Toothsome

Marie Skinner, First Place

Iris/Apologue

The first time Iris’s own words sung by Jack’s voice ambushed her from her earbuds, her world reeled. It was like falling in love. Or maybe just falling. It took a few months to recover, but now she was ready to meet him again. She filled three notebooks with her writing, sprinkling the pages liberally with unattributed quotes and poems—things that were beautiful and metrical and mysterious. Mostly, she copied out the words of Christina Rossetti in between her own poems. She gave up beauty in her tender youth, gave all her hope and joy; she covered up her eyes, and chose the bitter truth, was right next to a free verse poem about buttons and keys and technology— and she planned to give them all to Jack this afternoon. At this point, she anticipated that he was desperate for new poems.

Once, when Jack was still just doing gigs at local bars and coffee shops—back when that was still possible and not a violation of health codes and common sense—Iris had given him a notebook full of drawings instead of poems. Jack almost panicked, and she felt bad for upsetting him, so she shared her inprogress writings. But after she realized why he wanted her poems, she had to think about it. More recently, she gave him her to-do lists and writing ideas with extensive comments and corrections in the margins. That reduced Jack to hilarious panic, which Iris was, of course, ready to alleviate with a few poems because she still hadn’t been ready to confront the situation. She didn’t know what to think of him.

It wouldn’t have hurt him to admit that he didn’t write his own lyrics the first time an adoring interviewer asked him. He could have given credit where it was due. The doodles and list and marginalia were gentle prods—teasing requests that he at least tell her what he was doing with the poems he pretended to like so much for personal reasons. He pretended to love her work, to be a devotee who hung on every beat and rhyme just like his own budding crop of fans did with his music. She didn’t believe him. He wouldn’t change anything she wrote, he wouldn’t lie about where it came from, and he wouldn’t keep her name hidden in the notebooks if it was true. So this time wasn’t just teasing.

She looked forward to discovering if he could figure out what she wrote for him and what had been written in another century by a woman who denied herself chess because winning felt like sinning. Iris loved Christina Rossetti’s style and the bittersweet inscrutability of so many of her poems, and, if Jack couldn’t tell the difference between the rigid, Victorian structure of Rossetti and the dancing wordplay

and unconventional structure of Iris’s own work, he deserved to be called a thief. She was sure someone would figure it out if he started making songs of Rossetti. It wasn’t nice, but getting famous and successful and not even mentioning her and her words wasn’t nice, either. Besides, it wasn’t so much a trap for him to fall into as it was a riddle for him to solve. If Jack couldn’t do it, Jack didn’t deserve to make her feel like falling. She found the argument convincing, so she had invited him to meet her.

Toothsome

“Iris,” Jack’s voice beckoned, but he didn’t say anything else, and he wasn’t singing, so her heart didn’t flutter, and her head didn’t spin. She turned to see him, and they both crinkled their eyes, showing teeth in fake smiles behind masks, half-veiled in frosty breath escaping the sides. The mask made Jack look mysterious and a lot older than he was. So did the dark, business-like coat and fashionably arranged scarf, just like the shadowy drape of tiredness under his eyes. He held his shoulders close to his ears, and he moved like his muscles had forgotten grace. She felt tense, too.

“I thought you’d be late,” she said, scuffing the toe of her boot against the sidewalk in front of the diner and peering through her frozen breath at the rips in her jeans. Real tears she got from doing things, not built-in rips for vanity. She was proud of them.

“You thought I’d be late. That’s kind of funny, Iris. I almost didn’t recognize you; it’s been so long.”

“I don’t look different,” she said, tucking a strand of violet-dyed hair behind her ear. A thin braid of her natural almost-black slipped forward to take its place. “One purple streak isn’t that different. Maybe it’s the masks.” A tiny blast of cold air stirred up by passing traffic caught the end of her scarf and made it flutter like a butterfly wing. The flimsy silk wasn’t there to stop the frosty gust—it wasn’t winter-warm; it was summer-warm because it reminded her that it wasn’t always cold out.

“Maybe. It’s still been a long time. Did you want to get something to eat?” he asked.

“Sure, Jack.” She didn’t let him see her roll her eyes. Why else would she have asked him to come to a diner? She thought Jack eyed her bag, but she ignored the hint of hollow desperation. How did someone like him make her feel like falling? He could wait. She let him hold the blue and brass door of the diner for her. Curling fliers about long-past charity drives, performances, and motorcycle rallies plastered the glass, half covered by the requisite notices about masks and a select few of the ubiquitous, nebulous risks they all faced by choosing to interact with other living, breathing people. The hinges creaked in counterpoint to the clanking, dented bell that announced their presence. It was somewhere she’d never been, somewhere he’d probably never go without a good reason. She liked being a good reason every once in a while. Iris ducked under the strap of her patched bag, shed her coat, then sat down at a booth.

