Nothing But Blackened Teeth

by Cassandra Khaw

It wasn’t charitable but apologies didn’t exonerate the sinner, only compelled graciousness from its recipient.

You can’t move forward when someone keeps dragging you back.

But the interior didn’t smell like it’d had people here, not for a long, long time, and smelled instead like such old buildings do: green and damp and dark and hungry, hollow as a stomach that’d forgotten what it was like to eat.

A long year spent making acquaintances with the demons inside you, each new day a fresh covenant. It does things to you. More specifically, it undoes things inside you. To have to barter for the bravery to go outside, pick up the phone, spend ten minutes assured in the upward trajectory of your recovery: that the appointments are enough, that you can be enough, that one day, this will be enough to make things okay again. All those things change you.

Media’s all about the gospel of the lone wolf, but the truth is we’re all just sheep.

It doesn’t matter how many corpses are lying in the soil with them. It’s not the same. The dead miss the sun. It’s dark down there.”

One girl each year. Two hundred and six bones times a thousand years. More than enough calcium to keep this house standing until the stars ate themselves clean, picked the sinew from their own shining bones.

Phillip excelled at inciting want, particularly the kind that tottered on the border of worship. Small wonder he was so inept at compassion sometimes. Every religion is a one-way relationship.

“You wound me.” “Your ego wounds you. I was just its instrument.”

Lmao

Suenomatsuyama nami mo koenamu. A whisper, so quiet the cerebellum wouldn’t acknowledge its receipt. The words were drowned by the reverb of Faiz’s voice calling, an afterimage, an impression of teeth on skin. We exited the room, the future falling into place behind us. Like a wedding veil, a mourning caul. Like froth on the lip of a bride drowning on soil.

After all, isn’t that the foremost commandment in the scripture of horror? They who are queer, deviant, tattooed, tongue-pierced Other must always die first.

Even if it was a house with rotting bones and a heart made out of a dead girl’s ghost, I’d give it everything it wanted just for scraps. Some unabridged attention, some love.