The Wire House

Originally published in Esoterica Zine (2015)

Mother, may I drown here?
The concrete transcends to mirrors in this weather, reflecting back the biting neon portrait of store fronts and diners.
The rain is heavy down my neck. The warm, fat, tears of a drama queen.
The Wire House is a concrete dog kennel left out to rot in someone’s back yard.
Cracking at every seam; flaking, disintegrating, washing out of its metal structural bones and spreading its decay across the asphalt road.
I stand outside only because I cannot bear the smell inside.
But I can't light a fucking cigarette in this weather.
I am through the doorway, into the broken darkness, huffing liver disease and dime-store perfume. I touch the wet velvet of my skirt, a sodden second skin, I leak when I move.
Light steals its way through the gaps of the boarded windows, pierces the gloom within. I've never been here during daylight hours, but I imagine that the darkness is eternal, as permanent as all other residents of The Wire House.
I find Cake on the floor of the front room, mummified within a blue sleeping bag that has seen better days long past.
I nudge him with my foot.
He remains still.
I crouch to scrunch his face in my hand but he is rigid, stiff.
The summer storm outside has made the air dense and humid, soggy in my lungs. But Cake's face is the marble sheen of winter, glassy and pallid in the dim light. I drop my bag by his head. He will be needing my services today.
I unzip his cotton coffin as far as possible.
“He's dead, yeah?”
Hurricane peeks at me from the doorway.
“You always sneak up on people like that, kid?”
He shrugs and chews his lips, his hands twitch and I have an urge to brush his hair.
He crouches to the floor and whines like a cat in heat, rocking on his heels. Baby always needs something.
“He's been dead at least a day”
Hurricane doesn't look at me, he continues to pivot in an easing motion, stomach cramp from withdrawal is a bitch alright.
I'm only here for the teeth, I don't need to be babysitting.
I light two cigarettes and hold one out to him, the smoke drifting.
An incense stick for this funeral parlour scene.
He shuffles towards me to retrieve it and I snap my arm back. Dust re-settling, the compression of muscle beneath my hand, the reddening whites of his eyes. I yank his head back and inhale his ethanol skin. I can give him something for the pain, but I want payment first and he's already overdue.
I slide my bag over to us with a foot. His eyes move downwards, eyelashes extending the shadows of his face.
“Fill it up, boy”
I release him and toss the cigarette at his bare feet.
He darts to pick both it and the bag up from the floor without the contact of my skin. He sprints from the room and I get to work.

The mouths of the dead are always more comfortable to be inside, they don't try to talk around my fingers, drool down my sleeve. The muscle resists me and I crack the jaw with force. Sorry, bud. I guess there aint much to talk about in the grave anyway.
Enamel dust.
Coagulation.
he sensation of crushed glass.
Organs lubricating.
Go easy honey, you can take care of that later.
I hold Cake's teeth in the palm of my hand like confetti. They jingle when I move, clatter like chips of china off of one another.
I fill up my coat pockets with them.
Enamel diamonds.
Pockets of calcium jewels.
I press my fingertips into the spaces of his gums that previously held the teeth, they fit the indentations uniformly. I dig my nails in through the latex and clutch his vacant mouth with force, his body a new glove.
I puppeteer the skull and force Cake to nod or shake his head, in answer to my unspoken questions. I put my cigarette out on his tongue and close the jaw back together.
He was a human ash-tray in this life and he'll be a human ash-tray in the next.
The smoke from my extinguished cigarette leaks out from his nose, slips from between his pale lips and drifts upwards into the room. I'm still watching it rise when Hurricane comes back. He stands in the doorway and watches me silently, I know he is afraid and I do all that I can to relish that fact.
“Bring it here,” I tell him.
Hurricane shuffles towards me with the bag, now heavy and filled, swinging between his knees. He dumps it on the floor beside me and the impacting echo rings from room to room.
“That's all I could get”
I open it up to check he isn't trying to fuck me, not that I would mind filling my coat pockets up with extra teeth tonight.
Hurricane has such little teeth, peg teeth, like a those of a child.
In the low light I can just make out the contents of the bag — rolls of copper wire, wound up like a giant tangled slinky. Jutting and twisted amongst itself.
I think of cat gut.
I think of Hurricane's intestinal track.
I think of cutting him open and rebuilding his innards with the copper wire. Replacing his soft tissue with the cold metal.
I'd make him a work of art. An internal installation.
“Hurricane, do you like modern art?”
“What?”
I light another cigarette and zip up the bag. It'll do.
I retrieve a quart baggy from my bra and hand it to him. He snatches it from me with earnest. Scuttles from the room back to whatever rotting hole in the ceiling he came from. I listen to his bare feet thunder across the splintering floorboards, fading into the distance. The Wire House stretches on forever, I'm not sure I've even been in all the rooms.
I pack myself up and open Cake's sleeping bag fully, exposing him as much as possible.
The rats can have him.

