Tooth Trade
“She could start an argument in an empty house,” goes one Southern expression, and that about describes Aunt Millie to a tee. Once, she even nailed a severed cat’s head to a stick and proceeded to yell at it for well over an hour for missing the deadline to file her taxes. To be fair, she was already upset with the goldfish for breaking her favorite jar of ants [They immediately marched in a uniform line, straight to the pile of dead roosters rotting in the corner of her apartment] [She found it annoying the ants ate better than she did].
One time she found a gun and shot at pedestrians from the open window of her 7th floor apartment. The police were not happy with her on that day.
Sometimes, real late at night, the city gets so quiet that she can hear the humming of a train somewhere in the distance. Never having been near a train, she mistakenly interprets the sound as a herd of whistling elephants, angry about the rain; even on nights when there is no rain. Thinking about elephants always leads to a sudden craving for peanuts, so every quiet night eventually leads to her flipping over her mattress, to gain access to the garden she keeps underneath. Not many peanuts grow there, but she always manages to find enough to get her fill for the evening.
I don’t think she can die. I’ve seen her eat at least eighteen Tide Pods, all in one sitting. She told me she’s trying to become a mutant, but I told her it doesn’t work that way.
She often bites me, but her jaw muscles are very weak, and continue to grow weaker by the day. I don’t even feel it anymore when she does it.
Right now she is holding up one of her teeth and attempting to bargain with me. She wants to trade her tooth for a handful of shaving cream. She says she has a date tonight and needs to make her “eagle the American kind,” whatever that means.
When her date arrives, she immediately accuses him of being an undercover cop and sends him packing.
She spends the rest of the night angrily masturbating to pictures of Gerald Ford and complaining that there aren’t any decent men left in the world.
The Moon Fields
The moon broke through the clouds, and the four of them stood there, frozen, waiting for something to happen. They were in the middle of an open field, and it was as if a spotlight had been trained on them. Suddenly, without warning, their skin grew taut, hardened and split. There seemed to be no explanation at first, however it happened the instant the moonlight crept upon their skin — there was a sharp breath of cold, then numbness, as every bit of moisture within their bodies seemingly was sipped up into the dusty mouth of the moon. Skin turned to leather, turned to dust, turned to smoke, then was inhaled. The process was quick, occurring even before they could move into a final embrace. There were no goodbyes, no final words. Limbs moved, then split, then were taken by the wind. Just before the end, one of them caught a glimpse of the full moon and saw for the first time its true face — ashen cheeks, dead black eyes, pursed pink lips — as it blew the final sharp breath that changed their skin and absorbed their blood and dissolved their bones. They would never know it, and their story would never be told, but the lesson here is that there are certain places the living never should go, and when drifting through the Moon Fields, ill intentions or nay, one shall surely be absorbed.
