A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
Z
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A. When she couldn’t sleep, your mother told you stories, but I am the teller now.
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B. Your brother huddled against his headboard, afraid to stretch a hand or foot past the edge of the mattress after dark, since you’d said there were sharks and they wanted their ugly teeth back. After you lost your father, everything else seemed to follow, including your brother’s baby teeth. The tooth fairy was on strike, your mother said. The tooth fairy’s life was a black hole, and her wings weren’t real. Plus, the tooth fairy didn’t want your brother to grow up so fast. Your brother saved his teeth under his pillow like pennies in a piggy bank.
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C. He had double teeth in the bottom row—two permanent behind two stubborn babies—smack in the center. He looked like a shark, so we called him Jaws after a movie we’d never seen. We knew the shark liked girls in bikinis. Your brother whined but no one cared whether you were mean or sweet as sugar. His tongue pushed at his baby teeth day and night, trying to kick them out.
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D. Your mother sat at the edge of your bed in the room you shared with your brother and his dead teeth. Her bedtime-story voice was almost as pretty as the one she used to hum along to the radio before your brother was born, like the song of an extinct bird no one but you remembered. Her stories involved second marriages and glass slippers and cars that never broke down. They wouldn’t come true, she complained, if you weren’t awake to hear them. If you fell asleep, she went off like an alarm. “You don’t want my stories? You don’t want a mother?” she’d say. “You should’ve run away with your father. Wherever he went, you can bet it’s nicer than here.” And then your brother would cry, and your mother would cry, and you’d have to choose which one to shush.
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E. Early mornings before the sky changed color, you’d wake and catch your brother sweeping his saved teeth from the sheet into his cupped hand. He shook them and they rattled like dice, but daintier, and then he spilled them onto the floor and began to count.
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F. While your mother talked, you tried to remember what it felt like to twist bone from flesh. Your father saying, It’ll fall out when it’s ready. Your fingers on your lips. We twirled stems from apples the same way, to find out who we would marry: say the alphabet, and the stem will break on the letter of your true love. If you have someone in mind, twist fast or slow, and you might time it right.
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G. You got good at listening.
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H. Your jaw was full but hurt like it was empty. It hadn’t seemed strange then, to extract pieces of your body to make way for the new you, a wad of toilet paper held in place to stop the blood. And then a new tooth sprouted from your gums, the sharp edge of a seed you’d never planted.
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I. When we met, I told you the story my uncles had told me: At the bottom of the lake, there is a town. Close your eyes. Can you see it? There is a grocery store with empty shelves, a cluster of shotgun houses, a cemetery stocked with bodies twice-buried. It was a scheduled flood—the poorest people were forced to move or sink like stones, and my great-great grandfather was proud enough or dumb enough to stay.
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J. June, June, June: say it three times and when you open your eyes strawberries will ripen and bruise between your fingers, sprinklers up and down the street will hiss, the lake will buzz with boats. Girls in every bedroom will slice their jeans to shorts with their mothers’ sharpest scissors.
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K. When we met, you were filling your brother’s plastic pool with the garden hose. The air conditioner was broken again, and there wasn’t enough money to fix it. Your brother was killing carpenter ants with a magnifying glass, pretending to shoot rays of light from his eyes. I followed the trail over the sidewalk and into your yard. Your brother squinted at me, hard, and waited for a spark.
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L. Your father had been gone for what felt like your whole life, but was actually not long enough to turn the page on the calendar in the kitchen, which was printed with an unbelievable beach scene: sand white as flour, water blue as the cleaner your mother swished around the toilet bowl, palm trees skinny as your fingers shading the name of the bank stamped in the corner. The message seemed to be with money you can go anywhere, or at least here. It might as well have been a picture of Mars, its red eye a hotel swimming pool. We were landlocked, and only your father had set himself free.
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M. When we met, you said, “I wish the lake was clear as this pool. Then I’d be able to see whether or not you’re a liar.”
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N. We wore our swimsuits like uniforms, oiled our skin until we smelled tropical and looked like we belonged in the calendar. We outgrew your brother’s pool as soon as we stepped in.