Even after a long, silent look at the menu, she couldn’t decide what she wanted, so Jack

ordered for them both. Then he complained about the cracked vinyl seats, the waitress’s squeaky shoes and her face-shield and mask combo, and even the cheap light fixtures until the waitress delivered the food. When Jack took off his mask, the reality of his familiar face shocked Iris, and she froze halfway through removing her own. He looked exactly like she remembered—only the blond stubble that was the beginning of a beard softened his features a little—but the mask had forced her to imagine half his face while allowing her to believe she was actually seeing him. It was a raw moment of reckoning, but, in a heartbeat, her imagined version of his face evaporated and became the same as the face before her eyes. She felt disappointed, and that embarrassed her a little.

“You okay, Iris? Can’t eat through a mask, right?”

“This is the first time I’ve eaten out, I think. I just realized.”

“It’s good to get back to normal a little bit. It’s got to end sometime.”

Iris picked sesame seeds off her bun while he ate a burger. She didn’t feel like eating, though it seemed like a transgressive pleasure to sit indoors in public without a mask. She enjoyed it more than she expected. She felt like an exhibitionist for flaunting the lower half of her face like this. Over fries, Jack fidgeted and avoided asking if she had brought him any poems. Instead, he filled their meal with trivialities. Not the actions of someone who was genuinely excited about sharing poetry, she thought.

Bored, she tuned him out and held up an unused spoon—no grease. What kind of diner was this supposed to be, anyway? She set aside her disappointment but held on to the spoon, trying to find something about it that would let her forgive it for falling short of the trope. A fun-house reflection of her face would have been nice, but scratches crisscrossed the stainless steel—brushed steel, but what had brushed it? Even this flyspeck hole-in-the-wall wouldn’t hand-wash customers’ flatware. Was the surface etched by teeth? She imagined hundreds, thousands of bites—bites of cake, ice cream, instant pudding masquerading as ‘homemade.’ Bites so good, the teeth didn’t know when to stop. Toothsome bites. But they didn’t serve anything that good here, so maybe it was the waitress’s job, when she wasn’t busy, to Brill-o the dishes. The waitress made Iris think of her mother because she was nothing like the woman—and a cliché right down to the name badge: Doris. Iris imagined the piles of dishes waiting in the kitchen for a dose of yellow gloves and green scrubbers wielded by Doris. But even though Iris’s mother never washed a dish in her life, that probably wasn’t Doris’s job. The exception that proves the rule— otherwise, she imagined that they were mirror opposites of one another.

Iris liked the symmetry.

“—do you think?” Jack forcefully intruded on her thoughts.

“Hmm?” she hummed, hoping it would annoy him—it was a rude question. Of course she thought. Did he?

“How often?” he slowly asked with false, forced patience.

“What kind of question is that?” she asked, her words so lazy they almost slumped against each other. She might have apologized for being too busy thinking to listen to him, but if he was going to treat her like a child, well, now she wanted a fight, and his frustration was better than anything on the menu.

“Just forget it, you weren’t even listening to me. Is that buzzing coming from the dessert case? I can’t think straight. Meeting someplace like this was a stupid idea. Probably both going to get sick, too.”

She shrugged and glanced at the offending piece of equipment—flickering fluorescent lights and humming fans kept the most toothsome things in the diner cool and fresh. She didn’t hear a buzz. It wasn’t a proper greasyspoon, but she liked the place, and besides, if he thought it was stupid to be here, maybe he should learn to write his own lyrics.

“Do you think they have pecan pie?” she asked. She wanted the most sickly-sweet thing in the dessert case. She wanted to feel her teeth dissolve in the sugar, just a little bit, as she left her own marks on the spoon.

“You didn’t even touch your burger,” he said, exasperated. “Anyway, neither of us came here to eat—you said you were ready with more material.”

“After pie,” she said. “You should have some too; I bet it’s toothsome.”

“Toothsome,” he echoed. “What does that even mean?”

“Temptingly delectable. Worth a bite. Sometimes just toothy, like Little Red Riding Hood’s wolf-granny. But I hope the pie isn’t full of teeth. I didn’t mean that.”

