Such Sharp Teeth

by Rachel Harrison

as much as I’d prefer to hang out in the cozy palm of denial.

“Are you okay?” she asks, hysterical. “Are you okay?” It’s such a stupid question.

“Can we maybe talk for a sec about how I thought you were out getting laid and instead you were playing tag with a wild animal? What the fuck, Aurora?”

For some reason I can never fully trust my own experience. I’m always treating myself like an unreliable witness. I offer no empathy, only an endless cycle of interrogation.

I can’t freak out because she’s freaking out. One of us has to be calm. It’s a rule.

“You can’t shrug this off,” she says. I shrug. It hurts.

I can question what I saw, but I can’t deny what I felt.

I can feel it. The damage is there, but it’s ghost damage, haunting my body like it’s a goddamn Victorian manor. No one can see it but me. No one knows it’s there except for me.

I’ve been living with her for two weeks and this is the first time I’ve seen her face bare. It’s the first thing she does when she wakes up. Washes her face, brushes her teeth, applies lipstick. Then the black cat eye, of course, her precision immaculate.

Me

“Yeah, maybe,” I say, instead of Are you out of your goddamn mind?

I draw a smiley face in the flour on the countertop. “Helpful,” she says.

You being here is enough. Just knowing you’re here.

She, like me, suspects that exhibiting a sliver of vulnerability will cause the universe to implode.

I go up the stairs on all fours because it’s easier that way.

This

Bad things have a way of severing your life into “before” and “after.” It’s really annoying.

I check my reflection and connect with eyes that aren’t mine. Red eyes, set back in a face that isn’t mine, perched on top of a monstrous body that also isn’t mine. But it sits where I sit.

Having a nightmare during a nap seems particularly cruel. Regular sleep, fine. But to be betrayed by a nap? Uncool.

It’s a beautiful sky. It’s the sky that I grew up under, that I must have taken for granted. One of the few redeeming features of this place that I swore I’d never come back to.

I need to keep this to myself. This is freakish. Not normal.

Me

Denial is hard to sustain. It requires constant effort. The truth might not be pleasant, or logical in this case, but it’s easy. I don’t need to assign myself to it. It just is.

She’s still annoyed. I get it. I also don’t like to be treated like I’m fragile, even when I am fragile. Like now.

Passersby would shudder at the sight of me, without the slightest clue that I’m actually human and not a Halloween decoration.

By “we” she means her and Seth. It makes me queasy, this “we.” This is why I’m forever single.

“I want to be . . .” I start, scanning a wall of culturally insensitive plastic bag costumes, “invisible.”

I learned young how to pretend like bad things never happened.

I remember when Scarlett first got her period. I cried at the kitchen table because I knew I would be next. “It’s not that bad,” she said, eating Nutella straight from the jar. “You get used to it,” Mom said. “I don’t want to get used to it!”

Real

My hair turns out stupidly good. Maybe the magic product I’ve been missing all these years is distress?

“You can always talk to me. I might not understand, but I won’t judge you.”