Toothless

The Growers and the Grifters

The Night Thief (original painting by Grace F. Ribeiro)

I hurried against the bruising sky and the rain it promised. Little pebbles dug into my knees as I held up a rock the size of an incisor.

“Want to have this implanted instead?” I asked my father-in-law.

No laugh—just a huff of acknowledgement. He sat on the porch and gazed at the corn he planted. To this day I haven’t seen the gap in his mouth. He’d need to grin first.

In my sogro’s mind, if his tooth fell out then—logically—it’s worthless. After it dislodged in the sticky guava candy that my sogra served him, he chucked it out into an unforgiving world. There it was sucked into the vacuum of lost objects I’ve been cataloguing, which (most recently) includes a sock, an earring, and my sanity.

I kneeled on the line between the pale sun-cracked dirt and the abrupt drop where the hill sloped down toward a tangle of trees. How did my sogro, with his stiff leg from a poorly-healed break, manage to plant corn on this crumbling incline? Sheer will on a sheer face of earth.

Corn is among the few precious things that give here without too much competition from other hungry critters. Gold kernels like nuggets in the river of my mouth. I don’t have to share corn with larvae or ants. The ants especially like the fruit trees, scaling trunk and stalk until they reach the green. The workers cut leaves the way they sleep: in hundreds of short bursts. A few months ago, the nectarine tree hung heavy with fruit. By the time I noticed the trail of dark scurrying, the tree's bald spot was so pronounced it resembled several of my family members’. The glue traps I ring around the trunks deter the ants only until the next rain. Or until they make a bridge out of cut leaves.

I crossed the line and climbed down into the corn. If the tooth made it all the way down here, I wondered what would happen if it was planted. What would grow from my sogro’s hard-headed grit in this sour dirt? I already had an answer: the proud stalks dressed in their finest silks and tassels.

But I didn’t find the tooth that day. The rain soon came with its pelting violence that never fails to scare the bejeezus out of me. That night, I brushed my teeth outside. The crickets chirped in a frenzied brouhaha. Their stridulation is my lullaby, my bridge of cut leaves over the day’s glue and into the realm of night.

Only I didn’t just hear the crickets. Something rustled in the corn. My heart leapt into my throat as the darkness spun shapes of predators and foes: a big cat, a headless mule…a human. I was just another animal under the sky.