I’ve been collecting my teeth for as long as I can remember. I lost the first one under the slide at my school, pressed up against plastic that warped in the heat. There was a nook, right where the slide met the ground, where I could press my body flat to the ground and not be seen from outside. The woodchips dug into my cheek, and the blood dripping from my mouth stained them red. I could hear Kyle walking past the slide, yelling my name. I looked at the light shining through the pinprick holes above me and wondered if his knuckles still hurt from punching me. I hoped so. My mom always told me that family was the most important thing, but I wanted him to suffer, and I didn’t care that he was my brother.
It had been a solid punch. Mom had taught him, on one of her better days, directing him in the rotted bit of land behind our apartment complex. She’d tucked his small fist into hers and guided him through the movements until he could do it on his own. She’d set out one of the withered potted plants that had sat against the rattling chain-link fence that surrounded the yard. Then Kyle had attacked the plant, hands flying against the stem and sending dried leaves spiraling up into the air.
Kyle had apologized right after. He didn’t mean it, he said, he was just tired of me annoying him when he was trying to play with his friends.
One of my teeth was loose, wiggling merrily when I poked it with my tongue. It came out so easily, sliding from my gums with a quiet pop and a slow rush of coppery blood against my tongue. The tooth gleamed in the palm of my hand, pearlescent and delicate as a dandelion. My heaving breaths compounded in the cramped space and the noise came back to me louder. It sounded like there was a beast panting in my ear, maybe one of the monsters from the glossy storybooks at the library.
A small stalk inched out of the top of the tooth, where it had been connected to my mouth, like a chick breaking out of an egg. It was scratchy against my fingers, with small leaves all along it, and a miniscule purple flower at the top.
I screamed and threw the tooth as far away from me as I could. I didn’t know much about teeth, but I knew that they weren’t supposed to blossom, and I was terrified of this strangeness.
I regretted it almost as soon as I did it. The need to hold my tooth close and protect it was stronger than my fear. Once Kyle had left, I got down on my hands and knees and hunted through the woodchips until I found it. The purple flower had broken off at some point, and I grieved for it.
My mom always used matches to light her cigarettes. She said that the inconvenience would keep her from smoking, but all it really caused was empty matchboxes left on counters and in corners because she never bothered to pick them up. When I got home, I took the prettiest matchbox, bright green with silver lettering, as a container for my tooth. As I lost them, all my teeth bloomed with flowers, and I put them in the box.
My mother was better, for the most part. The days of her stocking up the fridge, leaving a post-it note on the counter, and leaving for days at a time were gone. But I still stepped around the place on the kitchen tile where she had collapsed and caved her head in, even though the bloodstains had been replaced with new tile.
“Your auntie got an abortion, you know,” she had said from her place on the couch, slurring her words. “All it took was a pill in the mail and then the baby’s just blood in the toilet.”
She clapped her hands together to illustrate her point. Then she jerked forward and grabbed me by the wrist, staring up at me until I met her eyes.
“I love you, you know? But sometimes I wonder…” She settled back onto the couch. “Yeah. I wonder.”
She’d gotten up, back to the kitchen for another bottle of wine. She claimed that wine-drunk wasn’t the same as actually-drunk. Kyle would call her an alcoholic sometimes, partly as a joke and partly not, and then every room would tremble with the force of her yelling.
She’d been stumbling, a shambling zombie of a woman. The ground in the entryway of the kitchen was raised, ever so slightly, and she went down hard. Her head cracked against the tile, chin first, and she didn’t move.
I’d been the one to call the ambulance. I stared at the scattering of loose teeth on the ground while I waited, and considered what my life would be like with a dead mom. Not so bad, I thought, and immediately felt guilty for it.
I didn’t mean to take them. I really didn’t. But I saw those teeth there, three little pearls discarded on the ground like loose change, and I couldn’t stop myself. I washed the viscera off them as soon as I could. It seemed wrong for something so beautiful to be stained like that.
I put them in my matchbox and watched them bloom like all the others.
I loved going to the dentist as a kid, even though we only went when my mother could afford it, which wasn’t often. I savored the sharp hook scraping away at all the impurities that had built up over time, the minty fluoride paste, and the careful probing for cavities. The best part was the scoured-clean ache at the end and the wet glide of my tongue across the smoothed surface.
“Well, there’s no cavities,” the dentist said, during one visit. “But there’s a bit of plaque build-up here in the back, so make sure you’re brushing and flossing regularly.”
The dentist was a short man with ears that stuck out from the sides of his head and a patchy beard that hung from his chin like a mop. He hummed while he worked, and I wished he would shut up, so that I could listen to the screech of his tools in my mouth.
“My teeth are impure?” I asked.
He laughed a bit, his beard flopping awkwardly. “I wouldn’t say it like that, but sure.”
I went home and flossed for hours, trying to dig out the faults that I knew were there. I stopped eating sticky foods and after every meal, I used the fancy electric toothbrush that I had stolen from the store on the corner. When I went back, the dentist said that my teeth were the cleanest he’d ever seen.
Every lost tooth was an event for me, as a child. I’d spend weeks in anticipation of it, feeling for looseness every day. Even when they felt so close to coming out, I never pulled a single one; I didn’t want to risk damaging them. When I was still gullible enough to believe in the tooth fairy, I would spend nights awake, clutching the dull knife I’d stolen from the kitchen. I’d pull my scratchy blanket over my shoulders like a cape and jump at every sound, waving my knife at the dark corners of the room. I would not let some idiot fairy take my teeth.
