This piece was nominated for The Best of the Net.
The following story is part of Abjectification (Apprentice House, 2020), a short story collection that explores the complex layers of relationships and half-told or half-understood stories revealed throughout our intimate interactions.
Shedding
The glue traps were a bad idea. They had been hearing scratching in the walls, and thought it was probably mice. They hoped it was just mice. The roof was original, tile, with some damage and likely the entire underlayment needed to be replaced, as well as a significant number of tiles. Plenty of gaps for things to make their way in. They’d wake in the middle of the night and hear the scritch of things behind the mostly-plaster wall, just above the headboard. He could feel his wife awake in the dark next to him, imagine the way she must be looking at him. He promised her he’d take care of it, like he promised her he’d take care of everything when she’d agreed to the house.
It was originally built in the 1930s and was rumored to be a speakeasy. They’d found some interesting things in the attic – things they thought could have been left over from Prohibition. There was a space in the basement that was rumored to have been a tunnel from their house, sitting high on the hill at the top of their neighborhood, to the house across the street. The neighbors in that house had told them about it shortly after they moved in, taken them down into their basement and showed them the door, opened it and pointed to the depression in the earth – told them to look in their own basement for the other end of the tunnel that had been filled in long ago. They’d fallen in love with that story, and the strange copper radiators behind ornate grates in the corner of every room, the arches and coves that distinguished their rooms from every other house they looked at. His wife had agreed to the house because of its charm, and because he promised he could do the updating to the kitchen and bathrooms himself, on weekends, giving her the high-end appliances she wanted, the black and white tiling with glass accents, the rain shower heads and tempered glass sliding doors. She was still waiting.
He hadn’t been able to start on any of that yet with all the nuisances that crept up in the first year: the small leaks in the roof; the radiators that burst their seams. Now this infestation in the walls. He chose the glue traps because when he went to select the old-fashioned wood and metal mousetraps – the kind that easily break a mouse’s neck when it snaps shut – he heard Melinda suck her breath in, sharply. He could imagine the way the metal-hitting-wood would echo through the darkened rooms in the middle of the night, bouncing off the worn wooden floors from downstairs to upstairs, her body tensing in the bed beside him. He figured with a glue trap nestled inside the bottom cabinets, or better yet, in the basement right outside the door to the defunct tunnel, there would be no noise. He would get up first, and if there was a mouse, and it was still alive, he’d take care of that before she even got up. By the time his wife came downstairs for her coffee, her robe belted around her, their youngest on her hip, the other trailing, all the evidence would be gone. He’d hand her a steaming mug with cream just the way she liked it, and there would be one thing he’d done right.
They both woke up to a noise in the kitchen: scraping, and knocking, and clucking, and things moving around. Mel sat straight up. He did too, and she shushed him. He headed down the stairs first, but she was right behind him. The cupboard door was open and a small animal, half bat-half rat was skittering around the kitchen floor. Mel screamed. From above, the girls’ feet hit the floor and began running from their bedroom. His wife turned toward the stairs, trying to meet the girls before they reached the bottom. Hurried whispering ensued, but he couldn’t understand why they were whispering – everyone was up already. Meanwhile, the creature continued its strange hopping, half-attached to the glue trap. Their oldest, Emmy, must have evaded her mother’s grasp because she was standing next to him, mesmerized. “It’s a squirrel,” she said. He looked down at his daughter, calm next to him, watching the frantic creature. She was six.
“It is?” He was still paralyzed, but realized he was holding a wooden spoon as if it was a weapon.
“A flying squirrel.” He could see the skin between its foreleg and hind leg, stretched because of how it was stuck to the glue trap. Its small erect ears. Its huge dark eyes. He didn’t know how his daughter knew what this thing was – but he knew she was right. Lately, she’d started insisting she was “six and three-quarters” whenever anyone asked.
Melinda had returned to them, holding their younger daughter by the hand. In her baby voice she seemed to be asking about the squirrel, pointing a pudgy finger in its direction. “It’s a baby flying squirrel, Lila” Emmy told her, taking her sister’s other hand. Melinda looked back and forth between the thing and her daughter. She smiled at Emmy, their smart girl.
