Milk teeth tucked away in velvet-lined earring boxes in the top dresser drawer, or has she buried our incisors and molars in the dirt with the portulaca and morning glory?
Instead of diamonds and toads falling from our lips like the French fairy tales she once read to us, our 60-something mother saves—still?—calcified remnants of what were once breast milk, formula, bananas, green beans, apple butter, biscuits and gravy, sweet corn on the cob, blackberry cobbler, cube steak dredged in flour and fried in a cast-iron skillet, the fluoride-treated tap water of rural Missouri.
Twenty primary teeth each for two sisters three years apart: root hidden in gleaming pink gum and crown—enamel erupted from bone. Internet descriptions like koans: “Both teeth and seashells are more complex than they might first appear.”
When I lost my first tooth, I set out a small rose-patterned porcelain and brass doll chair and a handful of jelly beans. I wrote a note to the tooth fairy. I wanted proof of her existence more than money. In the morning, I awoke to find a colorful self-portrait on yellow construction paper with tiny bites taken from each jelly bean.
My senior-year picture shows me wearing an off-the-shoulder formal black wrap all the girls wore over tank tops with jeans. Behind my closed-lip smile I wear metal in my mouth because my divorced parents fought until junior year about who was going to pay for braces.
Undergraduate anthropology classes in the mid-90s, whereby I learn our mouths are now too small, teeth too plentiful, overcrowding eventual. Our masseter muscles no longer as massive because we don’t rip flesh and crack nuts like we once did. We, the professor laments, have gone soft.
Meanwhile, some true-crime drama airing late at night tells the story of an unidentified child whose teeth reveal where she was raised within a 100-mile radius, how old she was when she died, who misses her desperately and wants her home.
In 2019 archaeologists discover lapis lazuli in the tartar of a 10th-century German nun’s mouth, which proves women wrote and painted illuminated manuscripts, too. We know female artists exist in the Middle Ages because this particular nun bit the tip of her pen like Ally Sheedy in The Breakfast Club.
What we sometimes say: Cut your teeth. A kick in the teeth. A gnashing of teeth. To grit one’s teeth. To sink our teeth into. To bare our teeth. To take the teeth out of us. Armed to the teeth.
My granddad, a Depression-era son of a bootlegger, chases us around the house with his dentures. We squeal in morbid delight as he turns the corner. He has worn dentures since his early 20s, after stacking bodies like cordwood on the beaches of Normandy.
When seven-year-old me tells my suburban dentist I can’t wait to have dentures, he pauses and gently laughs before asking why.
“Because,” I say, “that is what happens when you grow up. You lose all your teeth.”
Michaella Thornton's writing has appeared most recently in Bending Genres, Essay Daily, Fractured Lit, Hobart After Dark, mac(ro)mic, and Reckon Review, where her fiction was nominated for Best of the Net (2021). She loves the fun fact that some meteorites contain ancient grains older than the sun. She tweets @kellathornton.