A Quick One Before the Cicadas Return

tooth gem

I’m going for a quick one before the cicadas return and the worms eat us all.

I woke up earlier than anticipated with an unbelievable ache, and hit a two-step grapevine when padding out for water to vomit my brains out in the most biblical positioning imaginable. When flushing a bit later, I happened to notice a shrapnel of plastic, a micro-plastic, amidst the bile. I’d seen a few charged sentences online about micro-plastics, I understood we’re all just full of ‘em, but couldn’t quite remember if they should be large enough to see. It was washed down before I had a chance for a photo. It was blue.

Eventually, I got back to sleeping and thrashing and sweating, woke nine hours later to the twilight zone and got my teeth pulled out by the subletter downstairs. The intent, get this, the intent was tooth bejeweling.

I’d entered the building right after the old guy who lives on the 6th floor of the walkup, so I stood ramming random keys into the mailbox so he could do his step-by-step without me breathing down his neck the first four floors. I gave it a good forty seconds. This was my worst nightmare. I had no shoes and my apartment door was slightly ajar. Would he peek inside? I took the flight between floor 2 and 3 twice up-and-down to let the man hit the next landing, third floor cleared, barely at the foot I hear the rear doo swing and Jesus Christ she’s perfect, fifth or sixth time I’d seen her, she’s standing there smiling all goofily with sparkly teeth.

I ask, how much does it cost to get those done, and she’s telling me Oh, they’re not Swarovski, so I’m smiling like ah ha - ha, as if I thought she’d enameled diamonds to her canines, but she’s leaning against the door and I’m already halfway back up the hall. She asks if I want to see them, closer, and the second time she says closer she goes hoarse. Was that intentional? What the fuck was that?

I’m in her kitchen chair with my elbows on the table, I’m looking around admiring her decorative skills and then she’s talking about, Oh, Karie and Maya have insanely good taste, of course, and she’s so [ooooooo] ‘bummed to boot’ upon their return. I hadn’t met Karie and Maya. They ordered a lot of shit from Amazon.

The subletter had a plastic divider case, with beads and tiny pieces of string, and rhinestones. I watched her place a tiny stone in a mortar and pestle and grind it a few times, grunting. She dabs nail glue to her thumb and sticks a tiny piece on, pressing. She blows on it. She blows on it and looks up at me. See, she says, and she flicks the tiny gem. It doesn’t budge, so I guess that means it works on teeth, too.

She tells me to put my head face-up on the table and I tell her there’s no way to possibly do that comfortably, so we agree to approach this from the couch. She starts at my side, on her knees, but decides she’d rather a more head-on view and asks if I’d put my head in her lap.

Of course, I’m lying there thinking this is the start of my life, and she’s fumbling with clumpy plastic jewels and fingers gooped in glue. I didn’t tell her which teeth to place or not place jewels on, that was entirely my own dereliction in the name of warm inner thighs pressed to my ears.

She holds my jaw steady, I must’ve been grinding my teeth. It was one of those things where you kno you should be feeling embarrassed, or would typically be feeling embarrassment, but can’t seem to tack onto the remorse due to slippery comfort.

Once she’d finish, her legs’d be damp with sweat and I’d sleepily let my head lull to the hem of her skirt, kiss her there and look up with puppy eyes, begging wetly for more. And, in my mind, she’s missing a couple ribs, so she’d fold forward with ease to kiss my mouth and clink her jewels to mine. She’d moan down into me and I’d take her in a death roll back down those six flights, she’d tell me she’d been observing me for weeks, she’d been peeking in my open doors and curling into the drier as soon as I’d pulled my laundry out. She’d tell me she’d wanted this, my mouth, my scent trail, my teeth, forever.

And as I’m drooling from the corners of my lips in this ecstasy, I hear a crack. The pressure I’d felt in my jaw moves quickly from orgasmic to agonous and the imagined taste of the sweat between her legs goes purely metallic. My eyes shoot open to meet hers, and there’s so much white I could go blind.

Oh my god, she says. What, what, what, I say, and with the third repetition I choke on my incisor. Oh my god, I meet her with this. She rips her legs from under me which only cracks my jaw, and suddenly the swaying image of the subletter’s hips and waist and mouth and rapture has transmogrified into a 20 year-old child with piss streaming down her leg and into her socks.

She ushers me into the hall as Karie and Maya had invested in white World Market shag carpeting, where I continue to spit blood frontlessly. I spit and spit all the way to the old man’s door, where I rap and rap until it opens. He’s naked. Five minutes ago, I’d wished I were, too.

His cats lap at the oral bloodshed I trail in, and when I drop the tooth into a cup of whole milk they try at that, too. The old man swats at their rears and advises me not to let them eat my tooth. Because, he says, the rhinestone will make them sick. He smiles. He’s missing a few teeth too, and as I look over at the mangled felines crusading his countertop, I wonder if they’d eaten any.

It’s getting darker. The cicadas have returned. I don’t bother asking the old man to throw a dish towel over his shriveled crotch. More than anything, I want to retreat into his lap on the sofa, curl into him and sleep, sleep very softly, until the worms eat us both.

,by Mar