“Daddy’s going to go set it free,” their older daughter started walking her baby sister carefully up the stairs. Melinda looked at him once more, then turned to follow the girls. He heard Lila’s slurred baby voice mimic her big sister’s, “baba fwyin swirl.” He put on his grilling gloves and took the glue-trap-squirrel-package out to the back yard and finished it off with a shovel.
The next day, Melinda mentioned that if he was going to dispose of things in the garbage he should probably at least put them in a bag or cover them up. The next night, another baby squirrel showed up in the kitchen. The next night, it was two more. There must have been a nest of them in the walls. This time they weren’t stuck to the glue traps, so he had to trap them himself using a blanket and just let them go outside. He called an exterminator to find out what he could do, and when the man came out and climbed up to look at the roof he started laughing. He was relieved Mel wasn’t home when that happened. He’d known the roof was in bad shape, but now began to suspect it was more like a sieve, a welcome sign out for all the vermin in the neighborhood, advertising warm walls to get them through the winter. He didn’t want to think about the work and money involved in addressing that; he didn’t even want to think about how to begin talking to Melinda about it. The exterminator said a litter can vary from one to six if they truly had a nest in the walls – young stay with their mother for up to five months, before becoming independent. Those young he released probably just found their way back. When they’d wake now to a sound in the kitchen, it would be the chirping the girls had started calling “squirrel sounds.” The next morning they found the first tooth.
It was an adult molar, yellowed. Melinda took it from Lila’s grubby fist while she was sipping her morning coffee.
He thought Mel was going to faint when she found that tooth; he’d rushed to calm her down and take it from her and offer some story about how it could have gotten there. It was just a piece of trash, he explained, like a gum wrapper or an old penny. It could have been stuck to one of their shoes or the girls’ backpacks as they dragged them up the steeply-slanted driveway from the street. Just a random piece of trash that found its way in. Melinda had always had a thing about teeth. She was sensitive about her own. Growing up, her family hadn’t had a lot of money, so going to the dentist wasn’t very regular. They couldn’t afford braces for the kids, and any repairs were shoddy. She had a crown cap on her front tooth that would come loose every so often. Even though they had good dental insurance now, old habits die hard. He’d once come home to find Emmy and Melinda in the bathroom, his daughter mesmerized watching her mother use superglue to re-attach the cap. Later, he’d reminded her that she could just go in the next day. But she could barely open her mouth to talk or smile with that crooked tooth exposed. Emmy had been looking at her mother as if she was magic.
He found the second tooth in Emmy’s “treasure box.” She kept her favorite things there – rocks she picked up on the walk to the bus stop in the morning, a perfect pigeon feather from the grocery store parking lot that was laced with iridescent green, a marble scratched to total opacity that had been her grandma’s, some whitened sticks from the big lake, a sycamore pod. This one was an incisor. It had a hairline crack down the middle. He pocketed it, hoped she wouldn’t notice. When he went up to read the nighttime story, Emmy was pawing around in her treasure box. She set it aside, and listened to the story, quieter than usual, not even jostling for space alongside her sister. He carried Lila to her toddler’s bed, tucked her in, and kissed her forehead. He crossed back to Emmy’s bed, and went to do the same.
“I’ll just get another one, Dad.” He froze. The treasure box was still sitting open on the dresser top, the night light’s yellow bouncing off its contents. “I know where to get them.”
He kissed her forehead and walked out of the room, slowly closing the door.
He started with the neighbor across the street, asking a few more questions about the house, its history, the neighborhood. He had two interminable coffee meet-ups, even convinced Melinda to go to the annual block party. They made small talk, and he asked some questions about the house. But he got nowhere. He didn’t want Melinda to know why he wanted to know more about the house – as far as she knew, he was just interested in some of their home’s unique features. She didn’t know anything about the teeth, he was sure. It had just been the one as far as she knew. After he rationalized its appearance in their kitchen, she’d seemed okay, even asked for the strange treasure back – holding it up to the light streaming through the window over the sink. It wasn’t that he was trying to keep things from her, but he didn’t want to upset her either. He didn’t want to feel her awake, staring at him, wondering why they ever bought this house.
