CW: abuse, violence, death / dying.

The Story I Tell About the Beginning

I have told this story before, and I will tell it again, and each telling grows more teeth. Sometimes thirty-four, thirty-six. Sometimes they multiply faster than your science allows, like every word you made me swallow coming back to bite you.

You want to know how I came to be counting teeth, what led to this particular obsession, and whether the counting came before or after the extra teeth. Whether this story has forgotten its manners, arriving unannounced without a “proper” beginning.

Day One: The Counting Begins (Three Versions)
Version One: What the Tongue Finds

This morning, I found thirty-four teeth in my mouth instead of thirty-two. I counted once, then again to be sure, running my tongue around each surface while my coffee grew cold. The two extras nest behind my molars. I do this every day now, although I can’t remember when I decided to start. The counting began the week after the DNA Ancestry envelope appeared in the morning glory vines. I simply found myself running my tongue around my mouth, checking inventory like Grann used to count her dwindling possessions after each move, each eviction, and each time the world reminded her she didn’t belong. My tongue finds a new ridge. I count again. Thirty-four. Thirty-six. Sharp, uninvited, growing while I sleep.

My neighbour, Mrs. Patterson, brings food on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Red beans, cornbread, sometimes smothered okra over rice with too much paprika. I thanked her. She smiled with orange teeth, faint and waxy, the way artificial flowers smile at the dead.

Grann taught me about teeth in Port-au-Prince when I was little. “Thirty-two exactly, not one more, not one less,” she would say, counting them off on weathered fingers.

“Dèyè mòn, gen mòn,” she would add in Kreyòl—beyond mountains, there are mountains. When I couldn’t sleep, when the heat pressed down and the mosquitoes sang, Grann would tell me the story of a hunter who murdered circles. Stories, when he found them, breathed in spirals, inhaling memory, exhaling prophecy. He hated their refusal to die on schedule. So, he sharpened his doctrine, sharpened his knife. He declared that a story must have three cuts: a beginning, a middle, and an end. Three wounds precisely. Never four. Never zero. Each time he found a tale, he split it into three parts—the wound, the fight, the prize. The wound justified everything. The fight made audiences lean forward. The prize let them sleep.

The hunter called it civilization. The knife agreed, licking itself clean. He said, “Look, the world is legible now.” But clarity was only the shine of his blade, stories rendered dead and reflected as progress. Every time he cut a story, resistance remained behind. Teeth. White and hard, watching from the soil. They sprouted like rage, like memory, like ancestors refusing to be erased. Some teeth spoke Hausa. Some clicked Xhosa. Some hummed Saharan desert blues. When the hunter walked, they bit his heels. When he slept, the erased chattered in his ears. The teeth organized. Molars became chiefs, incisors scouts. Canines waited, sharp in the shadows. They learned his patterns.

In time, the teeth grew into mountains. Great white ridges that tore the horizon. These mountains refused geography, appearing wherever he laid his head, wherever he planted his flag. The hunter tried to climb, but each mountain opened like a jaw, swallowing his path. Inside the mountains’ throats: every story he’d butchered still breathing, stitching itself back together in the dark.

The hunter vanished into the mountains. The dismembered tales swarmed in; their rattling became a roar from above, below, inside. He covered his head, but empire cannot silence what it buries.

His knife tried to cut its way out, but found only more teeth—teeth giving birth to teeth, infinite teeth. They rose, marched, and carried stories that breathe in spirals, double back, and refuse his arithmetic. They laughed in rattles, gleamed in sorrow, and refused to be carved into wounds and prizes. They grew fourth acts, fifth acts, no acts at all.

Grann said that is why we count. Not to keep order, but to remember what cuts us, to know what bites back, and to prove the mouth holds more than thirty-two truths.

Version Two: What Your Blood Carries

You are a woman living in a shotgun house in New Orleans. You have been told your whole life that your body does not belong to you—by your family, the state, and the men who claim to help you. You have learned to make yourself small, to count and recount the parts of yourself, to ensure nothing has been taken without permission.

Your body has added, not subtracted. Your blood carries the blueprints for weapons your people once grew in darker times. You run your tongue around your mouth and find extra teeth. You do not question this. Your body knows that survival sometimes requires becoming the thing others fear most.

