Baby Teeth

by Zoje Stage

A terror clawed beneath her skin, making small rips in her equilibrium. Doctors’ offices, medical buildings:

A terror clawed beneath her skin, making small rips in her equilibrium.

A twinge, electrical, poked beneath her incision like a warning. This is what anger, frustration, stress

of any kind did to her: sent her body into overdrive, signaled the soldiers to come out and kill, and everything they shot was collateral damage. Life with an autoimmune disease.

everything—she’d stopped the daily updates years before when she saw the growing annoyance in his face. He made her feel like a complainer; incompetent. Their time together went more smoothly without the behavioral reports.

Alex got that unseemly look that befell him when he was perplexed, or thinking too hard, where his features morphed together like the continents retracting, becoming the formless blob of Pangaea.

She’d tried explaining it to him before, how her energy existed in precious spools that came unwound faster than she liked. He tried, but couldn’t really understand any more than she could about how it felt to be someone else. She gauged herself against what she saw other people do and how they moved through the world, their days filled with work and errands and chores and social lives and home lives, and no one else seemed too tired to live.

People took eating and shitting for granted, like the continuous beating of their hearts, the inevitable protection of their skin. They didn’t think about their intestines doing everything wrong, fucking up the basic process of digestion. Sometimes food was a marauding enemy, threatening and bludgeoning. She couldn’t tell Alex how cheated she felt sometimes, or jealous. She looked normal and he accepted her near-normality.

Too many things in her life were tinged with horror.

She resented her body’s betrayal. She still couldn’t express how insecure it made her, how she lived on a precipice. The most basic parts of her could fail, and there was nothing she could do to stop it.

It was hard to pour endless love into someone who wouldn’t love you back. No one could do it forever.

The pain in her feet hummed in a shallow way, entirely different—and less frightening—than feeling her innards twist or swell.

Why would a girl who’d suffered through so much seek the services of a woman who promised to hurt her more? The fire popped, sending up a spray of glowing bubbles. Alex and Hanna both gazed into the fire as they ate. It had a mesmerizing effect on everyone. And then it dawned on her. Greta needed her pain to become

I make friends easily. False. True—if Skog counted. But she knew how adults thought. They liked what they could see right in front of them, solid things. They encouraged imagination but hated anything imaginary.

Children know where other children are vulnerable; the more she loved him, the greater his peril.

After years of shrinking, the world was getting bigger again.