lived as a container for the chili paste mashed of the red peppers that grew in my backyard with a plunge of pungent bodies of broken fishes with beaten lemongrass, exchanged for fresh white milk, bought special from the dusty corner store. My teeth would live in the jar for 100 days, until they were properly calcified and preserved. I was allowed to see them, gleaming in pearl, before they were placed in the velvet box, and I was warned that each tooth was a wish that I needed to spend carefully. As soon as the box was filled, after I grew a set that could build a new child, I would be allowed to blacken my teeth. 

My mother had not undergone this preservation as my grandmother ate the teeth of her children so they could not flee and fall into the hands of others who would prevent their escape. My grandmother, without the wishes of the lustrous baby teeth, having used all her own to survive the next 100 days, removed each grown tooth from her head. Each offering guaranteed her children would blossom in the earth of another land. As each wish took root, my aunts would leave her. 

My youngest aunt grew more beautiful. So beautiful she was stolen by a man whose tongue strangled her language until he proclaimed it was too difficult and stopped trying. She never had to work, and he promised to take care of her, leaving her with a scattering of children who occupied her day while he worked for longer and longer hours.

My oldest aunt spoke numbers so exquisitely, a university took her, just after her feet found their place in the dry soil of their new country. She lived there until she was given to a startup, where her brain powered inventions of rivets and wires that allowed people to speak at the same time across wide differences, which she did until a man at her company fell in love with her. She left her job to raise children, teaching them her language of numbers in secret when my uncle was away.

My middle aunt grew clever with her hands, being able to craft anything, without patterns or blueprints, from boats to blouses. Though she was warned not to, she decided to travel across the new country, selling her creations. Until a man asked her to work for him, fabricating sculptures that would be sold to people so wealthy, they purchased entire countries. Jealous of her genius, he chopped off her hands, so she could not make anything but children with him. 

Then my mother, who was deemed the most able to make something on her own, was given safe passage in exchange for a knot of teeth all with holes and rot. The teeth, still offering the plumes of sticky longan and eggs, were pleasant but not whole for a proper gift. While she found a husband faster than any of my aunts and was the first to bear children in this country, she never glowed as bright, and a form of contrite normalcy took rule in her life. She worked at the same place my father did, but woke up before rays of sun could warm her face to run before going to work and leaving early to tend to my brother and me. Cleaning the house and making a fresh dinner, perfect for my father when he arrived home. 

Knowing that safe passages were never guaranteed, my mother made me take after her. Following her footsteps in the streaky remains of cleansers as we got on our hands and knees and scrubbed at our worn floors as my brother ran in the mud of our yard gobbling down the worms that wriggled to the surface in the unexpected spell of rain. Leaving us alone in the summers when both she and my father were working, I was required to care for my younger brother. Tend to him. 

He was the first boy born in the country, and the hope of each unrooted tooth was placed on him. Every action our family unit took was to ensure that he could grow upright and achieve each success that was wished on him as he grew in our mother’s belly. The careers he was supposed to achieve were whispered to my mom’s navel, each aunt would coo blessings into him, their luck hoarded, to place on him. Wealth, an obedient wife, excellent education. This was the life he was to receive, the inheritance skipping me and no wishes were given but a weak moan of “Survive.” 

I was to ensure he thrived under my care, serving him in ways my mother had dictated to me. Cooking him the meals he desired, making sure he stayed in the house, and forcing him to do handwritten homework pages my mother scrawled out in the weak light of the morning to prepare him so he could be number one in his class. Being three years older, but consistently told to be smart like my brother, he refused to listen to me. He was so brilliant, the steadfast and thriving future, a genius who would bring us wealth. My brother beat these words into the insides of his kidneys, so whenever he pissed, the sound reminded him of his superiority, leaving his leftover urine on the seat for me to clean up after. 

This left me with summers built on long, hot, and miserable days, as I spent my time waiting on my brother, writing down the tasks that I managed to accomplish to be reviewed by my mother on her return, as the cat wisped around me, skinny in its second life. My brother would bounce to greet her, telling her that I had screamed at him instead of feeding him the lunch he requested, which meant he hadn’t eaten that day, therefore he should be taken out for a feast of burgers and ice cream.

I had offered him noodles, cooked over the stove in our small and sweating kitchen while he followed me until I could smell the stink of his armpits in the boiling water. When this wasn’t good enough for him, he took a plastic whistle he pilfered from school and blasted it in my ears so all I could hear was a reverberating wail in my ear, leading me to shake at him in shouts. Because I was older, and born a girl, I was told I needed to be better and be the bigger person, he was just doing what boys did, and if I couldn’t react peacefully to that, I’d be doomed to be thrown out of the window like my relatives foretold. To break into me my inherited submission, after this admission, I was first smacked with the good leather belt—the one that wasn’t softened in the practiced paddles of blows—and was forced to stay indoors while I watched my brother play across the neighborhood. 

Determined to write a new future, I tried to learn how to read and remake the lines in my hands. Scratching into the folds that had been channeled into my hands as I mopped our floors, wiped up after my brother’s piss, cooked him meals, and hurled my palms into fists trying to stop myself from pummeling by digging into my skin with the ridges of my fingernails as I begged him do to the homework our mother had created for him. I scraped my hands raw trying to arrange new rivets in my palms so I didn’t have to swallow my tongue and would be allowed to speak without bearing marks from the belt. The cat would come to me after and lick the marks from my hands and my back.