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O. Before swimsuits, I wore underwear or diapers or nothing. When I was little, my skin turned brown in the summer sun. My uncles said I looked like an Indian. This was a compliment and a warning. If the Osage orange trees are heavy with fruit, my uncles said, winter will be wet and cold, but we were still a long way from winter.
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P. Your brother’s extra incisors showed up just after your father left. It’s rare, the dentist said to your mother, but it happens. Give it time—it’ll correct itself. On the way home, your brother sat in the back seat, unspooling a carton of peppermint floss out his open window. You thought of Rapunzel letting down her golden hair, which is a story you used to listen to over and over on cassette at bedtime, before your mother took over the telling.
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Q. Your brother begged you to pull his last baby teeth. “The tooth fairy quit, and now they’re stuck,” he said. He held up a pair of pliers that must have belonged to your father, and started to cry. You wanted to tell him a story, but you’d forgotten how it started.
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R. You were alone in the house with your brother and three ghosts: your mother, your father, and the woman who used to live there. After she died, her children put the house up for rent, and she wanted to remind you it was still hers. Drawn to heat like a cat, in the summer she curled in bands of sunlight. Winters, she liked to lie in the drawer of the oven or sit on heat registers, her haunches pressed against the grates.
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S. We de-stemmed every apple we ate, every strawberry, every pear and peach and plum. Once we stripped a tree of crabapples and took turns playing Snake and Eve. The apples were too tart to eat, though we sucked on slivers until our faces turned bitter. Ants swarmed what was left, and we decided we weren’t in love with anyone.
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T. Shh, is what you told your brother. Shh, is what you said when you put your fingers in his mouth, around his slippery teeth, and tugged.
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U. If bone can be uprooted, why can’t it be planted?
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V. The Osage orange trees grew thick with fruit green and grooved like brains, and by Valentine’s Day we had given up measuring snow. The men who drove the plows went on strike. The bus drivers went on strike. Your mother went on strike.
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W. We stole Whitman’s Samplers from the store because they reminded you of your grandmother. That’s what you remembered: yellow boxes of candy, a sagging clothesline strung across a porch, a wrinkled woman sunk in an easy chair, cross-stitching in the corner while your mother convinced your father to stay. We just need a break, she’d say, before they drove away for hours or weeks. We just need a little time to fix things up.
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X. We ran to the woods and devoured each layer of stolen chocolate faster than the last, ignoring the legend printed on the lid, and we threw up in a drift of blank snow. Your vomit was the same color as mine. Birds swooped in to see what we’d left them. You let me lock your brother in his room while we watched Lizzie Borden grind her axe on TV.
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Y. You were alone in the house with your brother and three ghosts. The woman who used to live there gathered after-school snacks and left them on the table—spun yarn and hair, bent thumbtacks, smears of butter. She drew hearts in the fog that coated your window while you slept.
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Z. When I was a girl, I called it rain until my father corrected me: condensation. I let the syllables fall from my tongue and felt the way he loved me a little more each time he taught me something. Look! I tied my own shoes, zipped my own zippers, sang my way through every letter. My uncles were no different. You were good at spelling. I only heard words the way they sounded. I could never pinpoint what was silent or what was hidden.
Once upon a time, we bleached our hair Rapunzel and it turned to straw. Once upon a time we couldn’t see coming, we stopped speaking. Without you, I thought I could go on being the same girl I had always been. But we were valleys waiting to be filled. We were basins that could be flooded.
Shh, you said, when we sat on the rag rug in front of your TV. The best part is next—
Shh, my uncles say forever and ever. No one likes a girl with a big mouth.
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For more information about this piece, see this issue's legend.
Elise Winn’s fiction has appeared in Granta, Third Coast, American Short Fiction, and elsewhere, and has won awards from journals such as Fairy Tale Review, Zoetrope, and The Iowa Review. She is the recipient of an Elizabeth George Foundation grant and is currently working on a novel.
4681 Osage Beach Pkwy
Osage Beach, MO 65065
Randy’s Frozen Custard, “Home of the Ozark Turtle.” What does it say that so many places I love are connected to food? A fat, perfectly swirled three-dimensional ice cream cone towers above Randy’s, and tubes of neon yellow light the walk-up windows below. Across the street, there’s a motel with a revolving golden door—the motel no longer exists, though I haven’t been back to see it gone.