I grew up eventually, as children tend to do. No one came to see me graduate from school, and when I went home, the apartment was empty. I took my box of teeth and left, using the small amount of money I’d saved up to get a bus to the next city.
I was homeless for a bit, drifting from place to place aimlessly. I spent a lot of time at libraries, and I befriended one of the librarians. He got me a job with his uncle at a plant nursery. The nursery focused on flowers, but there were also a couple small bushes and hanging plants. There was also a garden tucked into the corner, to put plants that wouldn’t be sold. It was where my boss kept his personal collection, and he gave me free permission to use it, as long as I didn’t encroach on his plants. It was simple work, just trimming and watering, fertilizing and debugging. It was minimum-wage, mostly because I had no qualifications, but I didn’t mind. I liked caring for the plants.
It seemed cruel to keep my teeth in a box, when there was all that dirt so close. I planted my first tooth, the one I had lost under the slide so long ago, in the nursery garden. It was yellowed with age, but still beautiful, and I buried it four inches deep, with the stalk sticking above the dirt. It grew so fast that I figured it liked all the new space, and after that it didn’t feel right to have my other teeth cramped up in the box.
I was trusted to be alone in the nursery, by then. Most of the time my boss was off looking for a new mistress in Mexico or France, leaving me to look after the plants. I took advantage of the time alone to care for my sprouting teeth.
Once everything in my collection was planted, I started feeling a tickling in my mouth. It was coming from the center of my teeth, all of them at the same time. It felt like there was a spider crawling around inside of them, its legs prickling against me. It was maddening.
I leaned over towards the bathroom mirror, opening my mouth wide to see inside. As I looked, I saw a small crack in one of my bottom teeth. I ran my fingers over it, trying to figure out what it was, and they snagged on something that felt like a silky string. Peering closer, I could see a thin stalk emerging from the crack.
I gasped, staggering away from the mirror. My breath was picking up as I edged closer to panic. I pulled at the head of the stalk with my fingers, ripping it out with a sharp sting of pain that seemed to come directly from my spine. It fell limp into the sink, and I dared to hope that I had ended it. But the next morning, there was another stalk pushing its way out of the crack.
They opened up, more and more cracks forming, and flowers uncoiled from them. Carnations from my central incisor, a tulip from my top left canine, azaleas from my first molars. My mouth was too small for it all, and they hung over my lips. As more and more teeth fractured, the itch faded, and I learned to deal with the garden emerging from my head. Every attempt at pruning it just made it grow back stronger, and eventually I just tried to look on the bright side, as small as it was. At least my flowers smelled good.
Kyle found me during my fifth year at the plant nursery. His sweatshirt was stained and wearing down at the edges, with the seams coming apart. His nails were cracked, the bags under his eyes were big enough to be sold by Gucci, and his hair was hanging limp over his ears.
The bell over the door rang gently as he slouched in, hands in his pockets and a smile fixed on his face.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, stepping forward so that I stood between him and my plants.
“I don’t need an excuse to see my favorite sibling in the world,” he said, slinging an arm around me and touching one of my bushes as he did it.
I watched the hand that had touched my shrub, ready to smack it away if he got too close to anything else.
“Sure,” I said flatly.
He chatted at me while I got steadily tenser, about inane stuff like the grocery store he’d gone to last week and the state of the concrete on the public roadways. Soon, though, he got to the real reason why he’d come.
“It’s just, it’s been real tough lately. I’ve got lots of…stuff going on. And so I need a little loan from you, hardly anything.”
“How much?” I asked. I was willing to give him money just to get him to go away.
He shrugged, reaching up to scratch his neck in the faux-awkward way he had mastered. “Not much, not much. Ten thousand, that’s it, and I’ll pay you back with interest. Cross my heart and hope to die, I promise.”
“No,” I said.
“What, just no?” he said angrily. “I come all this way, for that? Mom would be ashamed of you.”
“Get out,” I said, and I pushed him towards the door.
He shrugged off my hands, turning to face me and dropping low. He bounced back and forth, sort of reminding me of the way that the characters in Street Fighter moved.
“You disrespectful little shit,” he said.
His heel hit against a pot, a fancy clay one that I’d gotten as a birthday gift to myself. It tipped, preciously, and then fell, breaking the pot and the plant inside into pieces.
My hand snapped out without my conscious direction, my fingers pressing against his lips and teeth. I pushed all of my rage into his mouth and he screamed. Sunflowers spilled out over his lips. He ripped at the daisies and daylilies that sprouted from his gums, leaves spilling from the sides of his mouth and vines hanging down his chin. It was far more violent than my own transformation had ever been. His jaw was dislocated, forced open by the force of the erupting plants.
“Help me,” Kyle begged through the petals, barely able to speak.
I watched the flowers consume him.
I planted Kyle in the corner of my nursery, near the shelf where I keep all my tools. I put him into the ground teeth-first, hooking his jaw into the dirt while his eyes darted desperately around. He struggled, in the beginning, but the vines sprouting from his molars held him strictly in place until he stopped trying to escape.
I watered him once a day and packed fertilizer around his neck, and within a month, he was indiscernible from a flowering bush.
My own flowers thrived. They spilled down my chin, brushing against my neck and filling every wet crevice of my mouth. I spent hours smiling in the mirror, admiring the wildflowers along my gumline, ivy threading between the gaps between my teeth, and the wisteria erupting from my crowns.
I’m afraid that I’m going to end up like Kyle, tethered in place and kept alive from my flowers feeding me nutrients. Kyle cries beneath the dirt sometimes, his sobs weak and scratchy. I don’t think I can stop this, though. Teeth are so pretty when they bloom.