SJ Townend

The battle between Michael and me began the first time we met at the annual village hall show. Our mums drew swords over whose Victoria sponge deserved first place. My mum nudged his mum’s top layer when she thought no one was looking. But I saw. And so did Michael’s mum. She spat on my mum’s loafers, then they tore at each other’s hair.

While an old man tried to split the women up, Michael and I ran off giggling and that’s when he showed me his shark teeth. Porcelain intruders, jagged and hungry, pressing through angered gums and overlapping their juvenile precursors which hung on strong like kids at the back of an ice-cream queue.

The disappointment on his face was impossible for him to hide when I dragged my lip back with a dirty finger to reveal that I had shark teeth too.

“Snap,” I said, before snapping my jaw in his face. He jumped, then swore, then adamantly insisted he still had more than me. And he did. But we were both young and we weren’t fools. We knew more teeth would come through for us both. 

“Wanna play shit hockey?” he said. 

“Sure.” 

I followed him outside to the back of the car park where we dicked about with sticks and whacked chunks of slate against a rusty Volvo estate. A game with the unspoken rule: who could make the biggest dent. 

Our conversation was limited, but when we did talk, it was mainly facts about teeth. 

And that’s when we decided to commit to our battle: a petty rivalry over something so absurd no one else would have understood. But in our twisted world, it was everything. It became everything. Competition coursed through our veins like fire—an instinct born, not taught, etched in the marrow of who we were.

#

At first, it was simple. We met up each Saturday afternoon on our bikes and grinned and glared and boasted when new shark teeth came through. 

“Piranha,” 

“Moray eel,” 

“Saw fish,” 

we shouted, followed by our current tally, hoping to one-up the other. 

#

“Dental crowding,” the dentist told my mother. “We’ll simply pull the baby teeth out if they become an issue.” I screamed and jumped down from the dentist’s chair and refused to go back after that.

#

One summer, when I was ten, I was horsing around with Michael when I found a human tooth in the mud by the creek. My first. The moment I held it, I felt a thrill I couldn’t explain. A tooth that had belonged to someone else would soon belong to me. My mouth bled as I drove it into my gum, fitting it into a space at the back where one day I knew wisdom teeth would erupt.

“You think you’ve won?” Michael sneered. “I’m gonna raid my mom’s top drawer. She keeps all my little sister’s milkies.” Then he peddled off home.

It only got worse after that. Michael and I began competing in earnest. We sought out teeth wherever we could: in the woods, abandoned buildings, the rear of the local pub.

We couldn’t stop, but our jaws became so full, we could barely speak; both our grins wider than they should have been, unnaturally so, with strangers’ molars wedged in between our own incisors and canines plugged into red-raw lips. We looked as if we were being devoured from the inside out. But we didn’t care what others thought when they avoided us at school. All that mattered was our battle.

“Tonight then?” I asked one Saturday afternoon.

“Yes, of course. Midnight.” Michael replied with a lisp, as if his own cramped tongue was trying to escape its ramshackle cage of haphazard enamel.

I realized then, with sickening clarity, as we agreed to creep out to meet later in the dark, to scrape, crack, and pry teeth free from living sockets, that Michael and I were no longer fighting each other. It was never about who had more teeth. 

It was about who would stop first. And neither of us would.

SJ writes horror. Her debut collection, SICK GIRL SCREAMS, is available through Brigids Gate Press. Her second collection, YOUR FINAL SUNSET, is coming through Sley House Press this year. http://www.sjtownend.com Twitter: @SJTownend