Reneé Bibby
Reneé Bibby is a writer based in Tucson, Arizona. She teaches at The Writers Studio and reads for Brink. Her work has appeared in Fractured Lit, Luna Station Quarterly, and Taco Bell Quarterly. Reneé coordinates a yearly Rejection Competition for writers!
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WHAT THE BODY GIVES UP​
Never all at once, but steadily, a Jenga tower collapsing over the years, children yield their teeth. At first, nobody is ready to let go. The Tooth Fairy is a terror, crawling in the bedroom in search of discarded body parts. The red roots anchoring the teeth, too tender to break. Apples skins are granite, bananas are cudgels, mashed potatoes requested for dinner every night. Weeks of candy-sized bone being reported on with the regularity of the weather, seesawed back and forth by the tongue, tugged tentatively, loosened, then regretted, and pushed back in place.
When that first Chiclet-white front tooth gives up the ghost—falling into the lap without any pain while watching TV—a scream of surprised delight, and the two-dollar payout transforms every kid into a wild prospector managing a goldmine, assaying the variegates of size and time taken to get out for the value of cashing them in.
The mouth unravels. A slice of undercooked cheese pizza tumbles a molar out the mouth onto the carpet of Chuck E. Cheese. A sneeze blasts germs and squeaks of surprise as another premolar breaks away. Brushing saws free a lateral incisor that hadn’t even seemed ready to go. One, practically perpendicular to the floor, is pulled out by Dad’s sleight of hand. A bicycle handle-bar lip-busting accident fills the mouth with bright blood, and another unmoored tooth tilts outside the bite plane as if attempting to rappel down the face. A brother’s elbow to the jaw, the culprit for an askew canine.
While the mouth empties, spilling out bits of kid, it also fills again. Children of a certain age look like a seven-year-old’s scraggly drawing of a demented grin: incisors crooked sideways, white blades of incoming teeth striving to save slots, wolfish canines growling over their still-in siblings, and horse-big front teeth dominating more than their fair share of space. The kids are half made—billboards of white enamel but also so much gum, arched and pink as ground beef.
Then it’s the last tooth, poolside, squinting, mouth agape, fingers on the rooted back
molar—emboldened by experience, all tenderness obliterated by the practicalities of wanting to swim without distraction, the tooth pulls out with a soft shuck, roots still attached, turned over to you for safekeeping. That bit of bone—what the body gives up in order to grow—is in your naked hand. The promise of a five-dollar payout extracted from you instead of the Tooth Fairy. You fold the last visible bits of babyhood in a crinkled napkin, while they scramble up the ladder of the highest diving board, a quick couple of steps to the edge, then diving, headfirst into the deep end.
Note: This was previously published in Harpoon Review, a now defunct literary journal.