Welcome October! It is now officially the most wonderful part of the year. 🙂
And this year, I want to try something new!
31 for 31 is often for horror cinema lovers as they use the month of October to work through their favourite or must-see horror films. But I realized I had at least 31 short horror stories that I’ve published over the course of my horror writing career, and now that most are back in the public domain, I’m going to share them with you all here.
First up? TOOTH!
This one has a podcast version as well, published by The Other Stories in 2023. “Tooth” is about Heather, a recent cancer survivor, as she grapples with the reality of life and death–and being the most heinous creature of all: the tooth fairy. Listen here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/84-3-tooth-77914262
Or stay tuned at the end of this post for the full version!
But first, a story before the story:
I wrote “Tooth” when I was on mat leave with my second son. One of the things people don’t often warn you about postpartum is that your teeth get weaker. You’ve made a whole human, an entire skeleton system, and so you’ve been stripped mined for resources. I had my two sons very close together (13 months apart! Irish twins!) and so this was especially the case for me.
Or I was really, really worried it would be.
You see, I have A Thing about teeth. I find them gross and scary and very spooky. It’s the only time you can touch your skeletal system! We lose them randomly! And that squishy feeling of gums… ick. So when I realized that some pregnant people lose their teeth post-birth, I was horrified.
So I waited, and waited…
As luck would have it, I would not lose my teeth post-birth. I barely even had cavities (another common side effect). But I’m still afraid of the dentist, still think teeth are weird, and really don’t think we should be inviting the fae into our kids’ rooms at night to exchange and barter cash for teeth. That’s, like, really bad magick right there.
So I wrote this story instead. Between rounds of naps and nursing, I exorcised my fear of waking up just like Heather… 🙂
Enjoy!
And tune in tomorrow for the next spooky story in my 31 for 31.
Tooth
By Eve Morton
When the teeth fell from her purse, and scattered up the airplane’s aisles, Heather had never felt more embarrassed in her life. She was already frazzled from a delay in her plane ride home, and a late-night layover combined with bad coffee from the airport lounge now meant she couldn’t sleep, even while exhausted.
So she had started to fidget. After snapping her chapstick lid, flicking a keychain with her nails, and fussing with the cancer treatment pamphlets she’d received from the doctor she’d met this weekend, she decided to get up and walk around. Maybe use the cramped bathroom, call her husband to let him know how the first round had gone. Do something, anything, other than stay wedged at the aisle next to a mouth-breather and a snorer.
But as she rose, items from her purse scattered everywhere–including the small Tupperware container she had tucked into a broken pocket, containing the baby teeth of her children.
“Uh-oh.” Heather’s commotion had woken several passengers. They glared at her as she scrambled for her keys, that chapstick, and her pamphlets. It was only as Heather reached the end of the aisle, where all the tiny teeth were, that she realized her true mistake. My babies, she thought. Or what was left of them.
Both of her sons were now in their early twenties and had left home. She had no idea why she still had this strange anomaly from a bygone era with her, but it was probably something that–when she first began travelling for these treatments–made her feel better. Her children were always with her. “When I don’t scatter them on the floor, at least,” she muttered.
A gasp sounded from close by. A family had been positioned at the back of the plane, and now two of their children had awoken. The boy and the girl looked at one another with wide eyes and then returned their gaze to Heather, her fists full of teeth.
“Are you…” the girl giggled before she could finish. Her brother spoke for her. “The tooth fairy?”
“No. I…”
Heather recognized the hope in the children’s eyes. The pure and utter joy. These kids wanted her to be that fairy that she’d once been for her kids. She looked down at the container that she was stuffing the teeth back into, and realized there was Tinkerbelle on the front of it. Daniel, her oldest son, had lost one of his baby teeth in Disneyworld, and so she’d needed to find something to hide it in while they’d played the typical bait-and-switch of parents everywhere. When Daniel lost more teeth, and Paul began the rite of passage, the container seemed as good as anything to keep adding items to, especially since she couldn’t throw anything from her kids away. The container had stayed with her, a hidden relic, until now.
So why not continue the tradition?
