Primordial: An Abstraction

63

The snow comes down more horizontally than vertically and the wind sends ferocious ripples across the windowscreens on the porch, threatening to tear off the windowscreens and hurl them into the Loch. The corpses of Junebugs remain intact, the fingers of their insect limbs fused to the steel lattice. Nothing can evacuate them. Not even the heavy breaths of God.

I awake.

Headache. In the center of my forehead. The frontal lobe. It throbs.

Another memory swims to the delicate surface of my consciousness. The memory parts the headache like the Red Sea, relegating the pain to my temples.

I have a loose tooth. It’s my first one.

My stepfather sees me wiggling the tooth with the tip of my tongue and drags me out to the Shed by the wrist, raking me across the gravel. I can feel the blood exit my knees despite my anxiety, my unbroken scream.

In the Shed, my stepfather stares hard into the middle distance as I nurse my wounds and plot my escape.

I hear insects.

My young brain lacks tactical prowess. I fail to accomplish even the vaguest gesture towards freedom.

The Shed is thin and tall and constricting. Not much room to move in here.

I can’t see the roof. The walls rise into an elusive square of darkness.

The wall is full of instruments.

My stepfather selects an instrument.

“No,” I say.

“I’m gonna get that tooth, boy. C’mere.”

“No,” I say.

“Gimme that tooth, boy. Gimme that old tooth in your head. I’m gonna get that old tooth.”

“No,” I say.

“You’ll feel better. Man’s gotta get his tooth yanked out sometimes. Makes a man a man.”

“Stop it,” I say.

“I’m not doing nothing.”

“Stop it,” I say.

“C’mere.”

“No,” I say.

He grabs me.

I scream.

He pries open my mouth.

I’m still screaming. Harder now.

He shoves the instrument into my mouth.

I choke.

He doesn’t care.

The pain is excruciating. I might pass out.

I don’t pass out.

I can feel the instrument.

It’s breaking my teeth.

All of them.

My stepfather’s grunting and shouting at me.

He wants the tooth.

I shouldn’t have wiggled it.

I should never wiggle anything.

I miss the glad heyday of Critical Theory. I imagine the University ejaculated scholarly heterodox and dynamism from every gleaming orifice in that era.

But the tooth.

The tooth.

He’s got it now, I think.

There’s so much blood.

Red. Bright red. Hammer blood.

Not blood.

Blood is dark, like bile.

My blood.

My blood is bile.

Lipids beware.

You don’t stand a chance.

The combustion chamber of my eventless gallbladder cannot possibly prepare you for the vagina dentata of my reckless duodenum.

My stepfather is pulling out all of my teeth.

Has pulled out all of my teeth.

I can’t feel anything.

Numb.

I can’t see anything.

Blind.

I can taste my bile.

And I can smell the Shed.

There’s no way to describe it.

Analogies can’t approach it.

Nothing smells like the Shed.

Nothing.