Amy Turn Sharp
I had a small silver locket that held my first baby tooth. I wore it like a talisman for years. It hung between my breasts, biting lightly against my skin beneath the fabric of my bra. I would take the tooth out from time to time, pressing it in my hands, finding the small, sharp underbelly with my finger. I wished I could whittle it into a tiny whistle, to blow air through the delicate shape, and I often wanted to put it in my mouth. Weird, I know. But I was always good and would put it back inside the safe locket and let it swing against my skin. A reminder that I was once innocent—a milk-tooth honey pot of endless possibilities, a true clean slate.
My mother was so kind as to keep mysterious items in a Lane cedar chest at the foot of her bed: teeth, souvenir t-shirts from all over the world, white starched toddler dresses, postcards from my uncle in the navy, small silver bangles and charms. Teeth. She kept all my teeth in glassine envelopes, and when I discovered them, I would line them up on my bedspread and stare.
I would arrange them into a circle like a mouth. They were like runes, artifacts. I was an archeologist of myself. I left the first baby tooth from the locket in a town in England the summer of my eighteenth year. I placed it with care on top of an old wooden fence that stretched for miles along a road I had walked while thinking of my future. I wanted to live forever inside that day. I kept turning around and looking at the speck of white until it was only a blur. I gave up trying to understand my compulsions.
In college, when they ripped out my wisdom teeth, I woke from the surgery to the fat face of my dentist and his women. They welcomed me back to the twilight mainland and told me all the stories that I had been spinning. They said I spoke in French to them like a record. I spoke in French like a record, and it was normal, they said, because everyone said loony things after surgery. I was very concerned that they knew where all my teeth were hidden. Had I told them my secrets? Twelve days later I walked by the dentist office and pushed a tooth into their daffodil bed.
In 1997, in the common year starting on Wednesday, I had a terrible breakup with an emotionally unavailable man. He left me alone in his room, the room that overlooked a church parking lot, the room that sounded like bells each day like clockwork, and I took a tooth from the locket, and I put it in his pot stash. I left it for him to find, all wonky and dull, and maybe it would give him a good scare. Freak him out like he did me, my heart all limping back home. People can unlove you. Terrifying.
I flung one of the littlest cuspids over my shoulder the day I was married. Like rice. Like salt. Like luck. It probably landed on the brick streets, now ground down to dust, to the quick of the earth of southeastern Ohio. Again, years later, I think about that tooth and the deciduous ecstasy and how time is a fast train. How things can always change. Fall out. Your teeth fall out.
Your heart falls out.
When my first child was born, I planted a tree in the garden of a house I do not live in anymore.
It was a light green house in the middle of the city where I became a mother. I put a tooth in the dirt with the tree, and I held my son over it and wished that things would always be like this. He made noises that I loved, and the sun licked us. I remember everything. Sometimes, when I am driving near my old house, I stop and look over the fence into the yard of someone else’s life, and I whisper hello to myself. I am still there. I am always there.
Recently I put my favorite tooth, a beautiful molar, on the gravestone of my mother, who was killed in a car accident last year. I did it quickly, so my children or my father did not see me do this odd thing. I pointed out an imaginary bird in the sky as a distraction, and I knelt like a prayer. And it was like giving back. Here, mother. Look at what you made. I am here with you.
I only have a few teeth left from the envelopes now. The locket was lost long ago.
The teeth seem smaller each time I touch them, and it’s like going back to your primary school and seeing all the tiny toilets, all the desks. I want to try and keep them, but I have always found myself giving them away to the world, burying them in sand, or tucking one behind an old bookcase in a library. They have been left for experiences, lovers, days that have illuminated my life. No real reason. I don’t know why.
And somewhere inside my mind is a map, a cartographer’s pretty daydream of teeth.
There are weirder things in the world. People collect taxidermy. There are LARPers out there.
Revolutionary War reenactment folk. Furries. Trekkies. My dad collects giant Sunoco signs from the ’60s. Still, you would grow dizzy if you tried to follow your finger across the zigzag, haphazard travels of this heart, this toothy grin.
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Amy Turn Sharp is a poet, mother of three, and art gallery owner in Columbus, Ohio. Her career in tech and advertising has put her words across billboards, corporate UX, and even the packaging your favorite burgers come in. Her poetry and creative nonfiction have appeared in Big Mess, Meredith Corporation magazines, The Ohio State University Press, Mutha Magazine, and elsewhere.