Teeth
Authors: Hannah Moskowitz
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An excerpt from Hanna Moskowitz’s
Break
An excerpt from Hanna Moskowitz’s
Invincible Summer
An excerpt from Hanna Moskowitz’s
Gone, Gone, Gone
To my mom, who read me stories,
and my dad, who made them up
AT NIGHT THE OCEAN IS SO LOUD AND SO CLOSE THAT I LIE
awake, sure it’s going to beat against the house’s supports until we all crumble onto the rocks and break into pieces. Our house is creaky, gray, weather stained. It’s probably held a dozen desperate families who found their cure and left before we’d even heard about this island.
We are a groan away from a watery death, and we’ll all drown without even waking up, because we’re so used to sleeping through unrelenting noise.
Sometimes I draw. Usually I keep as still as I can. I worry any movement from me will push us over the edge. I don’t even want to blink.
I feel the crashing building up. I always do. I lie in bed with my eyes open and focus on a peak in my uneven ceiling and pretend I know how to meditate. You are not moving. You are not drowning. It’s just rain. It’s your imagination. Go to sleep.
That pounding noise is pavement under your feet, is sex, is your mother’s hands on your brother’s chest, is something that is not water.
It’s not working, not tonight. I sit up and grab my pad and pen to sketch myself, standing. Dry.
Sometimes the waves hit the shore so hard that I can’t even hear the screaming.
But usually I can. Tonight I can, and it hits me too hard for me to draw. I need to learn how to draw a scream.
I close my eyes and listen. I always do this; I listen like I am trying to desensitize myself, like if I just let the screams fill my ears long enough, I will get bored and I will forget and I will go to sleep.
It doesn’t work. I need to calm down.
It’s just the wind.
Not water. Not anyone. Go to sleep.
Some nights the screams are louder than others. Some nights they’re impossible to explain away, like my mom tries, as really just the wind passing through the cliffs. “Like in an old novel,” she says. “It’s romantic.” Her room doesn’t face the ocean.
Fiona, down on the south end of the island, says it’s the ghost, but Fiona’s bag-of-bats crazy and just because we’re figuring out some magic is real doesn’t mean I’m allowed to skip straight to ghost in an effort to make my life either more simple or more exciting. God, what the fuck do I even want?
I should figure it out and then wish for it and see what happens. Who the hell knows? Magic island, after all.
Magic fish, anyway. They heal.
That’s the real story, that’s the story everyone knows, but it’s hardly the only one that darts around.
There are creatures in the water no one’s ever seen except out of the corner of his eyes.
The big house is haunted.
Maybe we’re all haunted.
I only take the legends seriously at night. The house is rocking, and the stories are the only thing to keep me company.
Stories, me, and ocean, and however the hell many magic fish, while my family sleeps downstairs and my real life sleeps a thousand miles away.
At home I never would have believed this shit. I used to be a reasonable person. But now we’re living on this island that is so small and isolated that it really feels like it’s another world, with rules like none I learned growing up. We came here from middle America. We stepped into a fairy tale.
And my brother is better but isn’t well, so color me increasingly despondent, magic fish.
Out in the ocean the shrieks continue, as high and hollow as whistles. I get up and press my face against the window. My room is the highest part of our kneeling house.
The panes on my windows are thick and uneven. Probably the windows were made by hand. Even if it weren’t so dark, I’d still hardly be able to see. Everything’s distorted like I’m looking through glasses that don’t belong to me.
But I can just make out the waves, grabbing on to the shore with foamy fingers and sliding back into the surf. I squint long enough and make out white peaks in the dark water.
“Go to sleep,” I say.
I close my eyes and listen to the screams. I pretend it’s my brother, my little brother, who has cystic fibrosis and this fucked-up chest and can’t scream at all. Pretend this island has done the magic it was supposed to do, and he’s okay. And we can go home.