Heather grinned and put a finger to her mouth. Both of the children giggled and clutched at one another. A fairy, their eyes seemed to communicate, a real fairy!
“Don’t tell anyone.” Heather gathered the last couple teeth into her container. “I may not be allowed to fly again if you do.”
“Can we have something, then? For keeping your secret?” The boy gave her a devious smile, one with a single tooth missing. The gum was pink, no longer red and gory, so she must have already visited him.
“Yeah,” his sister added. Both of her front teeth were gone. Her wide smile created a window into her mouth, strange and eerie. “Please?”
“Of course.” Heather wasn’t quite sure how much teeth went for–or secret keeping in the teeth business–but she couldn’t say no now that she’d engaged the kids. Their parents still slept soundly, so while Heather realized that she was a literal stranger offering kids the candy she had at the bottom of her purse, she wasn’t too concerned. A flight attendant noticed her, lingered, but soon paid no more attention as the girl snatched a piece of candy and shoved it into her face.
“Whoa now,” Heather said when the boy did the same thing. “Slow down. You may break a filling on that caramel.”
“But then you’ll come again,” both said in an eerie unison. “And we like seeing fairies.”
When the seatbelt light came on, and the pilot announced that they’d begin their descent soon, Heather said a final goodbye to the children. They waved eagerly while she could only feel the exhaustion in her bones. She wanted to sleep, to recoup after that last bitter treatment.
The entire descent, and the un-boarding of the plane, Heather swore she could feel both children’s gazes on the back of her head. My own fault, she figured. If she had been a fat man in a red suit with a beard, she’d receive the same adulation, even if she didn’t admit to being a fictitious creature. She was about to offer the kids a wave goodbye, after getting her bag from the overhead carrier, but they and their parents were already gone. When Heather walked by, curious and still feeling that vaguely uncomfortable sensation of being watched, the wrappers from the candy she’d given them were scattered on the floor, along with a single and almost opalescent tooth.
Heather wanted that tooth. It was not her sons’, she was sure of it, but it called out to her. She reached down and snatched it between her fingers, and eyed it like a jewel that it was.
“Excuse me,” the man behind Heather barked. She had stopped moving and now blocked the plane’s aisle. “Are you going or what?”
“Yes, of course.” Thinking of nothing else to do with the tooth, Heather popped it into her own mouth. She crunched it like it was gum, and then, felt better than she had in days.
*
“How did it go?” Heather’s husband Mitch asked her upon her return. “Is there any news to report?”
“Still dying.” Heather set down her bags in the front hallway, her tone far more callous than she meant it to be. When Mitch’s face revealed endless lines of worry, she opened her arms for him to hug her. She updated him about the new treatments that were working as well as they could–which meant, in a way, that they were not working at all.
“It’s hard, you know,” Heather said. “Cancer wants to live as much as I do.”
“But I want you more.”
“I know.” Heather kissed the crown of his head, where his hair was the thinnest. Love swelled inside of her, followed by an uncomfortable sensation, like the crunch of that tooth. “You want to hear something funny?” she asked, and when Mitch nodded, she told him the story of her new role as the tooth fairy.
“You do look like a fairy now.”
Heather chuckled, then realized Mitch was serious. “What do you mean?”
“Your eyes. They’re… different. I thought you were wearing contacts when you came home.”
“What?” Heather laughed again, but it was uncomfortable. It had been her husband who had first found the lump that would lead to cancer. She feared he’d found something yet again, something that wanted to take over another part of her body from the inside out. “Are you telling me that after thirty years of marriage, you don’t remember the color of my eyes?”
“I remember. Red, right?”
“Hey!”
“Fine. You have blue eyes. But they looked sort of purple in the kitchen. As if you were Elizabeth Taylor.”
“Well, I see who you’ve been fantasizing about while I’ve been gone.”
Heather continued to tease Mitch until he dropped the topic. The moment her husband was asleep, however, she slipped from the bed and entered the bathroom. She expected bags under her eyes, sallow skin, thinning hair–the side effects of cancer treatment. But there was none of that. Her skin, hair, and nails seemed better than they had in years. When Heather leaned closer, she confirmed what her husband saw: violet eyes.