Version Three: What The Mouth Swallows

This morning, I woke up choking on blood and enamel shards. My mouth was full of new teeth that had erupted overnight, like accusations finally finding voice. They cut my tongue when I tried to speak, scream, or call for help. But no one listens to women like me. So, I learned to count instead of scream.

The shotgun house breathes around me as I count. I know it’s counting along—not keeping time but keeping score. Through the kitchen window, Mrs. Patterson’s shrimp étouffée burns again in the yellow house across the street, butter and bell peppers going acrid while she tracks me from room to room instead of tending her stove. I’ve started timing the old woman: seven seconds from when I enter the kitchen until her curtain shifts, twelve seconds when I move to the bedroom. Such devotion. Her dinner suffers from her vigilance. It has become a performance she never misses. This is the version I don’t tell Dr. Henley.

The Story the House Remembers

I am quite aware you are reading this, dear. I can feel your eyes moving across these words like fingertips along my wallpaper. You wish to understand my methods, do you not? How do I cultivate the women who dwell within my walls?

Allow me to share a confidence: I do not change anyone, strictly speaking. I merely remember. And when the remembering becomes too weighty, too abundant, too keen, I permit some of it to seep into the ladies who require it most desperately.

I was erected in nineteen-twenty-three upon a parcel of land the city failed to excavate with adequate thoroughness before construction commenced. The bones beneath speak tongues that those real estate gentlemen never troubled themselves to learn. Bones that recall being human, formidable, and hunters before they were made quarry.

Are you familiar with what transpires when one constructs a dwelling upon unmarked burial grounds? Upon remains interred in secrecy, without ceremony, and the benedictions that allow the departed their rest?

The dead do not slumber. They nourish, instruct, and make ready.

Each lady who takes lodgings with me possesses the appropriate bloodline markers, those dormant inheritances that may be roused under adequate duress. I do not select them through conscious effort. Rather, I . . . beckon and they respond. They come to reside within my embrace until they acquire what knowledge they require. Call it ancestral recall given room to operate.

Do I assist them? Or do I exploit them?

The answer, I’m afraid, is both. I draw sustenance from their metamorphoses, growing more robust with each woman who discovers her true appetite. Yet they require what I provide—the sanctuary to become hunter, the license to cease being hunted, the inherited memories that teach them how to endure in a world that would devour them whole. We employ each other. It is, one might say, an equitable arrangement. For the most part.

The Story I Tell About the House

On summer evenings, the air tastes of café au lait and fryer oil drifting down Dauphine; cypress beadboard sweats under my palm. Across the street, the yellow cottage with its gingerbread trim keeps its curtains always half-drawn, positioned at the exact angle where someone inside can see out but I cannot see in. I catch the curtains twitching when I water the morning glories, a flutter quick as a swallowed word, fabric settling back before I can focus. Someone tends that garden obsessively. Caladiums and sweet potato vines pruned to submission, not a brown edge, not a stray tendril. But I never see the gardener. The plants simply appear groomed overnight, as if the maintenance happens while I sleep, while I blink, while my back turns to make coffee.

The shotgun house where I live was built the same year Grann was born, both of them learning to bend without breaking, to weather storms that aim to destroy them. But the house learned another lesson: how to select its tenants.

The house runs one hundred feet deep and sixteen feet wide, with three rooms lined up like vertebrae in a spine. Open the front door and you can see straight through to the back porch—deliberate design, not accident. The house needs clear sight lines to track what moves through it. Katrina’s high mark still stains the plaster four feet up, a brown ring circling each room like a protective ward. The flood didn’t damage the house—it fed it.

The Story the Documents Tell

Fingerprints smudge my mailbox daily, whorls and loops that aren’t mine, still damp in the morning humidity. The mail looks handled, with envelopes torn at the corners, as if someone had tested the contents without opening them. Probably the postman. Not what I know it could be, someone checking for a name that doesn’t match the lease. I should move. But moving requires paperwork. Deposits. Questions. That’s what I tell myself, while planning which direction I’d run if the knock comes.

