A Story of Lost Love and Damaged Teeth – Special Sneak Peak!

“Every night, there was that sound — teeth grinding against teeth.

She sleep walked around the apartment at night, muttering in tongues, jaw clenched, grinding her enamel down to a fine dust. I used to wonder where it all went. Swallowed, probably, reclaimed by her body. Or else swept away, in rivulets of drool, deposited on her stained pillowcase, like some crumbling monument, carried out to sea, grain by grain, under the pressure of rain and time.

The bruxism was an affliction I eventually acquired from her. It passed between us while we slept, somehow, like the jealousy, the insecurity, the calculated resentment.

We lived in a cramped basement apartment, next to the train station in a dying part of town. We passed the days under fluorescent lights in libraries and franchise coffee shops, in windowless offices and uninsured bars. We communicated in patchwork sentences, accented in both tongues.

And we listened to the dishes in the cupboards. It was a shrill rattling noise — every time a train pulled into the nearby metro station, every time a transport truck passed on the highway, every time a Greyhound loaded up with passengers and set off for someplace better.

The dishes rattled ceaselessly.

It became a part of the white noise of our home, like the drip of the faucet, the hum of the refrigerator, the running tally of inequities, kept in anticipation of some future argument.

At night, hairline fractures spiderwebbed across the wine glasses, the coffee mugs, the dessert plates.

The mice behind the radiators were gaining ground.

...”

– an excerpt from my latest magazine project

Bruxism is a story of how things come undone: love, monuments, and incisors. The magazine is now available for purchase at the link below: