He peered over the top of his mask, saw that Emma was still looking down at her book, and returned to watching her tongue squirm in her mouth. He wanted her to look at him while he worked. He watched her cheek divot as she, embarrassed at not being able to hold her tongue still, pulled soft, pink flesh between her teeth. Without thinking about it, he mirrored her. Emma’s eyes were not moving across the page. She was only pretending to read! This delighted him, that she felt the desire to hide something from him. Emma was not quite a stranger; he had cleaned Emma’s teeth twice a year for the last four years, and they frequented the same gym, though their encounters were limited to brief conversations saturated with abasing glances.

Emery felt about her the way one feels about a split lip, the desire to worry the lip with one’s tongue, stretching and pulling with teeth to see at what point discomfort becomes pain, the inability to leave it alone.

Emma sensed that Emery was out of step with life, and this drew her to him. Emma felt too much in rhythm with life, something programmed, no longer person. Life came and went for Emma untouched; her life a continual absence of anything meaningful. Occurrences took place, and they would entertain her or annoy her or bore her, but nothing moved her. She felt machine, an object that did because it was incapable of anything else, and this realization was something that should have been painful, should have moved her, but instead, as with everything else in her life, it dulled.

That too she was aware of, that dulling separation of herself from her life. Everything was good or bad only in theory. What is good eventually neutralizes and what is bad improves or worsens, and life continues, another sort of neutralizing. She knew this was not how she wanted or was supposed to go about her existence, but was unsure of what to do, this answer encased in concrete she could only pull at the edges of with soft, warm hands, trying to find somewhere to grip. Emma felt the same sort of wrongness she felt as a teenager in her calculus classes, reaching the end of a long, complex math problem to find her answer incorrect, but not knowing where, amongst the series of steps, she made that initial mistake.

There was something ill-suited about her mind. This was the issue, she thought, this divorce from desire and existence. She wanted something different, not more, yes more, she wanted more, but something different, not this, not what she had now, but she lacked any sort of footing in which to pursue what she wanted; she did not even know what she actually wanted, how to discern.

Emery, she felt, knew how to discern. She had the sense he knew exactly what he wanted and would pursue it without fail, even if it pained him, especially if it pained him. She wanted to be near him, to study him, rubbing his raw cuts of existence into her own, contaminating. Being near someone like him, she felt, was something closer to finding an answer, coming to understand something larger, something looming and lurking in the world and in her mind, in the periphery of her sight but never in focus.

She stared back at him. Someone, another dental assistant, came into the room, shuffled papers, opened several cabinets, said “hello” to Emery, and left again. Emery opened his mouth slightly, forcing his tongue to run through the cramped semicircle inside his teeth. He did not understand Emma. He did not understand anyone, he felt, and this shame colored the majority of his interactions.

“Do you think other people who work with children are having this problem?” He asked. Emma’s lower lip protruded slightly, exaggerated by the weight of his hand. She shrugged.

Emery did not want the conversation to be over.

“Do you think it has to do with the weather?” The calendar crept towards the end of October. Outside, the darkening cold felt electric rather than seeping. Autumn had been forgotten like a miscellaneous task on a long list of to-dos.

“It could be all sorts of things,” Emma said.

Emery gave up on the conversation. He rifled through various dental instruments, telling himself that Emma was boring, the kind of person who is mysterious to shroud a hollow personality. This assessment satisfied him, and he selected a spinning electric brush, the accompanying dusty powder reminiscent of mint-flavored chalk.

Emma noticed this shift in his mood. “I don’t think they are the same children,” she said. Emery looked up, then back down at the spinning brush against her teeth. He grazed the top of a tooth with his gloved finger, the nail pulling taut against latex. He wanted to do it again.

“What?”

“Maybe they are not the same children.”

“That’s what I said. Earlier. I said they are terrible now.”

“You misunderstand me,” said Emma, her words muddled by the brush. “You are thinking I am saying the children have had a personality shift, and I am saying they could be entirely different children, not in the same bodies.”

Emery now felt delighted. He resisted the impulse to run his fingers along the bumpy tops of her teeth, feeling the firm squishiness of her gums, where the pink insides of her cheeks settled against the sides of her teeth. He handed her a small hand mirror to ask her about fluorosis gathering around the edges of her canines, staining the tips white.

“Alright,” Emery said. “I’d like to hear more about this.”

“Alright,” Emma said. She glanced at the clock that hung on the wall. Emery followed her gaze. The clock was not ugly in that it was tasteless and ornate, but rather that it was hideously un-ornate; there was nothing to taste at all. It had a white backing with black numbers in a corporate font. The hands were thin black rectangles with a red second-hand. The rim of the clock was also black. Emma and Emery had seen similar versions of the exact same clock in seemingly every building, in an unspoken but pervading depression. Emma looked at similar clocks in the elementary school where she taught. It was as if daylight endings were a clock, or rush-hour traffic, or the Monday after winter break, or staff meetings, or waistbands slightly too-tight, or microwaved coffee. Emery could not remember anything that he hated more in his life, in this moment, than the clock, whose insipid hands neared the twelve.

