By Margo Pecha
When we woke in the night to the chattering, you said it was just the house settling and to go back to sleep. I pressed my ear against the pillow and the vibrations funneled into my cochlea, the tiny bones inside shuddering and amplifying. I lay awake and listened to the sounds of our new home, staring at the wall until the sky began to lighten.
We went about our business, you and I—work and school and unpacking in between, making our house a home in the spare moments. We painted the bedrooms and pulled up ratty carpet and ripped jagged strips of wallpaper from the kitchen. When I held my palm to the plaster, I could still feel it, the soundless rumble of something churning and juddering deep inside the ancient walls.
But it was just old house sounds, I reminded myself. I would get used to them eventually.
* * *
“Come look at this,” you said one evening, ushering me outside.
You took me around the back of the house and brought me near the cracked foundation, where a half-moon of polished white teeth sprouted from a muddy patch of grass. You brushed the blades aside, revealing the gleaming pink of a hard palate holding the teeth in place.
“Did someone lose their dentures?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” you said. “Let’s see.”
You pried it loose with a dirty trowel, and it popped from the ground with a wet sucking sound. You held it curiously, turning it over in your palm, before handing it to me. It was cold and clammy against my skin, the flesh soft and gummy. I retched and dropped it to the ground, backing away.
But you pointed out another set of teeth nearby, protruding from the earth like a mushroom, and began extracting it from the soil. “A lower!” you cried, fitting the two together, and you began searching for more. Before long you’d filled a five-gallon bucket with dirty mouths prized from the mud.
You spent a whole weekend assembling them, a wrinkled tarp spread across the kitchen floor, fitting upper palates to lower palates, overbites and underbites and crossbites, sifting through the jumble to pair the jaws. You bound them with thick wire and lined them on a bookshelf in the living room, admiring the way the evening light gleamed against the teeth.
They shuddered and rattled in excitement whenever we walked by, their new union somehow lending animation, and the wires loosened beneath the strain. You began to rewrap them before bed each night, twisting the wire tight, but in the morning, it was slack again, the teeth chattering feverishly. I stopped passing through the room if I could help it.
* * *
When we began to renovate the basement, I felt the shifting beneath my feet before we’d even started pulling up the peeling laminate. The room felt alive, like it was holding its breath, waiting to see what we would do.
We thought it was a large piece of chipped ceramic tile at first, until you pried it away and the basement shook, lurching sideways before righting itself. The gleaming root you pulled from the floor was nearly as long as my forearm, and blood trickled from the hole, puddling on the packed earthen floor. You wedged the tooth back in and the house shuddered.
You scraped more dirt from the ground, revealing a line of sizeable molars and canines and bicuspids that ringed the room like decorative trim. I sat on a folding chair while you ripped apart the wall paneling, revealing the matching set lurking behind. They rested atop the lower teeth in perfect harmony, groove to groove.
“Incredible,” you said, trailing your hand along the tombstone rows.
I gazed up at the ceiling, trying to determine where flesh merged with dirt and concrete and wooden beam. The room felt stuffy, the air stale.
“We should consider selling the house,” I said, inching toward the staircase, but you were too busy polishing the dentition with an old rag.
You didn’t come back upstairs until the next morning.
* * *
The gaping hole in your smile widens as the weeks pass. You probe it with your tongue, flicking it along the tender, swollen tissue where your teeth once were. You’ve stopped going to work, and your employer has ceased calling.
The teeth on the shelf continue to clatter and rattle, a little closer to articulation now that you’ve stopped winding the wires. If I close my eyes and stand very still, I can almost make out a syllable or two. Are they laughing at us? I can’t tell, and neither can you. Or if you can, you don’t care to share your thoughts with me.
And all the while the giant jaws shift beneath our feet, grinding like the earth on its axis. You descend into the basement most nights, only falling into bed beside me when the clock reads two, three a.m., the smell of damp soil and copper drenching your body. I don’t ask what you’re doing down there. I don’t want to know. I cover my head with my pillow, but the bruxing bleeds through.
“The house is just settling,” you say, patting me on the shoulder as you ease into bed. “It’s nothing to worry about.”
* * *
Margo Pecha lives in southwest Washington state where she writes about obsession, paranoia, and rurality. Her fiction has appeared in anthologies like Even Cozier Cosmic and is forthcoming from Fraidy Cat Quarterly and Demagogue Press. When she’s not reading or writing, she’s working in her gardens and herding chickens.