“That’s a cursed mental image. Who the hell says ‘toothsome,’ anyway?” he muttered. She didn’t point out the obvious answer: both of them because of her. And he claimed he was here for words. Toothsome was a great word.

They ordered pie and ate it in gooey bites that dripped vanilla ice cream. Iris scraped each glop off the spoon, the gritty filling like sandpaper on her enamel, the pecans popping softly between her molars. She could almost feel the sugar eating away at her teeth. The thought tickled her.

“This pie is eating me,” she said, smiling and waiting for him to get the joke and laugh with her.

“You’ve got that backward, as usual,” he corrected in a longsuffering sigh, not getting the joke at all.

“It’s eating you, too,” she prompted, hoping it was enough hint for him to finally get it so they could laugh together. They had to be able to laugh together, didn’t they? How could his music make her feel like falling if they didn’t even laugh at the same things? The moment stretched, and he remained blank. “You’re just too boring to notice,” she snapped when she realized that in one silent moment, he had returned all the frustration she gave him.

“When you say boring, do you mean sane? Because if so, yes, I am too boring to notice my pie eating me. It’s definitely not “toothsome” enough to bite me back, thanks. And thank you for saying so—I pay my therapist a lot to undo the damage you cause.”

“What damage?”

“You’re completely unpredictable, Iris! You promised to meet up with me every two weeks, and it’s been six months since you even spoke to me! Everything is word games and puns and weird metaphors that don’t make any sense with you—of course a promise or an obligation isn’t worth shit to you.” He stopped and took a deep breath.

Iris decided it would be best to focus on something that hadn’t made him angry. “I still don’t understand; there are so many good reasons to see a therapist, but why would you pay someone to make you not like word games—to make you more boring?” she asked.

“Sane,” he corrected. “You should try it. It might help you live up to your obligations,” he said, scooping up the last bite of his pie and chewing before continuing.

He seemed to enjoy the pie a lot more than Iris thought he should. The joke he didn’t get was the reason she found it so toothsome, after all—it certainly wasn’t the taste. She scowled at the empty plate. It was evidence that Jack liked the pie better than he liked her. If she’d been pie, he’d have left all but the tiniest bite. No, all but a sniff.

“I thought maybe that’s why we’re finally meeting,” Jack continued.

“We didn’t come here for the pie—no one does,” she said, shaking her head. “You can tell because the pecans are stale and soft,” she added. Sometimes Jack needed help figuring things out, but he would get it. Eventually.

“It isn’t stale,” he argued, but it seemed his heart wasn’t in it. “Pecans just soften when they cook, and they probably used shortening instead of—” he snapped his mouth shut when he noticed her smiling. “I wasn’t even talking about—”

“You think it’s stale, too,” she interrupted, still smiling at him. Making excuses for the pie proved that he was trying to be nice. It didn’t have to be perfect to be good.

“Forget the pie, dammit,” Jack swore, startling her. “I meant I thought you were going to start being more responsible. You know what I think, Iris?” he growled before biting off the rest of what he had to say to her. He took a deep breath.

She pretended she was a still pond so she wouldn’t have to shrink away from him and apologize. It worked. She waited, and she didn’t even look away while he collected the broken pieces of his composure. She shook her head and imagined ripples across the surface of her pond-self.

“I think you’re teaching me patience. Thank you,” he intoned, bringing to mind the quintessence of patience and gratitude in the same way Doris the waitress brought to mind Iris’s mother.

Iris scraped a tooth along her lip and chewed a sliver of skin—too late realizing that she wasn’t obscured behind a mask and Jack could see. But he wasn’t watching her. He only shifted and fumed in the silence his anger had bought him. Her calm pond-self began to evaporate in the heat of that anger. She didn’t have all night, and she still hadn’t given him the notebooks. Now that she thought of it, he didn’t seem very interested in them.

She put her mask back on, carefully looping the bands around her ears so they didn’t trap strands of hair or tangle on her earrings. “I thought you were here for more words,” she said as she molded the wire to the bridge of her nose. “But I wonder if you’re here because your therapist thinks you’re boring enough, and you remember what it used to be like before all that. You used to do things with me. We had fun.”

He shook his head. “My music’s getting more listeners by the minute. I can’t be that boring.”

“And yet,” she snapped. Pond-self wasn’t very deep, and by now, she was mud and flopping fish. Grimy, desperate, something you look away from as you hurry past.

“And yet?”

“Figure it out. Maybe if you write down how you feel, it’ll be easier to see where you went wrong. I can help,” Iris offered. She pushed his plate out of the way and replaced it with a napkin that only had one sticky corner; then, she dug a felt-tipped pen out of her patchcovered bag. Jack stared at the bag sitting next to her on the bench, probably catching a glimpse of the notebooks. His fingers closed around the pen while he was distracted.

“Iris, the thing you can give me to help me is poems. I already know how I feel,” he argued, trying to push the napkin away. She didn’t let him.

“So do I—stale and soft,” she said, tapping the napkin and making urgent eye contact with him. “You should write that down— ‘To others, I feel stale and soft’—like the pie that’s dissolving your teeth.” She waited for a heartbeat while he held the pen and glared. She snatched the pen from him and wrote two words in smudgy slashes on the napkin. The ink bled, and the nib dragged and tore the flimsy tissue, but she was satisfied as she snapped the cap back into place and tucked it between his slack fingers. Soft. Stale. She could have been cruel because there were a lot of other words that came to mind, but she restrained herself from pinning those words on him. And he didn’t argue; he had no words of his own. He pinched the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes. The bitter truth was sinking in.

She hoped he’d demonstrate his new understanding by laughing at the joke about the pie. It was so simple, and it was funny— almost the definition of funny. Swapped expectations. Hysteron proteron, the pie eats the boring man. She imagined his teeth dissolving in his mouth and going down with the pie. All that calcium must be good for bones. “Wait, do you think that means your teeth are turning into your bones?” she asked aloud, distracted and delighted by the new twist.

“Why did I ever think this was cute?” Jack

wondered, replacing his mask. His hair was in no danger of getting trapped in the earloops. “People really don’t get the reality of the manicpixie-dream- girl trope. Someone must have drugged me to make me think that some loony poet chick—”

“You drugged you,” she interrupted. “Endorphins, oxytocin, serotonin… ethanol. You’ve still got it all in your system; you’re just mixing it different. You’re boring instead of bored,” she viciously accused, immediately wishing she’d held back a little. Why was pondself so unreliable?

“Ethanol? Like alcohol? They don’t even serve beer here, and I’m not—”

“They did where we met.”

“Years ago. Right. Pretty sure that’s out of my system, Iris.”

“Alcohol is made of sugar, and you’ve had a lot of that. Some of it’s bound to break down before you digest that huge burger. I bet it’s starting already. Ethanol. You’re just mixing it differently.”

“Not convinced. Obviously, burgers and pie aren’t making alcohol. I can tell for sure because you aren’t getting any more fun.”

“True of anyone,” she protested. “You don’t have to be mean about it. Write down that you’re mean—tell the therapist so you get your money’s worth,” she said, tapping the napkin that incriminated his character in bleeding ink from her favorite pen. He didn’t pick up the pen to add anything.

“I really just need those lyrics,” he said, gritting his teeth.

“Poems,” she corrected. “We used to have fun. When you were bored, you were loony, too. And you liked the poems; you didn’t need them. But then, maybe there was too much oxytocin or something, and when you changed the recipe, no one liked the pie, and it went stale on display in the dessert case.” She took a deep breath, then she leaned forward and hushed her voice, “I won’t tell Doris.”

“Who the hell is Doris?” he said, looking genuinely worried.

Iris shook her head. He was so excitable; how could anyone named ‘Doris’ be dangerous? She pointed with her licked-clean spoon and an intent stare over his shoulder. “It’s possible that she has to wash the spoons, so she forgot to bring more coffee. I bet she wouldn’t like to hear that the pie is stale. She believes in pie, true love, and making the right mistakes.” Iris knew because Doris was the opposite of her mother.

“The waitress,” he sighed, clearly relieved about something. “I doubt spoons are her job. But good point about the coffee,” he said, draining the coffee-colored, sandy syrup at the bottom of his cup. “Iris? Poems?”

Iris ignored him. “Good luck with therapy. Tell her you were mean to me—you didn’t write that down.”

“I’m not mean; you’re just so frustrating, and you never listen when—”

“Okay,” she interrupted, “tell her you’re

sweet as pie. You’re toothsome. You turn smiles into bones.” Jack’s eyes widened. She felt like a soothsayer. A witch, proclaiming a fate read from the language of scattered knucklebones and carved teeth. “And, Jack,” she said, pausing for his complete attention.

“Yeah?” he replied, a strange, eager glint in his eyes. Iris thought he was probably worried she’d leave without giving him the notebooks.

“I thought you’d make me want to bite the spoon, but I don’t like the new recipe,” she said with finality. She stood and gathered her things.

