Holes

Nicole Desjardins Gowdy

The ad for the job caught my eye in the Sunday paper, wedged between a posting for a home health aide and one for a house cleaner. Wanted: Tooth Fairy.

     My manager, with whom I’ve only spoken on the phone, tells me it’s hard to keep people in the role for long. Flying around with paper-thin wings is physically demanding, and most of the middle-aged women who apply don’t have the requisite core strength. When Oscar was a baby, I cinched my abdominal muscles back together with physical therapy. But, as the years passed, I softened into motherhood, and my body became a pillow to absorb his tears and fists, to comfort him and to smooth the harsh edges the world honed in him.

     What my manager doesn’t understand is that there are many ways to develop core strength.

     I enjoy the combination of solitude and motion. I can be both a flicker and a shadow. Each night, I receive a list of children to visit and their rewards. Teeth go for $10 in the nicer neighborhoods these days. The crackle of a paper bill feels so much more fragile than the heavy quarters I received as a child.

     Tonight, my first visit is to a small house at the end of a long dirt road, on land densely populated with trees. In the child’s small room, jagged pieces of slate, limestone, and bituminous coal line the narrow windowsill. He sleeps on his back, arms flung wide, the same way Oscar used to sleep when he was small, as if ready to throw his arms around the world, or fall backward into the ocean.

     The little boy breathes through his mouth, and I see the fresh hole, still tender and red where the tooth had been.

     I remember the day Oscar had his two lower cuspids removed, those stubborn monoliths that refused to come out on their own. He woke from the anesthesia groggy and cotton tongued, with gauze packed into the empty sockets where his teeth had been. On the drive home, he squinted out the window at the city bleached with bright sun and asked, “Am I still dead?” I laughed and said, “No, honey, you’re still alive.”

     The little boy’s body is limp and peaceful. I remove his reward from my pouch: a tiger’s eye, polished to a smooth shine, striation glistening in the moonlight. Gently slipping my hand between the pillow and mattress, I locate the tooth, sealed in a Ziploc bag, and release the stone in its place. For a moment, I hesitate, comforted by the weight of his head on the pillow pressing down on my hand.

     Before leaving, I look around his room: a scattering of action figures on the floor, a leaning stack of books beside the bed, a pile of dirty laundry in the closet. I think of Oscar’s room, a time capsule sealed behind a closed door. What would I find all these years later, brushing away layers of dust? A permission slip for the science museum field trip that was canceled. His digital camera—a record of how he saw the world. His worn baseball glove. His Pokémon cards. The cheap plastic party favors from all those birthday parties he went to (“landfill toys” we called them, since that’s where they always ended up). The last pair of socks he threw in his laundry hamper. Not his voice, or the feel of his cheek on mine when we embraced. Not the way he said “bwefkast” when he was small instead of “breakfast.” Not his last words, which only his classmates heard as their teacher packed T-shirts, paper towels, and crumpled notebook paper into their wounds with trembling hands, glancing back and forth from the door to the children like a metronome, measuring minutes, ounces, heartbeats, regrets.

     Outside the little boy’s house, I unfold my wings, and with slow, steady beats, I rise into the dark sky. High above the city, where the children sleep like stones, I fly on to the next house. The breeze against my cheeks is gentle, like Oscar’s own soft cheek pressed to mine, and as it whispers past my ear, I can almost hear his groggy voice.

© Variant Literature Inc 2023