Nothing But Blackened Teeth

by Cassandra Khaw

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 felt molars close over my earlobe, felt a tongue trace its circumference. Her breath was damp, warm.

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.

The manor inhaled. It felt like church. Like the architecture had dulled its heartbeat so it could hear me better, the wood warping, curling around the room like it was a womb, and I was a new beginning. Dust sighed from the ceiling. Spiderwebs fell in umbilical cords, a drape of silver.

half-blind as I followed my Dantes into damnation.

No. Not like honey, I corrected myself. It was sinewy, sweet as a knot of tendon after you’d gnawed on it for minutes, a faintly corrupt delight. “We need to go.”

You could feel the house pull in a breath. You could feel its eyes.

Everyone turned as I spoke. Every eye in the hall including the ones dotting the walls, the ones framed in gold-leaf, drawn in brushstrokes. The room spun, wobbled on the fulcrums of a thousand painted faces.

Phillip said, and his kindness had a kind of teeth to it, had subtitles. Sit the hell down, it said.

There wasn’t a face to remember because there wasn’t a face to find.

Then a memory filled my mouth: “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.”

She stroked his cheek with the back of her alabaster hand, wove her fingers beneath his jaw, slid her thumb across his lips before popping the digit into his parted mouth. I thought I saw his tongue move, see Faiz suckle at the extremity, red muscle laving over her pale, pale skin. That laugh again. Girlish, gorged with knowing. The rest of us stood rooted, transfixed by the obscene tableau.

Because the dead are lonely in the dark, and they all miss the sun.”

his face was more pink than red, more muscle and clotting fluids than skin.

All the lights were on, and all the ghosts were home too.

door. I followed his gaze to where blind eyes, bulbous and luminous as fresh grapes, clustered in the gap. They blinked, skin frothing up from inside the mass, and, for a moment, they became scrotal-like.

Everyone knows what’s coming next but actions have momentum, every decision an equal and justified reaction. Just because you know you should, doesn’t mean that you can, stop.

Grief makes us worse people. But it was Phillip who pulled the metaphorical

Nothing but blackened teeth.

No artistry to the swoop of his arm but a knife is a knife is a knife is a sharp edge meant to split the seams of the skin, open up the torso and let in the light.

Heaving with earth, and wet concrete, and fingertips grated down to the bone.

I continued, six thousand miles away, numb in a way that made me wonder if I’d ever come home to myself, every word another lock to keep me out.

But then the manor sighed—a long, slow breath, a dying man’s breath spun of silk filaments—and suddenly, there was Talia, propped up against a wall, still garlanded in her wedding whites.