Yesterday, among the morning glories that climb my courtyard fence, I found an envelope with no return address. Inside: DNA results tracing my ancestry to Buganda, plus photocopied genealogical documents about someone named Nakibuuka, connected to my bloodline through the ships that carried my ancestors to Saint-Domingue. Tucked among the genealogy papers was another document: pages from a missionary journal, written by Reverend Samuel Morrison of the Church Missionary Society, dated 1887:

“Your God gave you thirty-two teeth,” the savage [sic] woman Nakibuuka told me with that terrible smile. “My ancestors gave me forty-seven. Would you like to know what the extra fifteen are for?”

The Story of Dr. Henley

Dr. Henley doesn’t understand what this house does to the women who live inside it. But he knows the house exists. He knows it houses “vulnerable” women, as he works with the organization that places them there. Safe Harbor Medical contracts with New Orleans Housing Assistance to provide mental health services for undocumented women in transitional housing. The city has three properties designated explicitly for this population. 1247 Dauphine Street is one of them.

Dr. Henley volunteered to take the Dauphine Street cases specifically. He makes house calls to clients who can’t report him without risking deportation. He’s been cycling through displaced women for three years. They all disappeared into ICE custody, deportation proceedings, and the underground networks that help women vanish when the system becomes too dangerous.

Or so he believes.

In his office, Dr. Henley writes these notes while touching himself. Not sexually—worse. He touches the bite marks his last patient Helen left, two perfect crescents that never healed right. He presses them when he writes about you. He needs the pain to focus:

Patient presents with indicators of adjustment disorder following immigration trauma.

Helen’s file sits beneath his notepad, pages soft from handling. She’d presented the same way at first: compliant, grateful, and desperate for help. God, the power of it. She’d cried when he offered to help expedite her case paperwork. Beautiful tears.

Then she learned to read the room. The way his breathing changed when she crossed her legs. How his questions drifted from trauma to anatomy. “Do you have difficulty with intimacy?” he’d ask, thumb on her pulse. He should have seen it coming. The way her jaw clenched when she smiled.

When she bit him that last night of their session, her teeth barely broke skin—frightened little nips, like a cornered rabbit. The sedative worked within minutes. Respiratory failure at minute seven. Complications from treatment, the certificate read.

He shakes the memory off, presses harder on the scars. Returns to scribbling his patient notes about me:

Subject demonstrates strong transference patterns, likely seeking father-figure replacement due to cultural displacement.

The exact words he wrote about Helen, too, before she soured the story, before she forced him to cut her ending short. You remind him of Helen, but you’re quieter. You don’t flinch when he leans close. Don’t document. Don’t threaten. The perfect patient.

Day Seven: The House Call
The Official Version

Dr. Henley made a house call today. He said clinical environments can be triggering for trauma survivors, and that healing happens better in familiar spaces.

He removed his shoes, examined my jaw, and checked for TMJ symptoms. He was professional, caring, and appropriate. He mentioned his former patient Helen, whose memory motivates his work with displaced women.

I told him about my research into Nakibuuka, the ancestor whose story I’d discovered in the genealogy documents, how she lived in Kabaka Mwanga’s court as the King’s chief wife during the missionary period, how she chose resistance when the colonial missionaries demanded submission.

He called the family history fascinating, as he studied the missionary journal pages I’d spread out on the coffee table. He noted the meticulous detail in the genealogical work. I didn’t tell him about the ink on my fingers that fluoresces under ultraviolet light. I didn’t tell him that the documents are writing themselves, new details appearing whenever I need to understand another piece of the puzzle.

Version Two: What My Body Remembers

Dr. Henley’s thumb pressed against my jaw joint, supposedly checking for tension. However, the pressure lasted too long and lingered in areas that had nothing to do with the psychological examination.

He told me to open my mouth wider, and I did, because I have been trained to open it when men ask me to. His fingers explored inside my mouth with curiosity that felt personal, not professional. He murmured that it was interesting, but didn’t explain what he found curious, and I didn’t ask. Dr. Henley scraped samples from my gums with his fingernail, collecting tissue he thought I wouldn’t notice. But my new teeth sensed the violation.

His wedding ring caught the light, white gold worn thin by years of wear, or so I thought. But when I focused, I could smell the deception on him like pheromones and taste his lies through chemoreceptors that shouldn’t exist in human mouths.

He said I reminded him of Helen as he settled beside me on the sofa. Said she’d lived here before me, same room, same careful way of organizing thoughts. Same need for guidance.

