Every day when we return home from school and before our mother returns home from work, my twin sister locks herself in the bathroom, alone. There, she climbs up onto the ledge of the basin and opens our mother’s cosmetics cabinet. We have known for some time now that this is where our mother hides them – our lost baby teeth. My twin sister digs around behind the soap bars and pill bottles, the BIC razors and the dead moth, until she finds them. Each tooth bound in a ball of toilet paper.
The tooth that my twin sister has developed an affinity with of late, is a premolar, and the very last of her baby teeth to have fallen out. Of all the milk teeth our mother has collected, this is the most peculiar-looking one of all. Two sharp roots jut out from the base of the tooth in opposing directions, and the remaining meat from the gum has, like me, the vanished twin, refused to dissolve.
My twin sister likes to think back to all the weeks she had spent wiggling this tooth out. At her desk in class, watching tv after school, at the dinner table, on the toilet, before falling asleep at night – she had sat with her index finger and thumb in her mouth, wiggling and wiggling, wiping the drool with her sleeve. Eyes wide in trance.
From the basin ledge, my twin sister likes to hold this tooth up to the window light and rotate it; her very own little meteor, like me, floating somewhere in space. It is there in the light that my twin sister notices the faint yellow stains on the tooth’s surface. This gives both me and her a sense of relief – to know that in the tooth’s short lifespan, something had enough time to leave its mark. My twin sister tries to recall the last meal that might’ve been chewed by this very tooth. A packet of sour worms, a peanut butter sandwich, an apple, a biscuit, the jelly around my organs.
After shining the tooth on her skirt, my twin sister likes to run the little white bone slowly over her mouth. Bottom lip first, then the top, round and round, smooth as a bottlecap. When she finishes running the tooth over her lips, my twin sister uses the roots to scratch long red lines into the skin of her thighs. Later, when she and our mother will bathe together, my twin sister will lie about the source of the bloodied scratches: a stick, a fall, a cat, her dead twin sister’s fingernails in the night, she might say.
This tooth had fallen out in the lift-club kombi on her way home from school. My twin sister had been sitting in the backseat and didn’t want the driver or the older kids to see that blood had dribbled onto the upholstery. She remembered how she had said nothing, how she just swallowed the blood pooling in her mouth. How she had ripped a piece of paper out of her homework book and scrunched the tooth up inside. How she wished I was there to take the blame, like a twin sister should. How she had tried so hard not to smile.
Every day, when our mother’s car pulled up to the driveway after work, this is when my twin sister’s ritual with the tooth would end. Quickly, it would be re-wrapped in its little ball of toilet paper and stashed back in the cabinet – just as my twin sister had found it, but never as our mother had left it.
At her desk in class, watching tv after school, at the dinner table, on the toilet, and before bed at night – instead of wiggling the tooth, my twin sister now moves the tip of her tongue in and out of the slippery black hole in her gum – mourning what was only ever a placeholder for permanence.
About the Author:
Robyn Perros is a South African writer. Her work has appeared in print and online in New Contrast Literary Journal, Mslexia’s Best Women’s Short Fiction anthology, South Africa’s Short.Sharp.Stories anthology, Isele Magazine, The Branches Journal of Literature and Philosophy (forthcoming), and The Brussels Review (forthcoming), among others. Her unpublished novella, Choosing an Outfit for the End of the World, was longlisted for the 2023 Island Prize for Debut African Fiction. She is currently a PhD candidate at Rhodes University, where she occasionally teaches. Her research is in the field of digital death studies, and her other mediums include photography and street art. She lives in Makhanda. https://robynperros.blog/ @robynperros
Isele Magazine 