Loose Tooth Vol. 1: Extraction

TH

L

E TOO

O S O

Vol. 1: Extraction

filled with art, words, stories, and snot from anonymous anna michnowicz alex durham alyvia covert elbridge luther elias rivera jordan kressley

joy bertagna lexy lemons liam mcdermott mae mcdermott rachael powles sam fuller whitney smith

+ messes of thoughts found on corners, parking lots, and spaces in between

~contents~ cover + background images: whitney smith 04: photo by elias rivera 05: words by mae mcdermott 06: photo by joy bertagna 07: thoughts 08: art by lexy lemons 09-14: photo series by sam fuller 16: words by liam mcdermott 17: collage by rachael powles 19: words by anonymous 20: photo by sam fuller 21-24: photo series by alyvia covert 25: thoughts 27: words by alex durham 28: photo by elias rivera 29-36: photo series by whitney smith 37: thoughts 39: art by jordan kressley 41: photo by elias rivera 42: words by anna michnowicz 43: photo by brianna pulver 45: words by elbridge luther 47: media + collage by elias rivera

02

photo by elias rivera

04

On Watching Others Leave

A

ge warps the glass, and ages of weather splinter the wood. My house is around 180 years old, white and wooden, perched on a green corner and full of old beauty, from dug-up and mounted wrenches to twisting plaster ceilings.

Humble and well-worn materials abound in a home that has raised children—ages of fingerprints dull the red, plastic countertops and rubber workbenches. The kitchen’s white linoleum traps whatever temperature stuffs itself inside the walls, and guides visitors into beige rooms coated in the smells of frankincense, dogs, and Black cigarettes.

As a child I sat inside of this house and heard my father’s silver Toyota truck pull out of the gravel driveway and hum over the hill, out of sight. From somewhere upstairs, I listened to the indelicate, key-scraping sounds of him leaving and entering the house, dismissing its beauty, like the sure sounds of a blade in and out of skin. I watched him open and reopen the wound created by heedless intrusion until I became numb to his re-entry. To him, we were something shy of a memory.

The stationary things are the receptacles of hurt because they don’t do the leaving. Think of the house, perched silently on its plot, situated near the roads and avenues by which its visitors may leave it entirely alone. Rooted to its spot, the place in which we live is an axis of life around the flurry of endless movement that is nearly everyone and everything else.

I am thinking of my overworked, umber-colored front door, with the warped glass window stratified by iron partitions. The key pad receives the jagged end of a searching key. The door gasps when it parts from its weatherstrip, and then shakes when it reconnects forcefully with its frame. The white screen door that protects it takes so little force to slam so harshly. I worry about the life of the hinges, the way the doors groan. I can hear their movement become laborious.

And yet the door is made to revolve. By nature, it awaits hands on a doorknob.

The house and I grew together in our watchfulness. When we’ve expected visitors, I too have waited anxiously at the kitchen table for hands on a doorknob, trying to at once tuck myself away and peer out the window, absentmindedly sweeping red counters and listening for the rumble of gravel. I wait for the intrusion of sound into this quiet. I hinge, for some reason, on someone’s entry.

When they arrive, I activate. They unlock the sweet, easy, gracious hostess, mimicking the comfort of this little country house: I slink out of my hiding place, my taut spine straightens, and with an elegant stride I meet the person standing on the doormat.

Hi! How are you? It’s good to see your face. Oh, do you really?

Ha, ha, ha. My voice emerges from me like hot tea, a stream from a searing glass kettle.

by mae mcdermott

The house also activates. Its linoleum, dulled by a thousand pet footsteps, glints with charm; the potted plants perk up and reach toward the bright lamplight. It opens its pantries, lends its couches, shunts its warmth onto someone new; it plays the role of the comfortable country haven. Yes, I say, we do have corn in the backyard. Why yes, we do have a few barns on the property.

I quite forget that some of them are there. They’re quite lovely, if you would like to take a look. The house shines in all its rustic glory, and we flaunt our quaintness in tandem.

We extend ourselves to visitors we think might return, or even stay. We arm ourselves with our Sunday best and course through the terror of letting others in.

I do not understand my own ceremony. For some reason I await people’s arrival, even though all arrivals, in some way, result in departure. Nor is the house immune to the leaving; there are many ways to vacate a space full of meaning. Every body that enters leaves fingerprints along the surfaces, and every absence darkens the walls of this home. We have lost loved ones inside the walls and felt the air change and the warm colors grow colder. We have seen new shadows bloom in the rooms’ corners. We have housed people who dim the colors more, people at once present and absent, their feet forever aimed toward the door and their minds always outside of what they feel these walls can provide. And then, sometimes, someone means to come back, but the house becomes a memory to them before they can return.