I start heading for the door but catch movement in the shadows at the bottom of the stairwell. I stop to crush the spent cigarette under my heel. The shadows are watching me but they don't venture forth.
“Yes?”
Stillness.
The eerie lullaby of heavy rainfall dripping down through the house.
The shadows part and a small girl extends from them towards me.
She's the youngest resident of The Wire House I have ever seen, she can't be much older than 17.
“What can I do for you darling?”
She watches me with the wariness of a beaten dog.
“They call you the tooth fairy. Why?”
I want to laugh, what a fucking ridiculous title, surely they can do better than that. Jesus Christ.
“Use your imagination”
She spits and I almost smack her. That's a filthy habit.
She twitches the same as the rest, nerves jumping, she's probably been in withdrawal for a few days.
“I'm needin'. I can't sleep no more without it”
“And?”
“And I heard you could hook me up”
“Do you have my fee?”
She pulls at her hair. Her fingernails are filthy and I think of removing them.
“Y'see, all the copper wire left is on the top floor and I can't go there. Hurricane owns that floor, y'know, him and his boys, they watch it all day allllllll dayyyyy. They got the stairwells blocked and everything”
“That's not my problem. No fee, no goods”
She spits again and I look away.
Her hands shake so bad I can hear the bones pop.
“I can get ya teeth. I'll give you some of mine, y'know”
Interesting.
“Is that so?”
“Yeah yeah, that's gotta be worth a few hits y'know?”
Sure.
I retrieve the pliers from my bag and hold them up to her face.
“Are you sure?”
She recoils back from me but I can see in her face that her habit is more painful than what I will do to her. She's willing.
“Yeah”
I put the pliers back in my bag. I have a better idea.
“Since this is a first time transaction I'll show you a little kindness”
She looks as uncomfortable by those words as I feel saying them. Perhaps kindness is the wrong word to use.
“Come here, child”
She steps towards me and I yank her by her thin arms into my personal space.
“What's your name?”
“Doe”
Huh. Everyone here is named after the circumstances of their birth, some weird addict nickname ritual fucking thing. Cake was born on the grimy floor of a confectionery factory. Hurricane was born in a Red Cross shelter during a storm that crushed South Carolina.
“You born in a wildlife park or something?”
“Nah. I don't know where I was born. Got dumped at some church, y'know. No name. They listed me as Jane Doe.”
I see.
I lift her arms above her head and inspect the under-sides of her upper arms. She may be starving, but the soft flesh is there, delicate and flushed.
“Hold still”
She obeys my instructions and doesn't struggle against me.
I sink my teeth into the loose flesh running from under-arm to elbow.
She jerks beneath me, startled, but does not pull away. I am going easy. I don't draw blood, I doubt it even hurts. I stand there and gnaw on her a little.
The flesh fills my mouth, even the rail thin ones remain tender. I have no interest in breaking the skin, that would be ill advised. I simply desire the pressure of chewing on the soft parts.
I'm reminded of lying in bed with my mother. Her sleeping arms near my face. My overwhelming urge to bite her. She let me chew on the soft fleshy parts of her hands between thumb and index finger. Until I bit too hard and she would pull away, frowning.
Oral fixation, I suppose.
I can feel her tensing, it's probably starting to hurt, but she never says a word.
I chew and chew until I am satisfied. The tension in my throat relaxes, the air behind my eye-balls diffuse.
I pull my head away to inspect the damage.
Red rings pattern her arms, darker in some places.
A kaleidoscope of my dental impressions.
Shining wet.

I release her and toss a baggy towards the stairwell.
She presses her arms into her torso seeking comfort and hurtles towards it.
I'll take her teeth one day and what a beautiful night it will be. I can't wait to put my hands in her little mouth.
She slips back into the roaming shadows of The Wire House, reclaimed by the darkness. I make my descent outwards, back into the storm.
The teeth feel like loops of pearl necklaces in my pocket and I thumb them reverently. There are more to be had, when the wire runs out the desperate living will surely come forward with their mouths yawning open, in offering