Teeth In The Drain

The first noise is inside my skull. A low electrical gnaw that has learned the shape of my bones. It lives behind the eyes and hums there, a nest of wasps, a filament that won’t cool. I open my eyes and the dark is a weight. Midnight. The stove clock has a cheap green glow, a sick aquarium color. I have not slept. The room is a mouth that has forgotten how to swallow; the air sits in it and rots.

My stomach is a fist that keeps closing. Then opening. Then closing again. You can train the face to stillness, the voice to sweetness, the spine to bow. You cannot train the gut. The gut remembers. It rolls the night in its palms and kneads it into something sour.

The apartment smells of iron and detergent. The detergent is a costume, a flimsy skin. The iron is the truth underneath, bright and meat-sweet, in the grout and under the nails and along the lip of the sink. I sit up. The sheet skims my thighs and clings in damp patches as if it has opinions. The hum in my head swells when my feet touch the floorboards. They complain. Everything in this place has learned to confess.

The kitchen waits with its cold silver grin. The sink remembers more than the mirror does. I lean over it and the porcelain kisses my hip, and my throat works once, twice—practice retches. On the third everything leaves me.

Not food. Not only food.

Something heavy taps the basin, hard enough to change the sound of the room. A chipped cusp, enamel, a crescent of white like a moon missing its sky. Not mine. A hair drifts in the pink water, rope-dark, webbing itself in the strainer. Not mine. The next heave brings foam and stringers of bile and the metallic taste of pennies and salt. Another tooth clicks against steel. A small clink, polite, like a glass set down carefully on a table. More hair. It coils on itself, a drowned thing.

I sputter and spit and watch the sink become a shallow tidal pool. Coin-colored light floats on top. What doesn’t float slides toward the blunt open mouth of the drain. The disposal has been dead for years; still, the hole looks hungry.

My knees shake, or the world does. I brace with both hands on the counter and feel the laminate sweat under my palms. The hum in my head rises until it eats the refrigerator, the radiator, the thin traffic below the window. The body knows when everything else is lying to it.

I rinse my mouth and the water runs pink and then not pink, and the taste remains. It is the taste of nicked fingers in winter, of ice on lips, of altar wine. It is the taste from yesterday. Yesterday, which is a door I do not have the luxury to leave closed.

I killed my family.

There: a sentence with edges.

They taught me sentences with edges. They fed me them like gristle. My father with the voice that cut and cut until it found bone. My mother’s little knife-hand, the one that seemed made for eggshells and ended up made for cheeks. The brother who learned his grammar at their table and found his own verbs: hold down, shut up, don’t move. The sister who inherited a crown of small cruelties and wore it like a saint’s wreath of thorns. We were a house of liturgies. I learned to say sorry like grace, to swallow my name before it formed. I learned silence as a second language and starvation as a first.

That could be the whole story, if it were a neat one. But bodies are not neat. They leak. They keep memory in places no prayer can reach. You can fill the head with forgiveness until it drowns; the muscles will still remember where to flinch.

In the morning, the sun used to come in through the kitchen window and show us the dust we had missed. In the evening, the house used to sit in its own stink and call it dinner. The calendar on the wall kept losing days because someone tore them away. We all helped with the tearing.

Yesterday was not a day. It was a mouth that closed around me, and when it opened I was on the other side.

I did not plan it the way movies ask you to plan. No lists. No diagrams in pencil. No romance of justice. It was a pressure change, a storm that had been waiting in the pipes for years, a rusted valve that finally snapped. The body stood and moved through the house with a steadiness I have never had. My fingers knew where the heavy things lived. My feet knew which boards would not call the neighbors. I did not invent the weight of the lamp or the honest grip of the hammer or the kindness of a belt folded double. I discovered them, like a scientist, though we pretend science is for clean rooms and not for kitchens.

I cannot tell it without telling it. I cannot make it elegant. My mother in her chair, knitting nothing into nothing, her mouth rehearsing insults like scales. The sound the lamp made finding her temple, a wet pop that was not loud because the skull is a drum filled with meat. My father at the table, that small lean forward he did before a strike, the way a man leans to pick up a single perfect grape. He did not get the lean. I took it from him. The belt knew him already; it walked to him like a dog and wrapped his throat and taught him what the blue world looks like at the edges. The brother—oh, he wanted a fight. He wanted a sport. He wanted me to give him the good story he had been promised. He wanted to be the hunter on the poster in his room, the kind with a square jaw and an animal that dies politelWhen I turn off the tap the apartment becomes a heart again. Thud: the upstairs neighbor roams his kitchen like a bear. Tick: the radiator counts down. Hiss: the window seal gives up. Below all that, the hum in my head has lowered to a purr, a cat making itself small in a box. I can carry that.

I sit on the floor with my back to the cabinet and pull my knees up. The tile is cold and clean and would like me to believe it has never known dirt. I put my forehead to my kneecaps and breathe through my mouth. The tongue is a helpless animal. It tastes the night anyway. It finds the iron in the air and the surfactant shine of soap and the lemon rind I left by the faucet because yesterday it helped the throat decide it wanted to keep opening.

I do not ask for forgiveness. The word has been used too often here like a dishcloth, to blot, to smear, to disguise. I invent a different word. It lives in the teeth. It lives in the tendons of the hand. It lives in the place at the back of the head where the wasps used to hum louder. The word is not clean, and it is not beautiful. It makes a sound like a chair dragged over concrete. It makes a sound like a chain that has finally learned to be quiet.

In and the sink forgets its glint and becomes a rectangle of depth. The hum in my skull becomes a thread I can wind around my finger.

The bedroom smells less feral now. The sheet is cool, and when I slide under it it does not cling. My body traces the groove it has made and decides not to refuse it. The clock’s green mouth has re-learned the numbers; it says 12:03 as if this were news. I do not close my eyes. I let them stay open in the dark until the room gives up trying to scare me.

On the floor, the small plastic bag sighs in its sleep.

Inside the skin, the little animal that counts threats loosens its grip. It does not stop. It merely changes its posture. The heart keeps time. The night kneels. The house—this one, not the old one—learns my weight and holds it without arguing.

I am awake. I am in the middle of it. The sentence with edges remains, bright as a blade left on a white plate. I killed my family. Somewhere in the city a siren uncoils, hungry. Somewhere a window slams like a book closing on a hand. Somewhere a woman stands in her own kitchen and watches water turn clean and tells herself she can stand it, she can stand it, she can stand it.

I lie there until the wasps in my head wear themselves to silence. Until the hum becomes a current I can swim in. Until the dark thins and the cheap green numbers admit they have been lying for hours. When it finally comes—the first light, gray as dishwater, gentle as a bruise touched with a fingertip—I am still awake, and I am not afraid of it. The room shows me what it has kept for me: a bed that will hold me, a window that will open, a sink that has learned how to forget.