Sarp Sozdinler: THE THING WITH THE TEETH • Cleaver Magazine

Flash by Sarp Sozdinler
THE THING WITH THE TEETH

Nana keeps a dish of hard candies on her dresser, cellophane wrappers crackling like fireworks in her old hands. She lets me take two, sometimes three if I sweep the kitchen first, dragging the broom over dust motes and old cookie crumbs, the shell of a beetle, something black and curled. The house smells like Pine-Sol and something bittersweet underneath, a tang of rot Nana pretends not to notice.

It’s summer. The kind where the air sticks to our skin and swells everything around the house: our bodies, the gnats, even the space between our porch and the house. Nana watches Wheel of Fortune with the sound low, listening for cars crunching gravel outside. She says the landlord’s nephew is coming by with a shovel to see about “that thing with the teeth” that’s gotten into the crawlspace. She says we are not alone.

I know her well enough not to take her words seriously, so I laugh. I know she probably means a raccoon. Maybe a possum. Some mean animal clawing at the beams under the floorboards. I picture teeth glinting in the dark, eyes yellow as egg yolks. Some nights, when the AC quits and the house goes all hush-hush, I swear I can hear it gnawing at the wood, at the delicate bones of our place. Sometimes I think Nana is right and it’s not an animal, but something older than the house, older than all of us. Something that has gotten bored and angry and just wants out.

Nana’s hands shake when she pours milk into her coffee. I ask if she wants help, but she snaps and tells me that she’s not helpless, not yet. I ask about the thing in the crawlspace and she just snorts and says, “There’s things with teeth everywhere, baby.” She gestures at my hand resting near the overflow hole. “Watch your fingers.”

The landlord’s nephew never shows. By dinner, Nana has fallen asleep in her chair, head back, her mouth open. Her face looks different when she sleeps, softer, less lined, like a peeled orange. I tiptoe into her bedroom and take another candy from the dish. I watch my reflection in the cracked vanity mirror as I unwrap the cellophane. The smell in the room gets sharper with the citrus of the candy.

When it’s nearly dark, I go out back with the flashlight. The grass is wet and patchy under my soles. There’s a board loose near the crawlspace and I kick at it softly, half afraid and half hoping something will dart out and finally confront me with its big colorful eyes. Instead, the dark just breathes into my face, warm and sticky. I press my ear to the opening in the slabs, listening for sounds of chewing, for the slimy click of words.

I say, “Hello,” then remain quiet for a while, just in case something talks back.

But nothing does, and I feel foolish. I remember the time Mom said she once got stuck in there as a kid, how her voice went after, how she sounded like she was talking underwater for weeks. I think about the scar on Nana’s arm, the thing she said about the teeth. I wonder if she meant the thing under the house or someone else entirely. The crawlspace or the world above it.

At dinner, I ask about the thing under the house again, the thing with the teeth, and Nana pushes her chair back and looks at me. “Some things you just have to learn not to push,” she says, crumpling the napkin into a ball in her hand. “You just gotta learn to live with it.”

That night, I can’t sleep. I sense the walls swelling, my bedroom shrinking. I sense the house getting hungrier by the hour, the chewing growing louder. I pull the covers up and think about everything that lives under our houses, what lives under our skin. Behind our teeth. In the morning, I find Nana sweeping in the living room, broom scratching at the vinyl, her feet bare and papery. She hands me another candy, the last lemon one in the bowl, and tells me to open it with my teeth.

Sarp Sozdinler has been published in Electric Literature, Kenyon Review, Shenandoah, Wigleaf, Flash Frog, Pithead Chapel, Fractured Lit, and Maudlin House, among other journals. His stories have been selected as finalists for the Los Angeles Review Short Fiction Prize and the Passages North Waasnode Short Fiction Prize. His work has been selected or nominated for several anthologies, including the Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, and Best Microfiction. He edits the literary journal The Bulb Region. He can be found online @sarpsozdinler or at www.sarpsozdinler.com.