Teeth by Amy Katherine DeBellis

Before my Hinge date I amuse myself by making faces in the mirror. I purse my mouth like an overripe strawberry, beckoning future rot. I slide oil through my hair, expensive oil that’s supposed to be very different from the grease that will seep through the roots after two days without a wash. A few minutes before sunset I slip on my combat boots and trendy trench coat and we’re out the door, me and the fragile home of my body.

I’m listening to “Botanica de los Angeles” on my earpods so I don’t notice him until he’s already seen me, this lone man on a block where I’ve realized—too late—that everyone else has crossed to the other side of the street. Automatically I keep walking towards him, past the point where I can pretend I was going to turn around anyway, and I lower the song volume to nothing so I can hear him saying to me as I pass by, “Yeah, fuck you too, bitch.”

A guttural memory ( bitch stupid bitch ) surfaces: belly-up, bobbing. My mouth tastes like rust, sharp and sudden. 

He laughs at my blank face. “What are you gonna do? That’s right, nothing.”

Something hot and feral slices through me. Still walking, I turn around and flip him the finger like a stupid, pissed-off teenager. He loves this—gleeful he stalks towards me, following me over the arid concrete, heavy hands curling into fists. And me a woman, me a weightlifter and supposedly something of a boxer and able to do a few consecutive pull-ups but still weaker than almost any untrained male, my bones like fiberglass sculpture next to their bodies of bloodless iron. Me in my useless combat boots, my body stupidly costumed.

As he closes the distance between us I stop and open my purse and find my pepper spray; my hands are shaking, but no I don’t fumble, I don’t drop the pepper spray and flee screaming down the street. With my thumb I twist the nozzle around so it’s ready, my heart thundering in my chest and in my hands and in my face, and he’s four feet away by now, panting and grinning, anticipating.

I hold the cylinder up between us. He looks from it to me, eyeballs rolling in his sockets like loose joints. The whites of his eyes are the color of spoiled milk.

“Awh, come on, I was just kidding,” he says eventually.

The whites of his eyes are the color of my ex-boyfriend’s teeth. More memories surface, bobbing. Terror like a collapsed star.

“I was just fooling around,” he says. 

We back away from each other. Unknown, unheard music is still playing in my earpods, the volume turned all the way down.

I continue on my way to the restaurant downtown. My Hinge date is a polite and well-dressed man I’ve never met before, who pulls my chair out for me and asks me about my day. I lie. I perform hope, confidence, trust. We eat handmade dumplings and are the first to applaud the live musicians. He listens respectfully to me, is sympathetic and charming and mature. At the end of the date he asks me to come home with him. I decline. “Come on,” he says. “It’s just on the next block. Just around the corner.” I think of blocks of arid concrete. I think of things coming around corners at me.

He smiles. He has teeth, too—they’re small and bashful, nestling crowded in his smile. I decline again and he stops smiling, his lips knitting a closing wound.

I unmatch him on my way home. “Botanica” is roaring in my earpods. I take a bath and the water tongues me, warm like the womb I can’t return to. I wonder when I will stop seeing men as various shades of violence. I wonder if I should stop seeing men as various shades of violence. Alone, I go to bed and lose my shape in the darkness. I circle men like jackals in my dreams.

Amy Katherine DeBellis

Image: Björn Hansson, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons – Woman with pepper spray.