It’s just that at home there’s so much green—trees and grass and Dad’s rosebushes—and the water isn’t ocean, it’s what comes from the garden hose and the sprinklers and the fire hydrant when me and my friends pry it open. It’s the sweat dripping down our faces. Home. We’d smoke cigarettes in the back of Abe’s van, still soaked from the
hydrant, and brag about the stunts he’d pulled. I’d lie to them all and tell them stories about the time I was arrested or my dad was arrested or, hell, that my baby brother was arrested. Back when he was just a two-year-old with a bad cough, toddling down the steps to chase us.
Home, before we had any idea how shitty this could get. When lung transplants and miracle cures were for other people.
Before we were desperate enough to believe, before we were a family alone in a dark room with everything crashing.
You’ll cling to anything.
I fall asleep imagining I’m on a plane home. There isn’t even an airport here.
WE HAVEN’T EVEN LIVED HERE TWO MONTHS, AND WE ALREADY
have our routine down pat. My father stands in the gray granite kitchen, chopping potatoes and onions for omelets. Mom is on the balcony facing the ocean, my brother on her lap, hitting junk out of his lungs and letting the sea air slap them both awake. Two fish boil in the pot on the stove. Both for Dylan.
I trip over Dylan’s rainbow xylophone on my way down the stairs. It’s the only color in the whole house.
Dylan’s talking a little; I can hear a bit of his voice drifting in through the open balcony doors. He must be having a good day.
“This thing’s a biohazard,” I say, giving the xylophone a nudge.
“I think it needs blood to be a biohazard.”
“Nuh-uh.”
“Trust me. I’m a doctor.”
“I can straighten up. I’m not being a good kid, don’t give me that proud face. I’m a useless shit and you know it.”
“I never forget.”
“It drives me insane. Fucking . . . stuff everywhere.” I load my arms up with toys and cardboard books and my sketch pads.
Dad says, “Someday he’ll learn to pick up his own stuff,” and he smiles a little.
His hair is still damp from his shower. It’s so humid here. We never dry. I try to shower as little as I can, because I hate being cold, and because there isn’t anyone here I need to look nice for, anyway.
There’s no one my age here, no one even close. There are two kids, around Dylan’s age, both as sick as he is, if not sicker, though they’ve all been here longer so they’re more hopped up on fish than the kid here, doing a little better. The next youngest person, after me, is thirty-two. She’s here with her mother, who has lymphoma. I feel more camaraderie with her, when I catch her eye at the marketplace, than I do with anyone else here, my family included. I can tell she’s here because she’s obligated.
I don’t think she’s ever going to leave.
In two years I’ll be in college. This will be the strange place I’ll ferry to on summer vacation.
These three will go from my whole world to a picture in my wallet. That’s how it’s supposed to be.
I can taste it, and it doesn’t taste like salt water.
Anyway, sometimes I wash my hair to look nice for my mom, which I guess is weird.
“How’d you sleep?” Dad asks.
“Recklessly,” I say, just to say something.
“That was some storm. Wind was howling like crazy.”
“Maybe a ghost,” I say, because I like the way his face contorts. The fact that my father will not even consider a ghost reminds me that not entirely everything has changed. We are not entirely crazy.
I steal a piece of potato. One piece, a rough cube, cold and grainy. It splinters against my tongue.
I tug my hood up over my head before I step out onto the balcony. The wind hits me, cold and heavy, and I taste it underneath my tongue. Below us, Mr. Towner is strolling with his bag, handing out copies of the newspaper he prints in his attic. It never says anything we didn’t already know.
Mom turns around and smiles when she hears me. Every morning she gives me this bright smile, like every morning she’s surprised I’m still here.
I kiss her cheek, then Dylan’s.
Dylan is twisting his shirt in his hands. His chest heaves up and down while he breathes. Each exhale wheezes out of his throat, like a miniature version of the screams that keep me awake. Even though his chest is tight, his breathing’s pretty clear, because Mom just finished smacking him clean. When we first moved here, there was this instant, amazing moment of “Dylan is so much better”—but since then it’s been slow. They warned us that would happen when we moved here. Get a cut on your arm and the fish will heal you right away, but my coughy little brother is still coughing.