Teeth

It sounded sweet when you told me you named all your teeth. I noted they were all women’s names. Mila and Pilar were the showgirls up front; Sofi and Carmen doing yeoman’s work of flattening, grinding. I watched them in the restaurant that night as you talked, chewing your paella with shrimp, calamari, clam, squid ink rice. I said I disliked paella, that fish gave me hives. My way of keeping you at arms’ length. But oh, I wanted to kiss you over our plates and glasses. Silverware softly pealed. Flirtations were murmured.

Our first time sleeping together, you said how sexy you found my teeth. You tapped a finger against my incisors and smiled. You divulged your pattern was to fall madly in love, lifting the woman high on a pedestal, but that at six months she became humanly, unsalvagably flawed. You ended it then, ready for someone fresh. You added that I shouldn’t worry because you were seeing a new therapist.

You were an intense listener to my litany of grief. And then—pop!—you’d occasionally toss me a fact about yourself. You’d never had a cavity. Pop! You’d eaten at eleven of the Michelin 3-star restaurants in the U.S. and planned to visit the rest before you turned 50. We’d go together! I nodded, breathing in your scent, watching your mouth and perfect teeth. Pop! You grew up in foster care, but none of the homes really took. I ached then for the little boy you.

We were in bed again, after the pedestal but before the crash. Between the pedestal and the floor is held breath and decreased oxygen to the brain. Is beige whispers, is the land of glacier and floating teeth unmoored from mouths.

We’d reached the half year landmark. We stood in a restaurant parking lot. No Michelin stars. It had been raining, and water spilled from the eaves. A plastic medicine bottle dropped from your jacket pocket. I bent for the bottle, shook it, and peered inside. An anti-anxiety medicine. My heart flew to yours in that moment. An opening into your vulnerability. It was like catnip to a woman like me. You didn’t say to stop, but the set of your shoulders told me you were already gone. There we stood, under the slowly-turning neon sign. Cocktails ‘n’ Chops. World-Famous Dips. It was so quiet I heard its motor. My last sight of you was with red and blue neon sliding across the planes of your unsmiling face.

It’s been exactly three years. I still cry for you. But you hadn’t lied. We dated half a year. You had that self-knowledge and imparted it early on. But I’d thought myself the exception, figured I’d gotten to you at the right time. After the counselor, the self-knowledge. And you’d told me about your teeth, the naming of them. I felt that meant something. You stuck to the schedule, ghosting me then. What an apropos word for that sudden cooling. While I’d fallen in love and stayed there. Your calls, never frequent, skated away all misty in Victorian garb.

Late at night I wonder if my voice and teeth have skated from your memory. Whether you would know me if we passed at Lake Merritt, or outside the Walden Pond Bookstore. At those times, pink-nostrilled and prettily sad, I use the tip of my finger to smooth nonexistent bite scars on my wrists. I miss them in a way you can only miss something you’d wanted and never received. In the blackness of night, I clamber out of bed to assess my eye teeth and canines: Enrique, Juan Carlos, Manolo, and Rey.

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Francine Witte is an NYC-based poet, fiction writer, and playwright. Her upcoming flash collection, Radio Water, is forthcoming in January 2024. She is flash fiction editor of Flash Boulevard and South Florida Poetry Journal. Claudia Monpere’s flash fiction appears in Smokelong Quarterly, Atticus Review, Pidgeonholes, The Forge, Fictive Dream, Trampset, Ghost Parachute, and elsewhere. Patricia Q. Bidar’s work appears in numerous journals and anthologies including Flash Fiction America (W.W. Norton, 2023), Best Small Fictions 2023 (Alternating Current) and Best Microfiction 2023 (Pelekinesis Press) Her collection of short fiction, Pardon Me for Moonwalking, is forthcoming in 2025.