His hand rested on my knee as he spoke about therapeutic boundaries, trust, and the special nature of our professional relationship. But my enhanced senses detected his arousal, his excitement disguised as clinical interest. When he pulled his hand away, two of his fingers bore puncture wounds from teeth that moved faster than human reflex. He called it remarkable, staring at the blood on his fingers. Just like Helen, he said. Right before she disappeared.

Version Three: The Story My Teeth Tell

We grew in the mouth of the woman before her, Helen, whose real name was Elena Santos, whose immigration case Dr. Henley promised to help with if she’d just trust him, let him help her in special ways, and keep their sessions private.

The Story of Mrs. Patterson’s Network

Mrs. Patterson doesn’t work alone. She’s part of a network.

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency pays civilian informants for tips that lead to arrests. Small bounties for “actionable” reports. It’s called the ICE Tip Line, and it’s perfectly legal. Mrs. Patterson has been doing this for three years, ever since her husband died and left her with medical bills that Medicare wouldn’t cover. She specifically targets transitional housing for displaced women who can’t fight back and will not report her. Women who disappear before they can cause any problems.

She works with a network of other informants: landlords who report tenants who pay in cash, employers who report workers who can’t provide social security numbers, and neighbors who report anyone who seems “suspicious.”

The Dauphine Street house is particularly valuable because of its high turnover rate. New women every six months, regular income, no long-term relationships that might complicate things.

She doesn’t know why the turnover is so high or what happens to the women after they disappear. She just knows they stop answering their doors, stop collecting their mail, stop existing in ways she can observe. She assumes ICE got them. She collects her payments and moves on to the next tenant.

The Story Mrs. Patterson Tells

That evening, Mrs. Patterson brings her third casserole of the week: shrimp and rice in the same ceramic dish.

“You’re looking so much better, dear,” she says, peering past me into the kitchen with eyes that linger too long on shadows, searching for evidence of the wrongness she senses but cannot name. She wants to cut my story into the three parts she understands. Beginning: pitiable refugee. Middle: grateful recipient. End: successful deportation. Like the hunter with his knife, she needs my narrative to have wounds she can document, fights she can report, prizes ICE can collect.

“I do worry about young women living alone,” she continues, backing away even as she speaks, some mammalian part of her brain recognizing danger signals her conscious mind hasn’t processed.

Her questions come faster now, more urgent: family connections, employment status, immigration documentation—the systematic data collection of someone who has promised that information to people with badges and guns.

“How long have you been in the States?” The question carries new weight, new desperation.

But when I smile at her—really smile, letting just a few more teeth show than anatomy should allow—her pupils dilate and her heart rate spikes, adrenaline flooding her system.

“A while,” I say, and my voice carries harmonics that shouldn’t exist in human vocal cords.

“Well.” She stepped backward, nearly stumbling off the porch. “I should let you get to your dinner.”

Later, through my window, I watch her making phone calls with shaking hands; the casserole tastes of fear-tainted cortisol. My enhanced palate can analyze her stress hormones with biochemical precision.

Day Fourteen:
The Story of Mrs. Patterson (Three Versions)

Version One: The Story I Remember

The papers were spread across the kitchen table when I woke up. My handwriting filled the margins—neat, careful annotations in blue ink that I did not remember making. The genealogy documents lay in perfect rows, like place settings for a dinner party I had not planned.

I recognized my own penmanship immediately, of course. One always recognizes one’s own hand, the particular slant of letters learned in childhood. But I had no memory of writing these careful lies, these elaborate fabrications about Nakibuuka, missionary journals, and ancestral hungers. Perhaps I had been sleepwalking again.

The house was tranquil around me as I studied the false documents. Not the expectant quiet of yesterday, but a listening quality, as if the walls were holding their breath. The morning glories outside the kitchen window hung perfectly still, no breeze to stir them, their purple faces all turned inward toward the glass.

I folded the papers along their creases and put them away in the kitchen drawer. Then I made coffee and counted my teeth. Forty-four this morning. I was pretty certain of the number, though I counted three times to be sure. The new ones had sharp edges that cut my tongue when I ran it over them too quickly.

Mrs. Patterson had not been by with a casserole in several days. This was unusual, as she had been so reliable in her visits, so consistent in her concern. I found myself missing her cheerful intrusions, the way she would peer past me into the kitchen with bright, interested eyes.