As my parents were eventually convinced my brother was the more responsible of the two of us, I was relieved of my duties, and worked to spend as little time at home as possible. Taking the only job that didn’t look for a proof of age, I spent my time cleaning off the sticky floors of movie theaters, layered with the sugary remains of beverages and the crunch of popcorn, still trying to rewrite the future that was written in the lines of my body by gashing into my hands.

Time away from my family softened my hands and eased the lines of my life. As I worked, new trenches were mapped in my palm. My parents stopped asking where I was going, just ensuring I would be home to support my brother as requested. I moved through school knowing there was no plan for me and understanding that, though the rite of passage for my classmates was leaving their homes and sprouting independent lives, mine would remain in the same childhood bedroom that fabricated my being, which would hold me until my brother was done with all his schooling. A nest egg had been formed for him to set him off on his promising future, and I assisted with it by paying rent to my parents with my movie theater money. While I had thought about taking classes, it was too expensive for me on top of my family-drawn bills so I made myself smaller, thinking of a day where I didn’t have to swallow my tongue and where I’d be gifted my baby teeth back. Though each one had been harvested, I still wasn’t allowed to blacken my teeth. I wasn’t trusted to hold that form of beauty. 

My brother worked to fulfill his destiny, but as someone who was raised with a particular type of catering, independent living was challenging. Because his brilliance was wished into his blood, he did not understand how to do the activity of school, and quickly failed out, which prolonged my sentence. As my brother moved back home, I was able to convince my parents of my responsibility. I had been reliably paying rent for four years, which I used as evidence to take back my teeth. Only in comparison to my brother’s recent failure did I appear worthy, and I was given my teeth back, though I could feel them choking on their ask, the wishes they had spoken into air, which disappeared into my brother’s organs. 

I continued to live in the same bedroom that held me for my entire life, with the cat the rest of them seemed to forget about. I watched as my brother found his footing under the eyes of my parents, graduated, and left. On the last day my brother lived in our house, my parents gave him a check he could use to buy a house, one set up for the life that was foretold. He moved far enough away that my parents could not visit him unexpectedly, where things were expensive enough, he had to ask for a second check.

Knowing that now was the time I could finally leave and armed with the currency of my baby teeth, I was finally ready to spend the wishes I had buried in the crevices of my hands. 

First, I needed to dig a hole the shape of my body, deep enough to fill with crystalline water. I went to the woods I was forbidden to wander when I was growing up and dug the well, like it was my own grave. After several hours, when the earthen gash was the right size, I laid down at the bottom and felt the water begin to rise, covering my face and smothering my nostrils. I lifted myself out of the well and looked as a large black and white spotted fish swam in circles at the bottom.

I went back to my parents’ home to fetch my baby teeth, which I had placed in a pouch in my underwear drawer, so I could press my fingers into each one every morning, counting the possibilities I could afford. The cat would join me, trying to nip at the gems of my mouth. Having heard the broken tellings of how the wishes would work, I sorted out grains of rice, ensuring that no broken grain was included, and cooked a perfect bowl, white, glossy and fragrant.

I went back to the well I had carved out of the earth, a drooling toothless mouth in the ground which beckoned me. I sang for the fish to rise to the surface. The fat fish floated to meet me, its eyes looking like they were stolen from my grandmother, and stared into me without opening its jaws. I offered it the hot rice from my hands, which it sucked into itself. 

“What is your wish?”

“I want to be born in a new body. The body where I can piss and do not have to worry about who cleans it up. Where I do not have to swallow my tongue.”

“What do you have?”

I emptied the pouch and showed it my fresh and luminous teeth. 

The fish smiled at me, revealing several rows of teeth, too large for its head, but perfectly sized for a human child. 

“These are very nice, but will not do for what you are requesting. For a new body, you need two sets of teeth. Come back with more rice when you are ready.”

I returned to the house and separated the rice again and called the one who had eaten every wish that was offered, while I watched the rice cook on the stove.

“I need a favor,” I told him. I thought about how we held each other when we thought the cat had died. How he leaned his body into mine and sobbed. 

“What.” There was no uplift to his voice. 

“I need your baby teeth. I don’t have enough to make my wish.”

“What did you waste them on?”

“Nothing. It just requires two sets.”

My brother paused. I could hear as his tongue lingered on each tooth that was still in his skull.

“I can’t do that.” 

“You’ve been given so much. Please. What could you use them for?”

“What about my sons? What if they need something?”

“You don’t even have a wife? How are you worrying about sons?”

He hung up.

I went back to the pond I created, the cat lingering behind me, my pouch heavy with my teeth. I spilled the rice into the water-filled hole and saw as waves shifted as the fish surfaced. I spilled out the rice and lowered my body into the pool. Sitting at the bottom, the fish feasting above me, I choked on mouthfuls of water, removed my teeth from the pouch and swallowed them. 

The cat circled the surface, a shadow in the pond’s ripples. As I laid down in the hole built for my body, I watched as it gobbled the fish whole. 

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Banner Art:
Image by Nika Akin, Pixabay, 2019