When I think of people, now gone, who leaned easily against our armrests and took liberally from our coolers; people who will never return to see the tanned living room walls with all their thin, white scratches or the colorful glass and wooden mantras my mom hangs carefully in the windows; people who will never have another chance to tear sheets or leave stains or slam dishes or dump garbage, I want to clear away their memory from the furniture.

This house is beautiful. And somehow these people never knew its beauty while they were here. Any place with doors can and will be left. We are gateways through which we can only hope the right people will enter. We opened a door and made ourselves more vulnerable than ever to the theft of our stores. And as much as we are defined by the few who remain, we are also defined, with our very long, wooden memories, by those who leave. When I extend my beautiful shoebox home, and it is rebuffed, I want to snatch it back from the memory of those who have seen and not appreciated it, who have taken stores from within our collective soul and left without care.

But something about the leaving roots me to the spot. I am an inscrutable witness of departure; I do not think to run after those who go. Running would be like my house: great, big, wooden, and stoic, tearing its upper floors from the earth to pursue a fleeing Toyota.

photo byjoy bertagna

a dream is a nightma

is a dream without end 07

art by lexy lemons

are

sam fuller

a photo pattern by

10

14

Someone 1: The Host

T

he room in the hostel was hot and the air was heavy and wet. Three of the four occupants, youngish men, lay sleeping more or less soundly with their shirts on the floor or crumpled on the one chair by the dusty radiator, all shed at various points in the night.

The middle-aged doctor, however, laid awake in his bed, his covers folded and tucked between the mattress and the wall. He was not as young as he had once been, and his sleep shirt still clung by sweaty puddles to his torso. He had neither the confidence of these young men in their bodies, nor the leave of their faculties which had certainly influenced their sense of freedom that night in the Greyfriars of Edinburgh. He hadn’t met any of the young men face-to-face before he’d come back and found them all in bed at 11:00 pm. After he’d heaved himself into his top bunk (as quietly as possible, he hoped), the doctor tried to lull himself to sleep by constructing their faces based on the backs and heels visible to him in the dim light.

By the doctor’s head, the top locker with tape that read “LEFT TOP” held a key in its lock with a rubber tag. Under a picture of a grinning, sunglass-sporting donkey, and written in smudged marker, was his name: “Bert Callum.”

Dr. Callum stared at the grinning donkey in the dark, just barely making out its protrudent teeth and the white background, against which his name looked like a small, furry caterpillar. The men on the bottom bunks rolled over. Every sound in the room seemed suddenly deafening. Dr. Callum felt the irrational urge to hold his breath as not to wake his roommates. One of the boys drew his shoulders up around his ears and clutched a corner of his sheets to his stomach.

Dr. Callum thought about his plan for tomorrow. He figured he would get up early. Yes, that always cheered him up. When one wakes up early, one can fool themselves into thinking the empty city streets are their own, and that the sun itself is a freshly-cut

complementary orange. He’d get up early and head toward the peaks several blocks away. His bus pass still worked, so he could probably take it two or three stops and be at the foot of Arthur’s Seat by 7:00 am. He could head down for breakfast at some cafe or another. Maybe catch a play. Sounded like fun.

Unseen by any of the men in the room, the canvased curtains (the only things keeping out the bugs) shivered slightly and a breeze slid down their length. At their hem, they fluttered from the ground as the slight wind slid across the floor and into the room.

Callum’s eyes were finally shut now, the lids having fluttered closed to the memory of the dissonant and tinny, yet strangely flirtatious, prerecorded voice which read out the names of stops on the bus. He slept, for a minute or for an hour, he could not recall. A feeling like being towed through deep water brought him back to his body.

He stared at the grey light as he tried to remember his name.

His stomach was clenched. Hence the pain, he concluded. His teeth were clenched as well. Somewhere in the dark of his mind, he cursed himself for the headache that would result later in the day. The grey light on the ceiling shifted as if sheets of fine glass.

The doctor felt out of place and conspicuous.

That noise is the sound of a man screaming.

This brought everything else back to him, and he shot up from the bunk, striking his head hard on the low ceiling.

