gizzard teeth

you're likely being fed sawdust and upholstered... | short fiction

Mar 04, 2025

denture lot — Photo by Enric Moreu on Unsplash

We feasted on bluffs spotlit by Kia halogens. When the post-meal grog came for my knees you scooped me up in your hammock arms. I starfished out, watching your trick moon face eat the light.

I rubbed my bellyache, puckering turned wine lips, "My tongue is so fat!"

Your laugh escaped your breastplate and came into me, quaking my winter flub. I giggled as the moon came close with your spring trap smile, "Give it here."

Then we woke, riding low in the waters of new light. The duvet lifts. The congratulatory mound of your belly shivers in the morning air—spit-shiny chromic flesh belching back drained clay hair and moribund eyes, so dyspeptic and mealymouthed I'm loathe to say “I.”

You gavoned the room’s air and pawed your eyes. I wait for your fists to drop—wait for you to pounce and kiss and arrange my guts. But when you do, your face is a pedestrian nub of blood-creamed skin.

Right now, you're likely being fed sawdust and upholstered—rag bathed by strangers in a basement. I don't know if I can be there. Your mother would take my scalp, but maybe it's worth it; it would be nice to touch your face again, even if it's half-formaldehyde.

You made a big show of curling fetal and calcifying into a loud, tiny pebble that haunted my insoles. You razed my arches and condemned me to gimp—gimp and strut and galavant, unable to decamp from the cuckqueanian march toward daily hecatomb.

Maybe I’ll come.

Maybe I have to…

…okay, I’ll come, but fair warning: I make my own rules now.

I'll forego the saturnine froufrou of black lace and fisted tissues. I’ll throw open medieval doors, enter the nave where mommy and daddy got hitched belching and gimping through molasses mourning in unwashed pjs.

Your mother? Mommy needn’t worry. Assure her: I come not to dole out comeuppance or amplify offbeat fascination. I come not to monkey with your child of God standing or rip the hair of the Other. No. I come strictly for reclamation. I come for my arches.

Remember: I could’ve made a stink.

I could’ve turned a blind eye to “initial here, sign there…”

I could’ve gone full canary and buried you.

You owe me.

Give it here.

Let me see your wormfood lips made up pale and bleeding warmth. Let me loom over your Ken doll husk and hock a green one in your sewn-shut eyes. Let me peel off my Converse and sit on your chest—rattle your breast like you used to, vibrate until I’m rolling your calciferous totem like a schoolyard booger. Let me leap from your chest and hit the hardwood with a constipated curtsy. Let me gulp you down—swallow your trick moon chunk with an August Coke ahhhhhhh that beckons your kin to press their ears against my belly. Let me infect them with the urge to hear esophageal yeomen till and sow my fecund gizzard with the last of you. I’ll rub your mothers’s hair as the gizzard yeoman bury your chaff tits up. She’ll close her eyes, seeing little yous in the red loam, screaming in wait for my head weather to storm down and bloom them into rows of improvident teeth.

Then I’ll be hungry.

Then your mother can speak her mind.

They can all bloodlet and purge and scream their sleaze down my throat. I’ll stand feasting upon their sour gazes, slurping down the sweet mold of their yops, feeling it all slither down into my greatest depths to be pummeled by newborn teeth—mashed into puerile flotsam, ferried by caramel-soft cells to feed my arches.

I'll be free.

Free of your gimp and sick pup breath—free from the salt tang of pink grimaces—free to stride under the muslin of No One—free from the trembling caricature trapped in your morning paunch.

I’ll disrobe and walk my own walk, inches taller on resummoned arches. My reverberant stride boom-tickles cracks into the stained tableaux as I breaststroke the waters of new light, feeling them part around my neck as I swim forward into sunrise.