make me real

by Seriah Black

I wisp across the bedroom, tendrils tasting the carpet, lick after lick.

At long last, I will feel more than taste. I will not gape open when the wind blows through me. One more tooth and I will be whole.

I clutch the drawstrings of the empty purse. The only corporeality in all the world I can grasp, aside from the teeth collected into it.

Teeth of every shape and size. Blocky teeth. Buck teeth. Sickled teeth. Straight-legged teeth. Teeth with spindly roots.

How long have only teeth mattered?

Gnawing hunger like memory abates as I near the edge of the bed, the end table. Fingers of abandoned hope solidify into flesh and blood, the first I’ve seen of my knuckles in a decade. Yes, time is returning to me now.

Blunt fingernails harden from figments into shells as my fingers reach across the expanse, over the table surface. Quaver and close in on a porcelain oval painted with the antique faces. Inside, a child’s abandoned tooth lays abed, inches away, two inches, one…

The hill of blankets to my left shifts, churns. A head pops out of its cocoon. A head with all its teeth. “Simon…?”

I do not answer. I am not Simon.

A lamia of blankets and woman rises as though charmed to outrage. Indignance. “Who are you? How did you get in my house?”

All forward movement crystalizes like frozen breath. I have awakened the guardian. I am not equipped to fight.

The woman looks at the latched window. Snatches up the box, envy of my soul.

Do I have a soul? Will I get it back?

“What do you want with my niece’s baby tooth? And don’t say you’re the tooth fairy!”

That was one name for me, yes, I remembered.

With solid fingers, I rip my fingernail off. It rounds into metal, icy as the rest of me. I wait for her to notice. I will trade.

The woman’s stare is uncomfortable as the sun, a sense of awareness that doesn’t quite touch me. “You can’t seriously think you’re the tooth fairy.” Her feet peep out and drift cautiously to the floor.

The breath sighing over my lips is still sweet with the jasmine blooming through an open window two floors below, two houses past. Breath, an illusion.

“Trade,” I offer, my first words since my last memory.

Skepticism shifts from her left foot to her right. “I can’t tell my niece some shady man stole her tooth,” she says. But she has not swiped at me yet.

“Trade,” I say again. That is all I require to leave.

“Why should I?”

Moonlight from the window pearls into my cloudy surface, so close now to skin. “I must become real,” I whisper. “I have been nothing for so long.”

She shakes her head, hair whipping around her eyes like my smokey frame. She is going to say no.

Then she pauses. She realizes the sway she holds at her breast. “What would you give me for it?”

I don’t reply. How am I to know the value of my life? I am a bogey.

“You may not be real,” she says, “but you can talk. That’s more than I have right now: a person to talk to.” She stares at her closed fist. “That’s what I get for marrying my best friend.”

A guardian offering common ground? Perhaps I am closer to human now than I thought. Most humans just scream.

“You’re going to leave if I give you this, right?” She holds up the porcelain tooth coffin. Her mouth is grim. “If you can return to this townhouse once a month and talk to me, you will have done more than my husband, God rest his work.” She looks at me, the first time any adult has really looked at me.

It runs through my plasma like poltergeist currents.

“If I give you this,” the woman says sternly, “You have to remember Korinna gave you what you wanted. And you have to come back.”

She removes the lid, the final barrier. Dumps the tooth into her cupped palm. Aligns it above where my tangible hand still hangs suspended by the foreign substance of hope.

I stretch open my palm. Hers tilts.

We watch the one dead little tooth tumble into my hand.

The last tooth I need.

Darkness lifts from my form. Solidity sleeves down my arm, cloaks my body, hoods me in curls, chisels in divots and masks me in skin.

I drop it into the purse. The pouch draws closed on its own. My new solidity remains.

The tooth has been counted.

I retrieve the tooth, fit it into my mouth. The night’s last acquisition.

The heat of life rushes back into me.

My head spins and pulses, teeming with lost memories newly reborn.

I turn, solid and human, toward the closet door, the way I’d come in.

“I will remember,” I say over my shoulder. My words fall hard in the air, the promise of a being writ back into the world. “And I will come.”

Photo of Seriah Black

BIO: Seriah Black is a mixed-race author exploring the dual nature and contradictions in people. Alongside blurring the lines between fantasy and reality, Black steeps in a good cup of tea, or ten. Find Seriah Black at @seriahblacksheep.bsky.social or www.seriahblack.com.