Senica Maltese's "Teeth"

We believed our mamma when she told us she’d stuffed our beds full of teeth. She said she’d know if we were naughty during the night, that she’d hear the teeth grating against each other, the sound of the rotten ones cracking under the pressure of our identical, lordotic spines.

“It don’t do to sneak about, rat-a-tat-tatting during the night,” she hollered, dental drill poised in a gloved hand. We scrambled up the stairs to the loft over Mamma’s dentist shop with thunder under our feet, toe bones crackling as we leaped, electrified, through the air.

You’d stashed the dollars we’d found loose on the street, in the market, in unwatched purses, between the leaves of oily paper in Mamma’s bedside cupboard. I’d packed the wear one-strapped rucksack full: socks, toothbrushes, a hairbrush we could share, an empty bottle for water, three granola bars, and a couple apples. The clothes we’d take, we’d wear.

No lights after eight. No talking, reading, miming: Mamma would hear the teeth shifting underneath rubbery insulation of our beds.

That night, once Mamma’d locked our bedroom door, we slid across our silent floor, and into the oak tree that thwacked our window in the breeze. Mamma didn’t believe we could be any different than her and Papa. That’s why she listened at our door in the middle of the night.

The cold night kissed our cracked lips and smacked our cheeks: Wake up, it said. Run.