Nothing But Blackened Teeth

by Cassandra Khaw

Suenomatsuyama nami mo koenamu.

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

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.

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.

half-blind as I followed my Dantes into damnation.

Not brown, but black as ink on teeth.

in front of an altar to the faded dead, the small gods of whatever still lived in the eaves.

The walls wore a senate of kitsune, pale-furred, the tips of their tails dip-dyed in coal. They waited, uncharacteristically imperious. A delegation of tengu was bringing their prime minister a gift.

“If I were one that had a heart that would cast you aside and turn to someone else, then waves would rise above the pines of Seunomatsu Mountain.”

He convulsed with his misery, scratched at his cheeks until the skin tore into translucent ribbons, embedding itself under his nails. Blood ran in thick stripes, muddying his hands.

“Gonna die, gonna die, gonna die. La, la, la. We’re all going to die. Because the dead are lonely in the dark, and they all miss the sun.”

couldn’t tell who he meant. Faiz or him or me or the entirety of our codependent coven, our audience besides, the blind damning the blind, a theatre of dead fools.

Hello, the kitsune sang to each other. Hello, said the kappa, the red-faced oni, the gashadokuro, bent low and crawling on its knuckles. Hello.

ink-stroke tanuki and painted tengu, kitsune drawn with six strokes of a master’s brush, a two-dimensional heron gorgeted in carnelian, the color so bright you’d think someone had slit its throat.

Mourning’s got a way of making men out of mice, I tell you.

In the next room, a perfect black silhouette on white rice paper, kanemizu on ivory, the ohaguro-bettari sat and laughed like someone’d told her the joke that killed God.

He became instead a closed casket and terse conversations, a house with every curtain drawn shut.