The only time in the first months after they’d bought the house that he’d really seen his wife smile was when the first utilities bills for the cold months had held steady, and they’d been able to adjust their budget down. They’d expected a house that old to be inefficient, drafty. But it must have been well-insulated. Maybe some previous owner had done already what they’d planned to do: pull back the rolled insulation in the attic and blow cellulose into every empty space in the walls.
He allowed himself to ask Emmy a few questions. The house gave her the teeth. She could get one a day. They were all different kinds of teeth. She would answer him calmly, holding his gaze the whole time. He said she could keep them, but they couldn’t tell Mom. He got a lockbox, and they put the teeth in there, and he’d let her see them, but not touch them. He told her they were dirty, like coins, and would make her wash her hands after she delivered her daily treasure. She wouldn’t show him where they came from, and despite searching her room and every inch of the house, he couldn’t find any teeth himself. He went down to the courthouse and did a records search and got the name of everyone who ever owned the house. He used his lunch hour to search their names. He didn’t know what he was looking for.
Emmy started upping the ante. One night, after they’d read their story and Lila had fallen asleep, she said the house wanted to give her two teeth a day now. She said the house wanted to give Lila teeth too. She said she was having trouble keeping the secret from Mom anymore. He felt panic rising in his throat but he tried to stay calm – they both heard the chirping they’d gotten used to coming from the walls. “Daddy? Can we get a cage for the flying squirrels?” His oldest daughter had an unnerving habit of staring straight at him. “I want to keep them as pets.”
About a week later, Melinda was drinking her coffee, bent over Emmy whispering something to her. He stopped in the doorway, waited.
“What’s going on girls?”
Melinda turned around, smiling. She was wearing her flannel robe, a blue and green plaid, belted tightly. Her hair was still bed-mussed. She looked just like Emmy – or Emmy looked just like her. They had the same dark honey hair, the same pale pink skin, same off-kilter scatter of freckles. In the morning when Melinda drank cup after cup of coffee, Emmy had taken to mimicking her, sipping her milk from a child’s teacup, blowing on it before taking her drinks.
“Emmy has a loose tooth.” Next to his wife, Emmy grinned wide, wiggling her front tooth with a pink tongue.
“How much do I get for a tooth?” she asked him. He was probably being too sensitive, keyed on the word tooth. But she said “a tooth,” not “my tooth.” He started to imagine that this was all a part of it, the collecting of the teeth. His daughter was mercenary. By now, the lockbox was a quarter full, rattling with an assortment of incisors, cuspids, and molars. He kept it in his closet, hidden under a stack of sweaters. He felt it there all the time, as if it was breathing. His daughter had been negotiating with him all along – she had an end in mind. Out on the three-season porch, he could see Lila doing her baby bounce in front of the cage, chanting “Sqwirl! Sqwirl! Sqwirl!” at the cloth pockets where the new pets spent most of the day sleeping. In the evening, with supervision, they’d feed them some fruit, letting them out to roam over their bodies, practicing their leaps from one family member to the next as their skin stretched open to gather air. Melinda would be posed like a scarecrow, holding her arms out from her sides and the small furred things racing from one limb to another and leaping between her and Emmy while Lila squealed. He thought Mel would be squeamish about the squirrels, these wild things in the house, but she’d surprised him by getting the cage herself, and fashioning little fabric pockets to hang inside the bars. She and Emmy would cut up fruit mornings before school, and in the afternoons, feeding the vermin from their hands, getting them used to touch. He’d mostly watch from the doorway. They’d only have them for another month or two before they hit sexual maturity and went crazy for the outside world. He couldn’t wait. He hated watching them scrabble all over his wife and daughters, clawing at their clothes and exposed skin.
In all his online searching, he hadn’t been able to find any information about the house beyond what his neighbor had told him: the illegal liquor, the escape tunnel that had been filled in. He wondered if there was some connection between the radiators and some sort of still; he wondered about the original owners of the teeth.
