Teeth(38)

“Uh-huh.”

He doesn’t even pause before he slits the Enki’s throat with his teeth. No tears, no deliberation. He opens up its stomach and takes out a hunk of meat. He moves my jaw up and down to help me chew.

And it’s like he’s feeding me marshmallows right out of a campfire. I want to close my eyes and fall asleep. I want to be small enough to swim in my mouth, to fill my whole body with this feeling.

He feeds me another bite, and the warmth pricks its way down to the tips of my fingers. I can sit up a little, and I do. “More.”

“Right here.” He puts another bite in my mouth. More. There’s a soft layer between my clothes and my skin. I’m a blanket right out of the dryer.

“Better?” he says.

“Mmmhmm.” I’m praying that he won’t stop, and he doesn’t. He keeps his eyes locked on the fish while he picks it clean of meat, searching each crevice and around each tiny bone. I can taste the slime on his fingers when he brings them to my lips. It’s not as gross as I would have expected—musky, salty, and alive.

By the time he’s halfway through, I’m practically okay, but I keep letting him feed me the whole thing. I don’t even grab for the meat myself once I can. I let him do it. I want to see if he’ll stop. Or break.

He’s smiling at me the whole time, bigger and bigger the better I get.

“All done,” he says, once the fish is cleaned out. And that’s the first moment that he lets go and looks a little sad. And I feel it, warm and heavy, in my stomach.

I grab his wrist and say, “You’re incredible,” because there’s nothing else to say.



Then we’re in the pool of water, except really he’s in the pool and I’m in the air, because he doesn’t want me to get cold. He has me on his shoulders, and he swears it isn’t hurting him, swears, and he spins me around and I hold my arms out like I’m flying.

We swim all the way back to the shore like this.

And I spin all the way home.



Mom is staring at me like she doesn’t know who I am, but all I’m doing is running around with Dylan on my back. “We’re playing airplane,” I tell her. I don’t know why she looks so surprised. It’s not as if I never play with Dylan.

“Must be that new girlfriend,” Dad mumbles to her.

I don’t know why they think I’ve changed. It’s Dylan. The difference is Dylan, playing back.

I haven’t changed. Why would I have changed?

I balance Dylan on my hip while I help Dad with dinner. I realize I’m whistling.





sixteen


THE NEXT DAY ALL THE MAGIC IS GONE, BECAUSE I GO OUT TO the dock in the morning and Teeth is catching minnows and mumbling to himself. He’s shivering almost as badly as I was yesterday. I don’t know if he’s sick or just really freaked out. He has two black eyes and blood under his nose. “They broke it?” I ask. “C’mere, let me see.”

He doesn’t look at me. His eyes keep darting around the water. “My teeth are doing like yours.” They’re bending, they’re hitting against each other so hard.

“Yeah. Have you caught anything?”

“Want a catfish . . . They’re eating my fish. I saw one of them eating my fish.”

“The catfish are?”


He sneezes so hard it almost knocks him over. “I need to fix my fish. Killed a fish. Need to grow a new fish have a fish can’t have babies.”

“It’s okay.”

“Hurt Rudy . . . ”

“Whoa.” I put my hand on his shoulder. “You didn’t hurt me.”

“Hurt the fish . . . ” He goes back to scanning the water. I touch his forehead, but his skin is just as cold as ever. I don’t know what to do. I settle with grabbing the back of his neck and just holding it, the way you’d hold a kitten. He doesn’t protest, but he doesn’t seem to care much, either. Still, this contact is making me feel better somehow.

A few tunas slide right through his hands, like he can’t figure out how to grab them quickly enough. I try to help, and after I practice for a while, I finally grab one, but he doesn’t want it. “I want to catch it myself,” he whines.

“You’re such a kid sometimes, y’know?”

“I’m a fish.” He rubs his eyes. “Rudy. Rudy.”

“Uh-huh?”

He looks at me and sighs. “I’m really tired.”

“Yeah. Let’s take a nap.”

He used to sleep, he told me a while ago, in a very small cave pretty close to the marina, but the fishermen found him there last week and now he’s skittish about going back there. He’s okay with letting himself be caught, sometimes, for some reason I will probably never understand. But he’s clearly really violated that they found his home. I saw it once after a swimming lesson. He had a little piece of net he stole that he used for a pillow and a moldy doll that he found at the bottom of the ocean. I don’t know where he’s been sleeping since they found him, or where his doll is now.

He wants to go to the sandbar so he can have a bit of him underwater, but I convince him I don’t want to freeze again, and that the dock is better because no one can see him. I pull him up there, and he bitches the whole time, but as soon as we’re settled he falls asleep with his head on my knee.