Nothing But Blackened Teeth

by Cassandra Khaw

Time etched itself into the shape and stretch of the Heian mansion, its presence apparent in even the texture of the crumbling dark.

this was old before the word for such things existed.

Have you ever cannonballed into a cold lake? The shock of an old memory is kind of like that; every neuron singing a bright hosanna: here we are. You forgot about us, but we didn’t forget about you.

I checked myself into the hospital for terminal ennui, exhaustion so acute it couldn’t be sanitized with sleep, couldn’t be remedied by anything but a twist of rope tugged tight.

I swear, if that moment wasn’t magic, wasn’t everything that is right and good, nothing else in the world is allowed to call itself beautiful.

Faiz and Talia emerging, arms looped together, eyes only for each other, smiling so hard that all I wanted to do was promise them that forever will always, eternally, unchangingly be just like this.

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

Phillip always folds for wolves in girl-skin clothing.

Superstition was a compass: it steered your attention

every storm drain to have clasped a body like a girl’s final prayer,

The sight of it itched under my skin, like someone’d fed those small, black picnic ants through a vein, somehow; got them to spread out under the thin layer of dermis, got them to start digging.

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.

smile like a Christmas miracle.

when she laughed, low like a note in a cello’s long throat, it was as if she had been the one to teach the world the sound.

the boys bantered, their voices prickling like the hackles of a Doberman, short and stark, animosity panting between the niceness,

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.

“Why do you think there are so many stories of ghosts trying to get people to kill themselves? Because they miss having someone there, someone warm. 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.

I mean, I’m okay at some things, but—” Like women, I thought. Like being a star, being loved, being hungered for. 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.”

In one room sat terracotta monks, heads weighted with an ancient regret.

“You okay?” Talia leaned her weight against the doorway, arms crossed, a hundred sentences suspended between each syllable, most saliently this: what the fuck are you doing?

Like the architecture had dulled its heartbeat so it could hear me better,

“A pale little bride with a smile full of ink.”

My breath shallowed to sips. Something was wrong.

her eagerness a knife working under all of our jabber, all of our fears, cutting away the parts that didn’t fit what she needed.

I followed my Dantes into damnation.

The air tasted like honey, had a chewiness to it.

The tasseled curtain came down with a sigh of silver.

his kindness had a kind of teeth to it, had subtitles.

Then a memory filled my mouth:

Faiz’s eyes remedied those preconceptions. All the lights were on, and all the ghosts were home too. It wasn’t the face of a killer, or the face of a suicide, but someone too exhausted to be either, which was somehow all the worse.

the blind damning the blind, a theatre of dead fools.

He could have been a somebody but all he ever wanted to be was somebody to someone, a husband, a family man,

Mourning’s got a way of making men out of mice,

and laughed like someone’d told her the joke that killed God.

the yokai danced like they invented the idea,

hurt has a way of stretching out a heartbeat into an infinity

A decade of friendship teaches you a lot of things: the tics that separate I’m sorry and I’m sorry you caught me, that hangdog expression that is really code

We tucked the lie of Phillip’s death between Starbucks pick-me-ups and takeout dinners, Skype conversations and police interrogations, kept repeating its specifics until we almost believed it. Then, we tucked ourselves into our own lives, drifting until we were nothing