I walked to my front window and looked across the street at her house. The windows were dark, the little garden neglected. Perhaps she had gone to visit relatives. Maybe she was ill. It would be neighborly to check on her, I thought. I crossed the street in my robe and slippers, the morning air cool against my skin. The front door was slightly ajar, not wide enough for anyone to notice unless they were standing very close, as I was now. I pushed it open with one finger.

“Mrs. Patterson?” I called softly. “Are you quite all right?”

The house smelled of flowers and cleaning solution, and beneath a sweet, cloying scent that reminded me of the funeral home where we had held Grann’s service.

I found Mrs. Patterson in her kitchen, seated at the table as if she had been waiting for me. Her head was tilted back at an odd angle, dark stains spreading across the front of her yellow dress.

I was quite proud of myself for not screaming. Instead, I sat down across from her at the little table and studied her face. She looked surprised, her mouth open in a small O, her eyes wide. On the table beside her was a notebook filled with her careful handwriting, containing dates, times, and observations about my comings and goings. The last entry read:

Subject shows increased agitation. Recommend immediate intervention.

I tore out the pages about me and folded them carefully, putting them in the pocket of my robe. Then I walked home across the street, leaving Mrs. Patterson’s front door exactly as I had found it.

Back in my own kitchen, I made more coffee and tried to remember what had happened. But my mind felt cloudy, distant, as if I were trying to recall a dream upon waking. The harder I concentrated, the more the memories slipped away. I must have done something to Mrs. Patterson. This was a reasonable conclusion, given the evidence.

Version Two: The Story The House Remembers

She arrived at my threshold at precisely 2:17 a.m. Mrs. Patterson. Not during the daylight hours with her casseroles and manufactured pleasantries. She came under the cover of darkness, when she presumed the lady who dwells within my walls would be slumbering.

But I do not rest, dear. Nor does my tenant when the appetite grows too insistent, when the teeth press too urgently against her gums, and when the ancestral memories supersede her waking consciousness.

Mrs. Patterson possessed a key, if you can imagine such presumption. The housing placement program provides emergency access to what they term “community liaisons”—individuals charged with observing these vulnerable women, and reporting when they become what the authorities deem “troublesome.”

She admitted herself without ceremony. Proceeded directly to the kitchen. Commenced photographing the genealogical documents with her modern apparatus. Evidence, she termed it. Documentation of what she called “delusional episodes” and “fabricated identity materials.”

The lady who resided within my embrace then awakened. Mrs. Patterson never managed to return to my domicile. The woman with forty-two teeth accompanied her across the thoroughfare, accepted an invitation for evening tea, and assisted Mrs. Patterson in comprehending precisely who she had been observing.

Version Three: What Actually Happened

You are walking across the street, but your feet don’t feel like your feet. Mrs. Patterson’s door opens before you knock because she’s been watching through the window for weeks; that’s what they pay her to do.

“I know what you are,” she says, but her voice sounds far away, distorted.

Your mouth opens to respond, but the wrong voice comes out. Not your voice. Nakibuuka’s voice. What speaks through you has always lived in your blood, in the spiral of your DNA, waiting. Speaking English with an accent that died two centuries ago.

“You know nothing, little spy. You count coins from betraying your neighbors, but you cannot count what I carry in my mouth.”

The teeth erupt so fast they slice your gums open, blood flooding your mouth, forty-two becoming forty-three, forty-four, sharp enough to puncture bone. You taste her fear before you taste her flesh, cortisol and adrenaline and the bitter tang of understanding that she picked the wrong prey.

You don’t remember biting. You remember the wet sound her throat made when your teeth found the artery. The way her blood hit the back of your mouth, warm and metallic and satisfying in ways your conscious mind will never acknowledge. You remember her trying to crawl toward the phone, fingernails scraping linoleum, leaving red streaks.

Her notebook hits the kitchen floor with a slap. Pages scatter. Your name written over and over in her careful handwriting. Times. Dates. Surveillance notes. Evidence of betrayal.

You remember her pulse against your teeth, rapid, then slower, then gone. The way her bones cracked between your molars. You remember thinking, very clearly, that this is what justice tastes like when it finally has teeth.

You walk back across the street in your robe and slippers, her blood drying under your fingernails, the taste of her still coating your teeth. You remember thinking how neighborly you were being, checking on an elderly woman who lived alone.

