Ten Million Teeth: an Exhibition by Emrys Donaldson
Illustration by Emilee Covers
Associate fiction editor Eli Sparkman on today’s bonus short-short story: Welcome to teeth! Showcasing images that shine and stain, eek and speak, Emrys Donaldson invites the reader on an exhibition of the imagination. Come, bring your full body, bring your own teeth, Donaldson will take it from here.
Ten Million Teeth: an Exhibition
If anyone asks about your mother, you tell them it’s a performance art project. Outside the room where she’s lived for the last three months, a placard reads TEN MILLION TEETH: AN EXHIBITION. You aren’t sure where so many teeth came from. When you ask your father, he pretends not to hear you. Your mother’s friends poke their heads in, and so do people from the gallery. Twice a week you open it to the public.
Inside the room, rivulets of teeth cascade down teeth mountains. Silver fillings sparkle in the light like leftover party glitter. The teeth come in many colors. Molars with layers of calcified white from plaque and incisors yellowed from coffee. Purple-black bicuspids, wine. A nearly transparent white on some from the overuse of whitening strips. You think about the open mouths of sea urchins, yawning in wait, and a white dust like tidal scum rises in lines on the walls.
Your mother hides here from the eleven men who like to cause pain. She is very tired. All her life she has alternated between fighting these men and hiding from them, and yet they pound on the door of your building every morning still. Your mother wants peace. When the eleven men scream and shout, your mother asks for the classical radio station to play over the ceiling speakers, and you and your father usually oblige. You are also scared of the eleven men, even though you know they most desire to hurt people who look nothing like you, because you know their secondary desire is to stick their long, curved genitals into anything that yields. Your mother told you this, and she knows it better than anything. She used to be married to the third of the eleven.
Did you know when you sink down into a pile of anything small—like corn kernels in a silo, thimble-sized clowns inside a warehouse, teeth in a room—that as a mass, the pile will compress your chest until you cannot breathe? Your diaphragm will be pressed closed by a pile of teeth, which leave tiny dimpled pinpricks on the surface of your skin. Blood will run through your flattened body to pool in your purpling extremities. One by one, your cells will die. Your mother will survive in the exhibition of teeth, because she practices spreading the weight of her body over the teeth and floating, butterflying through the pile with great kicks. You are scared to chance it.
Inside her den dug out of the biggest pile of teeth, your mother meditates and reads. Within the den’s confines, your mother develops a full-body crush on Proust. Crusty pages torn from La recherche du temps perdu occasionally float to the top of the pile. You imagine the inside walls collaged with the glamour photo where Proust rests his tilted head on his hand, one greasy lock of hair fallen across his forehead, and stares dreamily into the camera. When she chooses to come out, to greet an art critic or receive food, the top of her wide-brimmed black hat breaches the top of the pile, with a few scattered molars caught in the felted dimple, followed by her silver braid.
You wonder whether the exhibition might actually be the best thing for your parents’ marriage. Before the exhibition, your mother spent Adderall-fueled days binge-watching auction websites for rare clown ephemera. Packages piled up on the doorstep, their cardboard edges sealed with arrow-patterned tape. Some of them stank. You never saw her open one, though you dutifully stack them as they continue to arrive. Silverfish slither between the corrugated layers. Long horizontal lines furrowed your father’s brow as though it had been raked into samon.
You close the door to the exhibition room and push in the lock. If your mother is emotionally distant when you crave closeness, you can, at least, control the placement of the door. From behind it you hear the clattering of molars against the other side, or maybe it is mice skittering among the piles. You imagine your mother in there reading, or maybe swimming over the teeth, comforted by their ridged surfaces and solid weight.
Emrys Donaldson is an assistant professor of English at Jacksonville State University. Their work has recently appeared in The Rupture, Cartridge Lit, and Redivider, among other venues. Visit emrysdonaldson.com to read more.
