Choking on Our Teeth

“Your uncle is dead,” my grandmother whispered to me and to the clouds.

“I did not know you had another son.”

My mother passed during childbirth, and my father, never wanting to be a father, abandoned me on the porch of my grandmother. A note tucked beneath the blanket the hospital shrouded me in read, “I told her not to bear a child, and from her stubbornness, her life was lost. I will never be able to love another the way I loved her.”

My grandmother paused, almost in reflection, and, with her eyes turned up toward the sky, said to it and to me, “There were many mountains between us.”

I nodded my head.

Her long silver hair danced in the wind as she turned to go inside.

One evening, as we listened to the storm, me with my eyes closed, lying flat on the knitted rug, and her in the wooden rocking chair that cried out with each motion, she announced,

“Osa loved the rain.” My father.

She spoke so little of him. I knew not much but his name. I, too, loved the rain.

Voda. My name. Water in Russian. It was the only thing given to me by my father.

“Why have you never said anything?” I questioned hesitantly.

“Because you are mine.” She responded confidently.

Her cheekbones sat high, close to her eyes, and her jawline was sharp, as if her bones were to pierce through the delicate skin that enveloped them. I did not resemble her, with my face round and my neck short.

“Who do I look like?” I asked on an early morning, digging the heel of my bare foot into the dew-soaked grass.

“Probably your mother.”

“Have you never met her?”

She inhaled so sharply I felt it in my chest.

“I have never met her. Now go collect the eggs.”

She never did notice that the eggs were fewer than they should have been. Not since I caught you before dawn gathering some. When you saw me, you froze, and two of the eggs met the ground. The yolk no longer encased in its membrane, the shells in pieces.

“Why are you awake so early?” you sputtered.

“Why are you in our chicken coop?” I replied.

“My father does not provide for us.”

“Four eggs a day is what you may take.”

The day after, I found a red string bracelet in the place of four eggs. The next time we spoke, I wore it tied around my wrist.

“For protection,” you told me.

I fear I have too much, I thought. I should have slipped the bracelet off and slid it onto your thin wrist instead.

I have never, and do not believe I will ever come across a person as lovely as you again, with your nose so striking and lips pillowy. I still envision them late at night as I await sleep.

“It is just us, Voda,” my grandmother would often say. Those words, with the years, slowly shifted from comforting to constricting. I wanted to ask if there would ever be room for another. I so desperately wish I made room for you. 

On days that I arrived at the coop to find your share of the eggs already gone, my stomach would turn. On days that they weren’t, my heart would flutter, and I would wait impatiently for you to come by. Not often enough, I would bring vegetables and bread.

The morning our lips met, you told me I smelled like lemons, and I told you that you looked like the sun. My body felt so warm; it was that sensation that led me to the realization that I had been cold all the time before.

I wanted to be warm forever. I wanted to crawl all the way inside of you. I wanted to be made of you and you of me. My bones rattled with such immense desperation.

I tried to hold on, but you were sand between my fingers. I watched you shrink and shrivel. Crawl into me, crawl into me, crawl into me. Oh God, please! Why did you not crawl into me, wear me as your armor? You were so stubborn, like my mother. And then you were gone.

Everything has since dimmed. I almost melted into the floorboards but she did not let me. She peeled my flesh off the ground and scrubbed at the grime that permanently stains me. 

Not much belonged to me but that bracelet, whose thread I constantly rolled between the pads of my fingertips.

“Do you have anything of my father’s?” I asked my grandmother. I had almost forgotten the sound of my voice. I fear I will forget the sound of yours. 

“Just the teeth he lost as a boy.”

“And my uncle?”

“The same.”

“Why do you keep them?”

There was not a trace of either son in the house.

She laughed. “Silly girl, you know that the mouse who collects milk teeth is only a myth.”

The walls of my throat suddenly seemed tight.

“I would like to cross the mountains,” I said to the sky and then eventually to her. I wanted to cross them with you, my sun. I hoped crossing them for you would be enough.

“Why is that?”

I stood up. “I want to see beyond this house, beyond this land.” There was a ripple in my voice that I desperately did not want her to catch. It often seemed that she saw all. Except you. She never saw you.

“The sky is the same wherever you are.”

I sat back down. She is not wrong. You cannot outrun the sky. Is that where you’ve gone, my sun?

On the day she left the earth, there were tears in her eyes, the first I’d ever seen from her.

“It hurts when they leave, and now you will be alone.”

“I will cross the mountains,” I whispered, my voice wavering. I held her hand, cold and slender.

“You do not know beyond what I have given you.” I would like to believe that it was regret that laced her voice.

Her eyes shut before she said, “I love you,” so I do not know for sure that she loved me, only that she protected me. Hid me.

 Do you see her in the sky? With my mother and my uncle? Is my father there too? 

I kissed her goodbye and filled my bag with all the little that I owned, searching for anything more to carry me across the journey into all that has forever been unbeknownst. 

“I will step past the land she swaddled me in,” I said out loud, my voice echoing through the all-too-familiar walls that surrounded me. “I will cross the mountains.”

I screamed, feeling the vibration of my voice more than I ever had. The rocking chair was still. Silent.

Underneath her bed I found a glass jar, caked in dust. I circled my finger over the lid, dumping out the rattling contents and counting sixty child-sized teeth, an abundance of incisors, molars, and fewer canines. Their rarity made them feel special. You were so very special.

I spilled a handful of the teeth into my hand, placed the jar with the remainder into my bag, and slid on her mud-crusted boots, made from layers of outings and quests she fulfilled independently. I was invariably there, as I imagine my father and uncle once were. If she had not gone, would I have ever been able to muster their courage? Does even an ounce of their bravery run through my veins?

With my hand squeezed tight around the teeth, the dullness of the bottom and sharpness of the top, where they were once rooted, made indentations in my skin. I took a deep breath, and with my shaking legs, began stepping forward. Mountains, tall and ferocious, stood before me. I dropped a tooth, a canine. I do not know if it came from my own mouth, my father’s, or my uncle’s. All I know is that here is where each of our roots stem.

And so I continued on, sprinkling us through the land. I will reroot myself eventually. So much will grow again.

To her and to the clouds, I announced, “I forgive.”