Day Eighteen: The Story That Begins With Forty-Seven Teeth

Dr. Henley arrives at seven-thirty, carrying daisies and a small black medical bag.

“These are lovely,” I say, accepting the flowers. The stems are still damp, but the air around them is wrong. My enhanced olfactory receptors detect sedatives, numbing agents, and the faint metallic trace of surgical steel.

A pulse flares beneath the crescent scar on his right hand—my bite from his second visit, when he insisted on examining my molars and pressed his thumb against my jaw hinge. Each throb travels up his wrist in a visible wave. My mouth tingles in response. The rhythm in his blood has aligned with mine, the same way a tuning fork feels its pair across a room.

“You look different tonight, Mirlande,” he says. His smile holds steady, but his voice tips upward at the end of my name, vowel trembling. My teeth have reached forty-four now, close enough to Nakibuuka’s forty-seven.

His pupils dilate. Sweat beads along his brow in symmetrical drops. The muscles in his forearm tighten and release in rhythmic contractions.

“You’ve gone to so much trouble,” he says, looking at the table I’ve set with Grann’s china. But his eyes catalogue exit routes, his autonomic nervous system flooding his bloodstream with fight-or-flight hormones.

“No trouble at all.” I pour wine into glasses, my movements carrying fluid precision. “I wanted to discuss our therapeutic relationship.”

He reaches for the glass. His fingers jolt, a sudden spasm that jerks the tendons along his knuckles. The bite scar reddens as fresh capillaries burst beneath the skin. It looks like a mouth attempting speech.

“This smells incredible.” His throat clicks against each syllable. “What’s your secret?”

“It is a family recipe.”

Dr. Henley raises the glass to his lips and drinks, knuckles white. The wine catches the light, dark as arterial blood, while red rivulets cling to the crystal in thin, trembling trails. When I smile—really smile, letting all forty-four teeth show—he drops the glass.

“Your teeth!”

“What about them?”

“How many . . . how—”

His jaw muscles seize. His tongue pushes forward, the tip quivering.

I run my tongue across the sharp edges. “Nakibuuka had forty-seven. I’m almost there.”

A tremor ripples through his torso.

“Tell me about Helen,” I say, rising from my chair.

The sound my jaw makes when I stand—a wet clicking, joints articulating in ways they shouldn’t—sends him stumbling backward until his shoulders hit the wall. His hands are pressed flat against the plaster behind him.

His diaphragm contracts in a sharp spasm. Muscles along his throat begin a peristaltic motion—contractions designed for swallowing now reversed, pulling words up from his chest. My teeth planted the command, leaving a dormant pathogen in his bloodstream with my bite. It has completed its incubation.

His lips part. “Helen was my patient.” Each word expels from his chest with the force of a gag reflex. His hands claw at his throat, skin reddening where fingernails drag across the surface. I take a step closer. He turns his head away, but I can see him looking at my mouth from the corner of his eye, trying to count what he’s seeing there.

“What happened to her?”

His vocal cords strain. Veins in his neck bulge. The pathogen has seized control of his autonomic speech centers. His body can no longer regulate deception. Every suppressed memory rises through his bloodstream like gas escaping a sealed corpse.

“She threatened to expose me,” he gasps. “I injected her—respiratory arrest—seven minutes—she died—I wrote the report—”

His head jerks to the side as another spasm travels down his spine. His eyes remain locked on my teeth with the stunned focus of prey. I tilt my head, watching him with unblinking focus that mammals reserve before they strike.

“I didn’t mean for her to—”

His voice cuts off. The air in the room holds the silence like a blade at his throat. He slides along the wall, trying to reach the door. I open my mouth and keep opening it, jaw dislocating with a wet pop, revealing rows upon rows of teeth that spiral back into my throat like a shark’s maw.

His knees buckle, pulse flickering along his carotid artery. Blood vessels burst in the whites of his eyes. A red web spreads across the sclera. His body stops resisting. My vision collapses into carmine. Memory floods in—mine, hers, theirs. The room dissolves into pulse and breath.

The house exhales. Blood-soaked fabric clings to my skin, still warm. New molars slide into place with a clean, decisive click. When my mouth closes, I have forty-seven teeth.

Count yours carefully.