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” he snapped after several heartbeats of stunned silence. He stood up when she did. “I’m not a damn piece of pie, Iris!”

“Okay,” she said, not like a witch. She flipped her hair over her shoulder. He would listen to ‘pixie dream girl.’ “I don’t think we should do this again. I think it’ll set back your therapy and…” she said, trailing off as she placed a stack of three notebooks on the table in front of him.

“When you fall, try to do it the right way,” she said, her gaze skittering around his face, but she failed to meet his eyes. It wasn’t ever him, she finally realized. It was her. Her words spoke to her; they just happened to use his voice. Maybe they would again, but she wouldn’t make the same mistake twice. She shifted the bag on her shoulder and walked away. She felt too light without her notebooks, and she thought maybe she was wrong—it was a trap after all. Jack/Epilogue

Dumbstruck, Jack watched Iris leave. The dejection in her posture made him feel like a bully. For a moment longer, he doubted himself, but the notebooks demanded his attention. He licked his lips and tasted sugar, quickly overwhelmed by the stale aftertaste of coffee. He flicked the cover open to read a line—she covered up her eyes, and chose the bitter truth—and a grin broke across his face. For the first time in weeks, he felt like he could take a full breath. He tucked the books carefully into his laptop bag. Iris hadn’t even pretended to pay, so he tossed a few crumpled twenties on the table for Doris—he made sure to overtip even for crappy service, now that he could afford to. He thought of it as funding a little sliver of normalcy, just like using cash instead of some touchless payment option. Then he left the crummy diner with a spring in his step.

He didn’t look around, and he pretended he didn’t see Iris waiting for a bus. Or maybe she was holding court with the little brown birds that eked a winter living out of dropped sandwich crusts and diner garbage. He knew she would be feeding them if she had anything. Even out of the corner of his eye, she was eyecatching. No matter where she went, Iris stood out—she had a style all her own, which he now recognized as a mark of her eccentricity and not, as he initially thought, of trend-setting fashion sense and confidence. It was easy to see what he wanted to see in her, but only when she wasn’t around. Only when he wasn’t relying on her.

A few years ago, he’d have had his eyes glued

to her. In fact, he did, and it made him screw up on stage. After the third wrong chord in a single song, he took an unscheduled break to hop down from the short platform in the back of the bar and run after her when she left. He never played in that bar again, but he got her number, and it turned out to be a real one. Would a boring person do something like that? He wasn’t boring. Iris’s accusation bothered him. The whole world had gotten a lot more boring, and that wasn’t his fault. It wasn’t fair to judge someone by how they were now with everything locked down and limping along. As he walked, he made lists of all his non-boring qualities and deeds—especially from before, to be fair to himself. First, he was a semisuccessful musician, to start with, and that was before everything went digital and everyone was desperate for new entertainment. Once, he’d jumped off a cliff into a spring-swollen river (after Iris jumped first). Once, he’d climbed a crumbling brownstone in Old Town (Iris showed him the handholds). Once, he’d taken Iris on a midnight picnic in an empty railcar. For dessert, they tagged made-up names on the side in weeping spray paint. The paint was hers, and she was a suspiciously good graffiti artist. Maybe the picnic had been her idea, now that he thought of it.

He ripped the mask off his face. No need for it with the meeting done. “Shit,” he muttered, a flag of frosty breath clinging to his quiet curse. All he had was music.

Jack stopped and pulled one of the notebooks out of his bag. He kept the cover closed like the door of a cage, keeping the beautiful words locked up tight. Hiring a writer was nothing to be ashamed of, and Iris didn’t even want money for her poems. He could write for himself if he had the time, but he had to write the music, perfect the performance, spend time in his home studio recording, and deal with the streaming platform. Everything. He did it all himself, except this one thing, and it’s not like Iris would want publicity for her contribution, anyway. There was no reason to tell anyone where his lyrics came from. The binding cracked as he opened the notebook.

Come to me in the silence of the night;

Come in the speaking silence of a dream;

Come with soft rounded cheeks and eyes as bright

As sunlight on a stream;

Come back in tears,

O memory, hope, love of finished years.

Jack smiled again and he traced his fingers over the doodles on the page—a border of moons, stars, flowers, and vines, a weird, crescent squiggle where most people would sign their name after the poem. This was so much better than her usual; it made sense, it rhymed, and the meter was going to be easy to set to music. He’d need to change some of the wording, but that was why it was okay for him to use a lyricist—he had to make it his own, even when it was this good. The words in the notebook didn’t feel anything like falling to him.