As the stars faded he stared hard into the dark, teeth gritting and stomach clenching, his head swimming with anger at being awoken and anger at hitting his head— what a stupid fucking idiot on a pathetic fucking vacation, your daughters know, Susan fucking said so, she was right— The young man, screaming. Dr. Callum could see him in the lower bunk closest to the window, back against the lockers, arms gripping the metal behind him. The young man’s tendons shone with silver sweat, reflecting the faint light coming from the

etelThere? by liam mcdermott

empty corner of the room, empty except for the window. Callum stared at the window, but soon realized that it was not yet light outside. The light was coming from inside the room, beside the window. Callum thought of throwing up. “Oh God, no, please no,” he murmured under the screams of the young man. He was conscious now that there was movement in all four bunks, all seeming to recede from the room’s end. The space was a black hydrozoan, defined only by the tendrils which emanated from one empty corner.

Empty, yes, but Callum could see something taking shape in the emptiness, filling in the blank spaces from memory. The limbs convulsed in the dark as the thing just barely came into focus.

Her eyes were black rot, wet in the weird light, and definable only by the greyish cheekbones which held them in place. Two nostrils like nests for tiny creatures. Her mouth was what made Callum sure that it was no trick of the light. It was frozen, midword, half-pursed with one cheek peeling the lips back and revealing the woman’s teeth. What one could see of the skin always seemed paper-thin. As Callum focused on the mouth, he could see the movement of muscle and tendon. She was trying to speak, just like last time. Where her eyes should have been, he now registered a feral fear, or maybe it was anger. The scream coming from the young man seemed to come from her thin lips and imbued the face with a tragic pain.

The hairs on her head emanated from the massive, skewed skull all around the room, like little glass shards edging closer to the bunks in which the four men had once been asleep. Callum drew to the wall, feeling like he was swimming somewhere very deep—deep enough to crush his skull. The glints of light were bioluminescent glow—the only evidence of a massive, incomprehensible horror just out of the diver’s range of sight.

It was so cold.

The door opened and light from the hallway obliterated the

thing on the walls, although it was surely still there. The young man on the bunk below Bert pushed the attendant aside and ran from the room, wearing only his boxer shorts. The screaming stopped, and there was silence.

The faces of the two young men by the window, one on the top bunk and the other on the bunk below, were now smaller versions of the thing that had frightened them in the opposite corner moments ago. Their lips were pulled back in fear, their noses pulled up by the shallow skin besides the bridge of the nose, unshaven cheeks and chins making them appear gaunt and starved. The one on the top threw his legs over the side and just before he jumped to the floor and ran out, Bert could see that there were little cuts all along his calves and ankles. The young man in the bottom bunk had spun his head back to the nowilluminated corner, where nothing but blank wall could be seen.

He was clearly too frightened to move.

Bert grabbed all his bags and got out before the police came.

As he hurried out the door, a hostel attendant called, “Wait, what happened? You alright?” With Bert’s knapsack on his back and duffel bag by his side, and his flimsy green faux fur-lined raincoat over his shoulders, he had completely removed all traces of his ever having been there before leaving, all traces including the little lanyard with his name, which he had wiped off before tossing onto the empty desk on his way out the door. He was on West Bow, nearly at Victoria Street, when he heard the sound of a siren in the direction of the hostel.

He turned left onto the George IV Bridge and hoped he could find his way to the Mound Place bus stop before the fear of an unknown city after dark paralyzed him. Once he was moving he would be alright. He just had to get out of here. He had been pushing it with three days. He just had to get more distance between him and her, whatever she was. He remembered her lips, his mind matching sounds with their shape.

collage by rachael powles

18

The world came to be.

It was unbeknownst to me that we got here last.

He then spoke and said, “Before you are blown apart, tinker with your art.”

untitled by anonymous

I was so confused.

A child sees the box booms.

I can feel sons’ moons.

I traveled to lands— lands I knew, more I didn’t.

I only found land.

I then felt alone on my journey through myself.

Still only questions.

Why must you probe us?

The secrets of my species are not kept up there.

I can’t be his god— my mind’s been there and back, Easel been through hell.

I traveled to trees— nothing is forbidden there.

Here...you can’t be black.

I mixed hate and love; each place, I explored my heart.

I crafted my soul.

He then heard my soul, he frowned and said he was hurt “What you’ve done missed it.”

I gathered the force, we confronted the creature.

We asked, “What’s our doom?”

19

With my soul in hand, the creature laughed and pointed.

