No News Today - Guest Post - Dawn Pichon Barron

Living Things

When I was eight we moved to another farm. Big red house but no barn. In the field behind the house I found a baby rabbit. I cocooned it in the bottom of my t-shirt and took it home. Mom and I made a bed from an old shoe box, and I wrote Hopper's House on the side with a felt tip marker.. I fed Hopper from a eye-dropper and set the box by the wood stove to stay warm. In the morning I ran to feed Hopper, wondering when I could bring him to show and tell, but the box was gone. I looked all over the house. Mom didn't know where it went. I got ready for school and stared at my soggy cereal until it was time to leave. On the front steps was the box—empty. Then I saw Dad walking up to the house from feeding the horse and chickens.

Necessary Bifurcation

Loosen up—you amazonian boa: supple, shiny smother monster. I'm screaming through crushed lungs, although itt doesn't matter for I've lost my voice. Synapses misfiring, connectors coiled around the ifs and could haves; finally, at mid-life, I'm fearful, dead awake afraid because I'm losing it in this fray. I'm manhandling a self twenty years past. Like when I heard that song from twenty years ago on the radio yesterday and sang everyword, the flood of nostalgia squeezing my heart muscle. My husband said, “this is classic rock now.”

Nursemaid

Crutching up the front steps, entering the living room, cussing under my breath, I see two plastic lawn chairs, the hand-me-down sleeper sofa pushed to the back of the room. Mom smiling, “see your nice little place I made you.” I see my striped purple and white pillow, my faded flower bedspread. I point, “that one mine?” Mom nods. “That for you?” I point at the other chair. The toilet flushes, and in limps a man with yellow hair, yellow teeth and yellow beard. He holds his back with both hands. “This is Rod. He had back surgery. We are getting married.” I'd never seen this man in my life. I'd been gone one day having knee surgery. I cuss some more, loudly. Mom hands me a glass of water and pain pills. I close my eyes and hope to sleep for the rest of my life.

Dawn Pichon Barron teaches English, Native & Chicano Literature & writing to students at The Northwest Indian College~Nisqually Rez and Saint Martin's University. Her work can be read at Oregon Quarterly, Greenbeard Magazine, The Olympian, Of a Monstrous Child:  An Anthology of Creative Writing Relationships (Lost Horse Press), wordspace/The Black Front Gallery & at booksbeautybullshit.wordpress.com. She is founder and curator of the Gray Skies Reading Series in Oly, WA. She can be reached at pigeongirlsgot@gmail.com.

No News Today - Guest Post - Melissa Swantkowski

Something Useful

The pain in our teeth started gradually, and I was more focused on hers. “Soup doesn’t require chewing,” I told her. “Heated, just slightly, it won’t disturb the mouth at all.” We stocked up on Progresso, stacking cans two deep in the cabinets. We had in common a fear of the dentist, leftover from childhoods blighted by fillings in baby teeth, aggressive headgear and root canals by age nine. A few weeks in our relationship, we discovered we’d shared the same orthodontist.

Now, she had holes in her teeth, places where the composite fillings fell out, little white nuggets that she spit into her palm.

“Ow,” she said.

“Does it hurt?”

“Not really, but don't you think it should?”

“Is it tooth?”

“I don’t think so. Look for me.” She directed and I complied, bracing myself above her and lowering my face, the closest to sex we’d come in weeks.

“I see a hole. Where it came from.”

She rolled a chunk between two fingers. “Ugh, it’s disintegrating.”

“You should go to our dentist.”

She said she’d go tomorrow. She stopped asking me to look into her mouth, but I could tell when something was wrong. From the look on her face and the slowed pace of her chewing, I could tell.

Perhaps our first bonding agent wasn’t something unique. It was, after all, a small town. The man had yellowed teeth and halitosis, hairy wrists that poked out of the space between his white coat and too-tight latex gloves, and a booming business. He shoved wads of dry cotton into our gums and made a buzzing sound in his throat as he adjusted. He buzzed along to Top 40 hits and left glue on our canines.

My molars started to ache, really ache. It’s my sinuses, I reasoned. Something seasonal. I could tough it out. Just opening my mouth was a chore. I eased the toothbrush out to find the bristles bent and sticky, as if my jaws had attacked, given up, gifted me with a stranger’s effluvia.

But I went, and once in the waiting room, it seemed silly how hard it had been to get there. Then, in the chair, reclined half back, it seemed like a bad idea again. Had I moved on? I hadn't. The dentist cleaned and polished. He mentioned a referral to an oral surgeon. He flossed my teeth starting in the front. “You should start in the back though,” he said. “People have a tendency to get lazy by the time they get back there, and oh.” He pulled the floss from my mouth and wiped something yellow and gummy on my bib. He took a metal tapper from his tray. That’s all I can think to call it, a tapper. He tapped a molar, gently, then a little harder. “How does that feel?” 

“Mmm, okay,” I said, though I wasn't sure. He tapped another. He pointed a stream of air into my mouth, then suctioned. His third tap pulled at the contents of my stomach.

This couldn't exist as something that I, alone, experienced.

“Not good,” he said. “It seems, with the cleaning, I’ve uncovered a network of cavities. They start here,” he tapped, “and go all the way back here,” he tapped his way into a far corner of my mouth. I imagined mole tunnels. My teeth like an unkempt lawn. I think I saw a glint of drill-giddiness in his eyes. My stomach protested. “Do you need a moment?” he asked, sitting back, crossing ankle over knee and glancing at the Novocain. I closed my mouth cautiously, afraid of what I might find when my teeth met.

The dentist pursed his lips and pushed his hands back inside my mouth, prodding my gums and tapping. “It’s generally true that your front teeth, the adult ones, are in proportion to your face. There is a ratio that works out mathematically.” I wondered what he was trying to tell me and couldn’t ask him with my mouth wide open and his hands inside. I tried to recall, looking at my teeth, if they seemed somehow proportionally relational to my face, 1/50ththe size, or perhaps, at a distance, the same shape. I tried to recall looking at her teeth, the time that I’d held my face over her, as close as the dentist was now. I had only looked in the back, but surely I’d noticed her smile, could remember it, or at least bring it back up as an image. But what I saw instead was the soup, cans lined up in my pantry like a grin.

The dentist nodded as if he’d told me something useful. He turned away to ready his instruments. I wondered there was something off about my teeth that made them wrong, something different from teeth, in general.

Melissa Swantkowski is the fiction editor at Bodega Magazine and one-half of The Disagreement, an edited reading series based in NYC. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Joyland, The Mississippi Review, Monkeybicycle and elsewhere. You can read all of this again, and more, at melissaswantkowski.com