Heather blinked. The violet eyes remained. She smiled, and soon noticed a crooked tooth.
“Shoot.” She furrowed her brow as she pressed her molars together. Pain. “Shoot!”
She opened up her mouth to glimpse inside, wondering if her foolish stunt in the airport had caused a filling to come loose, but she was only able to assess the trouble spot for seconds before the pain returned. “Ow!”
“You okay?” Mitch leaned in the bathroom doorway. “Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you. But I heard you cry out.”
“Was it that loud?” When Mitch nodded, Heather explained her molar pain. “Probably just a side effect from the treatment. They warned me it could cause a weakening of enamel.”
“Did they?”
Heather shrugged. There was, in theory, a long list of side effects from the cancer treatment, including death. She figured it was a legal thing, covering all bases, so no one could sue when they got psoriasis or a broken cavity. Or died, she thought morosely. She closed her mouth tight, not wanting to scare her husband.
Her jaw flooded with more pain. She wiggled a molar with her tongue. It swayed back and forth, much looser than before. Heather sighed.
“Do you want me to call the doctor?” Mitch asked. Then, seeing the subsequent flash of pain on Heather’s face, he answered his own question by disappearing down the hallway. He returned fifteen minutes later. “I left a message, and we can probably get in by the afternoon. Is that okay?”
Heather nodded. She swore she heard her teeth shake together, so much like the sound of her sons’ in that Tupperware container.
Mitch stared at her from the doorway, worrying his hands. “If you feel ill, we can go to the emergency room, and I can–“
“No.” Heather turned away from the mirror, no longer wishing to look at her reflection. It didn’t quite seem like hers anymore. “I’ll be fine. Let’s get a snack before bed.”
“Sure,” Mitch said. “Whatever you want.”
Heather’s stomach roiled. She wanted cake and milk, nothing but cake and milk. She made them both crackers and cheese instead.
An hour after that, they slid into bed. Mitch was tender and attentive, but Heather insisted, over and over again, that she was fine. Mitch soon snored. And when sleep took Heather into a strange and intoxicating land of dreams, deep and winding and utterly surreal, she didn’t fight it.
In fact, she was looking forward to it.
*
“Hey. It’s you!”
The teeth Heather had been carrying scattered across a floor, muffled by the carpet. They glowed like small fireflies and begged for her to pick them up again. She got on her knees, trying to hide in the darkness of the bedroom, but there was no use.
She was caught.
A small pink bedside lamp flickered on. A girl with pigtails stared at her from the bed. Familiar, but not. She smiled wide, revealing missing teeth in the front and bottom of her mouth. “It’s you,” she said again.
Heather smiled. She put a finger to her lips and insisted on quiet.
“What happened to all your teeth?” the girl asked. “Did you lose them, too?”
Heather was about to answer that she’d only dropped them, clumsy as she was, but her voice caught in her throat. She ran her tongue along the inside of her mouth, felt nothing but gums and bloody stumps were all her teeth used to be. She looked down at the pile she’d collected. All baby teeth, no adults among them. She added one to her mouth, sucked it back into her gums, and chewed on it until she was able to smile again.
She was able to breathe and think and feel healthy again, as if cancer had never once touched her body.
“Oh, wow,” she said as she ate another tooth. Then another.
The little girl watched in horror. She held up her pink covers over her face. Heather clicked her jaw together as she reached the last tooth. Then she smiled with her new baby teeth.
“What do you think? You really don’t appreciate what you have until it’s gone, little girl.”
She said nothing, only trembled under the covers.
“You really need to take better care of your teeth. Less candy, you know.”
The girl started to cry.
“It’s okay. You didn’t know–I didn’t know!” Heather touched the pink bed-sheets with her hand. She left a few dollars behind. Enough to pay for what she needed, and what she’d keep needing, for the rest of time. “You still have lots and lots of teeth, little girl. Appreciate them. I’ll be back for the rest later.”
Heather made sure to gather the empty Tupperware container at her side before she transported to another house.
This one, a boy, so much like her own. And his teeth, his darling baby teeth, reminded her of the ones she’d dropped on the plane, the ones she’d not cared for until it was nearly too late.
END
Eve Morton 