He looked toward our hearts.

photo by sam fuller

a photo series with orange + green by

alyvia covert

21

world so smal you’re s a corne no one

feels ll when stuck in er with around

Default Choice by alex durham

At fourteen, in the car with mom, a radio voice says this: Today, a woman visits the man who murdered her son in prison; she goes to forgive him.

I wonder how that conversation went. I forgive you.

Mom says she couldn’t have done it.

At fifteen, I learn about the call of the void, the strongest choice you can make in a moment: Bat in hand, swing; at the edge of a cliff, jump.

This action feels like a default at the time, and later, like insanity.

At twenty-two, mom reluctantly gives me the car to drive into the city.

When I do, I escape my body and float to the birds. I see beneath me the masses of outstretched human limbs rooted to animated machines, zooming and breaking and colliding and avoiding one another like tunneling ants.

Then I float back down and, from behind my eyes, watch my own fingers wield death.

At twenty-two, I drive and think about the problems we imagine solving if only we hurried up. I think about the last century speeding by: an AK-47, a Tesla, a Googleable internet. I drive, and the default choice is moving faster than humans ever have or veering off the road.

At twenty-three, I’m going too fast. At twenty-three, I need a limit. I’m zooming and breaking and colliding and avoiding with outstretched limbs, listening to the radio, asking the woman how she forgave the man, asking the man for the price of a default choice.

27

photo by elias rivera

photos

of

our

PERCEPTIONS

whitney s m i t h

by

29

These photos represent the disillusionment that we are led to believe as truth. We trust our senses to a point of hinderance and fault. We take everything we see as truth. As we perceive the human experience throughout our lives, we begin to understand them through our past—we begin to attach labels to what we think we already know, adding bias and preconception to ideas we may not yet fully understand. The theme of these photos is to stay open and present to our changing environment, to experience everything for the first time with new eyes. We grow and we evolve with change. Change is the only constant, change is the rhythm of the universe.

do you wa stay here please wil me goodn you driftin the other couch

ant to with me ll you kiss night i feel ng off on r side of the 38

art by jordan kressley

39

stop me photo by elias rivera

41

e if you’ve heard this one (a collection of quarantine dreams)

by anna michnowicz

01. If you had told me three months ago that I would dream of Grand Central Station, I would have laughed in your face. Rush hour has cemented itself as pale granite with aquamarine, a ceiling of constellations behind my eyelids. The train takes us out of the city and into the desert, my clammy hand in the too-certain hand of my best friend. I would not be making this journey without her. Mistake number one: do not drag your friends into heinous dream adventures. They are there to make you afraid for them. Mistake number two: do not cling to the tracks, no matter how fast the train is moving.

We see a mirage of a seaside attraction, Coney Island deposited into the Sahara. The peeling pale blue of the walls reminds me of home. Mistake number three: finding aquariums in the desert is not magical. Do not seek water if you cannot see its source.

02. There is a man I am going to marry, and he is perfect.

My friends and family wrap me in lace until I can no longer breathe. They tell me how kind he is, how excited they are for me, here, have a cookie, it’s your wedding day. They tell me how happy they are that this man has purchased a million-dollar home in my name. I run into the endless night until I find an outdoor movie. Lay my head in the lap of a woman who is not my mother but covers me in a blanket and tells me it’s okay. She lets me cry through the last twenty minutes of Casablanca. I whisper that I cannot marry a man I don’t know. Not-Mother leans over and says that’s alright too.

03. There is a demon grinning at me from just beyond the window, and the demon looks like George Clooney.

Maybe I have learned to expect terror disguised as beauty. I have to escape this classroom, which becomes a grocery store, my every move emphasized by the crackling of a plastic bag on my arm. The outside smells of sulfur. My getaway car is a mintgreen Cadillac 1970 DeVille Convertible, a vehicle I have never seen in reality. Someone is shouting for me to go, go, go, and I floor the gas. I blaze through a town of vague familiarity, and George laughs. He runs through my subconscious like he belongs, chasing me, and the green hillsides erupt with fire. Flames lick the pavement, and I wake up with smoke in my lungs.

photo by brianna pulver

45

I’m Wide Awake it’s Morning…

Oh Shit That’s a Bright Eyes Album… Uhhh

Sleepless in Seattle!

Oof, Really? Wow Creativity Isn’t Flowing by elbridge luther

I

f these walls could bleed they would feel like my eyes. That makes little to no sense. I’m not proud that my brain put that chain of words together, sent it in a neat little package to my mouth, and then watched my lips form nonsense.