He’d taken to sleepless nights, wandering the house listening for creaks of the floor, or feeling for strange currents of air on his face, hoping to find seams in the walls of the house that might show him the source of the teeth. He didn’t know how to bargain with his daughter; he knew he was running out of time before he’d have to tell Melinda. The store of teeth in the lockbox grew: half full, nearly three-quarters. Each day she added her new teeth she smiled a secret smile that scared him; missing a front tooth of her own made her look like a jack o ’lantern or a harpy. Once, he thought he caught sight of her through the mostly closed door of her room putting one of the teeth into her mouth. He stood very still in the hallway and watched through the slit between the frame and slightly-ajar door. He knew he should go in there and stop her, stop it. But he couldn’t. He was afraid of her. He imagined her mouth holding one of those yellowed teeth, alongside her own baby teeth. He couldn’t believe in innocence anymore – he found himself rushing through nighttime stories, his bedtime kisses perfunctory. He watched Lila for signs of Emmy-ness.
He got an estimate on the roof of almost $70,000; they’d have to take out a loan – he filed it away for a later conversation, not wanting to burden Melinda. He found an artisan who could re-make the radiators, for a price. He held on to this information too, hoping they wouldn’t need it too soon. In the meantime, he tried to repair them as best he could. Melinda had loved the way the downstairs bathroom had turned out finally: black and white vintage reproduction tile, clean white fixtures that fit the scale and era of the house. He’d even managed to re-arrange the plumbing to ensure enough space for a corner shower with custom glass walls. It was her favorite bathroom in the house now, but it had taken every spare moment of every weekend of three months. She would kiss him when he came upstairs with drywall cement in his hair.
He’d had to buy a second lockbox once the first one filled. Emmy would make him open the first one to see her horde of teeth before she’d carefully deposit the day’s new teeth into the second one. He made sure to obscure his hands on the combination locks when he was spinning the dials. When she washed her hands, she rubbed the tip of her tongue over the new nubs of white growing in her mouth. Watching her rub her soapy hands over each other, working her tongue in her mouth turned his stomach, but he felt like he needed to supervise – to maintain some control over the situation. At the last dentist appointment, the hygienist had called this “eruption” – those little bits of tooth poking up through the gums. Losing the baby teeth was called “shedding.” When he looked up, her knew her eyes would be locked on him in the old silvered mirror above the pedestal sink. She’d pantomime an elaborate shh motion and run downstairs to the kitchen, where Mel was cutting up fruit. All three of them would feed the squirrels. He’d sit on his bed, head in his hands, listening to their squealing fill the house. He thought the flying squirrels would be long gone by now. They were old enough to be released outside. They had teeth, and claws, and full coats of rough fur. But Mel didn’t agree; the play sessions stretched longer and longer now, and he couldn’t watch.
When the most recent radiator blew, soaking the wall between the study and the second-floor bathroom, he decided to just hire out the work and begin a big project. He needed some distraction. He cleared the bathroom of all the girls’ things. When he moved all the furniture out of the study, readying it for the work crew coming the next day, he was surprised to see a small hole where the wall met the warping wood floors. Behind Melinda’s bookshelves. It was crumbly and grubby with dirt, finger stains. He stuck his fingers in and pulled out a tooth, lateral incisor. He scrabbled at the plaster, pulling it away from the wall. Lathe exposed. More teeth. He worked the hole bigger and bigger. The whole wall would be coming down the next day, so he got started early, swinging a hammer erratically across the wall, knocking out pockets of powdery white, splintered wood. More teeth. He went to the basement for the sledgehammer, attacking every spot of wall between the studs. Teeth poured out, making a sound like sleet. Behind him, he heard laughter.
“Mom always said you would find them,” Emmy smiled at him, a sweet and patient smile that looked just like Mel’s, when he made another promise about something he’d get to. His daughter ran out of the room, laughter echoing down the hallway. Teeth were still pouring out, a cascade piling on the floor. The plastic clatter of their accumulation sounded like precipitation on a clay tile roof.
C. KUBASTA writes poetry, fiction, and hybrid forms. Her most recent books include the poetry collection Of Covenants (Whitepoint Press) and the short story collection Abjectification (Apprentice House). Find her at ckubasta.com and follow her @CKubastathePoet.
