PodCastle

* Author : Lina Rather
* Narrator : Wilson Fowlie
* Host : Summer Fletcher
* Audio Producer : Peter Adrian Behravesh
*
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Previously published by Gamut.


Rated R.
Baby Teeth
By Lina Rather
Laura watched from the window while Mama took the salt packets they’d pocketed from a Speedway and sprinkled a circle around the house to hide them from the monster. She tore the top of each one off with her teeth and spread it as far as she could, then dropped the white paper scraps on the ground. Laura had stuffed her pockets with packets, so she knew Mama had enough to walk around the whole perimeter of the property. Not that it was much—the next mobile home sat just ten yards away.
When she came back inside, she swept her hands together to brush off the salt and sat next to Laura at the table. “Okay, honey, show me again.”
Laura opened her mouth. She’d been probing the sore spots (one in front, on the bottom, and one on the top right) and now her mouth tasted tinny. Mama touched her swollen gums.
“These just fell out today?”
Laura nodded. She pointed at her top front tooth and the canine next to it, and tried to say, “These are loose, too” but with Mama’s finger in her mouth it came out all garbled. Mama pinched the front tooth and her hands were shaking hard enough to wiggle it. When she touched the canine, it popped out in her hand easy-peasy. Mama stared at it.
“You said I should’ve lost them before.” Most of her classmates started losing their teeth in first grade, and that was a whole four years ago.
Mama got up and took a cereal bowl out of the dish drainer. She pressed a Kleenex to the raw spot in Laura’s jaw, puffy and red like a hangnail. They moved their folding chairs next to the sink, so Mama could make warm salt water for her to gargle. It was way after both their bedtimes. The canine went ping when she dropped it in the cereal bowl on the kitchen counter.
Ping went the front tooth that came out next.
Ping went the incisor from Laura’s pocket that had fallen out during gym class, while she was jumping rope.
The cereal bowl was half full, a week of lost teeth. Too many teeth, Laura thought. They’d learned about the body in her last school and she knew that kids had twenty teeth, more or less. Her teacher back there was what Mama called a free spirit and she liked to say Humanity is infinite variation so you’re just the way you’re supposed to be, but Laura was pretty sure there was an upper limit on teeth.

Laura was nine-and-a-half and for her entire life it had been just her and Mama, and for her entire life they had been running from the monster. She was six before she realized that other people’s mothers didn’t salt a ring around the house every full moon, and that other kids were told to stay out of the street more than they were reminded to wash their hands and feet with black soap so their scent didn’t track behind them. The year she was seven, they lived in Alabama. Laura loved the heat that sat around her shoulders like a baby blanket all summer and hated the humidity that made her hair go to frizz.
They left when the monster caught up to them, when the skulls of small things appeared on the doorstep and the air tasted of the monster, of deep, wet loam and burnt green branches. Mama stayed as long as she could, but Laura still missed the last week of school,