Here I am. 3:00 am on a Tuesday night. I have work in a few hours, my eyes won’t stay shut, and I have that damned Matchbox Twenty song stuck in my head. “It’s 3 AM, I must be lonely.” GET THE FUCK OUT ROB THOMAS, NO ONE INVITED YOU. I have always described it like brain ping pong. Every thought chains into another thought, picking up in speed until I can’t remember what started the chain in the first place. Occasionally it is punctuated by the constant refrain: “Stop thinking about____, you need to go to sleep.” Great strategy (cue eye roll and “I’m Just a Kid.”) Tonight’s special is an old classic with a new twist: Does Everyone Hate Me? (Workplace Edition) Why wasn’t I cc’d into that email chain? I was in the meeting discussing all the deliverables, and was the only one left off. Well, let’s not jump to conclusions; maybe they just forgot. Did I forget to lock the door before bed? Should I check? Wait a minute, I was on the email chain before the meeting, so she would have had to manually remove me from the chain. What did I say during the meeting, did I do something? Maybe I shouldn’t have played Pokémon GO during it. Granted, I was only a few candies away from evolving my Feebas, which is a pretty big step in my quest to be a Pokémon Master. Stop thinking about Pokémon, you need to go to sleep.

On and on. Over and over.

It used to be a lot worse. In high school, I would go two nights a week without sleeping, and the chain of thoughts would be a whole hell of a lot darker, with more shades of self-loathing and hues of teen angst. This was brought down to one night a week during my first year of college (the snoring Jamesy era), and then one night every two to three weeks, and so on and so forth. Stop thinking about your history with insomnia, you need to go to sleep.

Lotta good that does me now. I punch my pillow. Roll around hoping I’ll hit that perfect position. Am I sleepier? My eyes are still open and I just narrated that question in a Prince-style singing squeak, and now cant stop hearing that pint-size genius seductively sing “Am I sleepier?” over and over. What is that melody? OH! It’s from Backstreet Boys “Everybody (Backstreets Back)” and is just the melody of “Everybody (Am I Sexual?)” Glad we clarified that one. Real close call. Stop thinking about Prince singing modified Backstreet Boys lyrics, you need to go to sleep.

Some asshole just squealed around the corner with their music so loud my booty is jiggling from here. It makes me so angry, but what could I even yell at this guy? “Stop keeping me awake... even though I would have been awake anyway.” I apologize if my assumption that this was a guy rubbed you wrong. It’s an assumption, and I am making an ass out of you and me, but I’m also 99.99999% positive these noises came from a penis. Like, the person the penis is attached to. Although it would be very onbrand for penises to make a lot of noise. Stop thinking about this dude’s penis making loud car noises, you need to go to sleep.

Where am I going with this? I don’t know.

Insomnia sucks. I really don’t want to go to work.

media + collage by elias rivera

47

1 there is something potent and strong and smelly coming through the window. i can’t touch it and i can not see it yet, but it lets me know i am not as strong as xe is. xe conjures strength from evil. i close my eyes and try try try to crane my neck but xe won’t release me. i am stuck in the grip of a monster who i love. xe presses harder into my chest, my neck, my airway constricts and i feel i am losing. i can not breathe.

2 i was 12 standing alone in a long and winding line waiting to enter a haunted house. i wanted to see the monsters. they wound the kids up in a small room, and i began to breathe in flutters faster and faster. i don’t remember falling over and hyperventilating near the base of a trash can. i do remember the feeling of breath without air. the cliffhangar between life and death, and how sudden it all was. strict and focused on opening up the lungs but all they do is tense up tighter. open close open close open but they just stay closed. i am told later that it was a panick attack i tell them you know nothing about the dark.

3 can’t you close the door? if you are going to be in here snarling and standing on my ceiling you can at least be polite enough to not wake up the rest of the house. you whisper in my ear but it only gets louder. i hear children laughing and one very far from me calls out my name. i want to help xer but i can not gather enough strength to get out of bed.

4 rolling shoulders breaking bones nose bleeds on the sixth floor waking up at 3:33 am every night for months my mom says she feels her dead father around my friend tells me the attack is haunted playing bloody mary after ballet class i looked in the mirror in the middle of the night and saw a man in the window pools at night look and act too much like portals lost time lost keys lost cups are you playing games with me?

5 it is the final day of summer i am probably 15 or 16 but i dont feel i am any age at all. i wake up and i do not brush my teeth or hair i bake in the sunlight through my window like a burning leaf waiting to hear my skin crunch. i don’t know what day it is but i’m not looking forward to the next one. the man stands behind me watching me cry.