“Would you like to get a drink with me?” Emery asked, redirecting his gaze. Emma was already looking at him. She wore her hair in a long, thick braid that had draped itself around her shoulders and collarbones like a bendy red ferret. Emery wanted the style to look more like a snake but it didn’t; the more he looked at her red hair the more ferret-like it became.

“I have to go back to my class to teach.”

Emery’s tongue forced itself again between his two rows of teeth.

“Tonight? At seven? Unless your Friday is already booked?” He began to feel self-conscious.

“Are you asking me out on a date?” she asked. Emery could not read her facial expression.

“Yes.”

“No, thank you.”

The way she said this without hesitation, but in a way that told Emery that no matter what he did, or said, and no matter what potential could be actualized, she would still say No, thank you.

It thrilled him.

He wasn’t sure what to do with his body, if he should stand up straighter or slouch. He rubbed the back of his neck with his hand, pinching the skin below his hairline between his fingers and thumbs. The sound was too loud in his ears. He felt the oils from his hair on his fingertips, almost gritty, the way one’s hand feels after petting a dog. Emery thought the act of keeping animals as pets was quite strange.

What thrilled him further was that he had a delicious secret: in his pocket was a small bag full of extracted teeth, cleaned and handled carefully after their removal. Not one of them belonged to Emma, who had never needed a tooth extraction.

Emery felt that he wanted to orbit Emma, though the extent of this turmoil he wanted to keep unknown to her, or the thrill would be gone. In person, he wanted to be aloof with her, if not outright rude. Already he felt he was failing miserably, though this only excited him further. He had the impulse to make a scene.

Emery’s hand habitually migrated to his pocket. In the reflection of the hand mirror, Emma watched, saw his coat pocket flash open, the bag of brilliantly white teeth. Emery wanted to stroke the outside of the bag, to feel the ridges of the teeth. He was not watching Emma. It occurred to him that it was probably inappropriate of him to ask Emma out. This occurred to Emma as well. The overhead lights bore into him. He furrowed his eyebrows, trying to create a barrier between the fluorescence and his pupils, his forehead hurting from the effort. The lightning was relentless, like semen in one’s eyes.

“Actually,” Emma said, “I would like to get a drink.”

Both of them arrived at the bar too early and were drunk too quickly. Emery felt in a way that Emma was withholding some sort of prize, not sexual, but not psychological either, which confused him. They both recognized the other to be intelligent in a way that was entirely useless, the sort of intelligence that only serves to make one miserable, insight riddled with a lack of practical application, the sort of intelligence that is alienating and makes one doubt if they are at all suited for the world around them. In this way, they were married like animals.

He couldn’t recall what drink he had ordered, despite having ordered it multiple times. He felt a bit like a naughty child hiding behind the leg of his mother. He wanted to go home, and this depressed him. He stirred a straw around in his drink, feeling where he had chewed the black plastic. His coat sat behind him, shrugged off, bunching uncomfortably in the seat. He fidgeted. He could feel the bag of teeth he had put in his coat pocket pressing into his lower back like a sore kidney.

“Do you like your job?” He asked. She looked up at him.

Emma thought about this.

“I don’t know,” she said. Emery was upset with her for not having a definitive answer. “Children perplex me,” she said, after a pause. She drew out each syllable, slowly, the way one holds cigarette smoke in their mouth. Emery found smoking a bit disgusting and a bit intriguing. Emma did not smoke. Emery knew this from her teeth.

“Do you like children?” he pressed. The table was slightly sticky. Above them, dark wood curled up and into a dark ceiling. The interior was too masculine.

“Sorry, I didn’t ask you if you liked your job,” she said, still looking at him. Emery liked how much she looked at him.

“You avoided my question,” he said.

Emma was quiet for a moment.

“I like the ideas children have,” she said, flattening her palm along the side of the cool glass of her drink. “I think that children can be clever in ways the rest of us can’t.”

Emery thought about this.

“I’m not sure they are all that clever. I think they are just unknowing, and we mistake their lack of logic for being clever.” He took another sip. An ice cube worked its way between his back molars, and he bit down, listening to the squealing of the ice. He reached behind him, stroking his coat pocket containing the bag of teeth.

“Can the two not be the same?” Emma took a sip of her drink, too. “Can they not be both clever and unknowing?”

“I don’t know.” A bartender came to clear the empty glasses from the table between them. They had sat at a booth. Emery looked up at the Cupid’s bow of the bartender’s mouth, thanking her. He was trying to decide if he found the bartender attractive or not. There was something strange with her eyes, he thought. They seemed to touch the back of her skull, not literally, there was nothing unusual about the shape of her head, but her irises were so black, so, so black, Emery thought. And her hair. She had hair like Emma’s, but brunette, so thick it was an animal of its own, curly and sentient. That excited him.

“So are you more clever than a child?” Emma said.

“You’re asking me if I am more clever than a child?” He kept fingering the bag of teeth.

“Sure.”

He suddenly couldn’t stand the way his arms connected to his body, how they hung limply, swinging when he moved. “I think I am more clever than a child,” he said. “Isn’t everyone?”

Emma shifted in her seat. He heard her shoes click against the floor. He wondered if women enjoyed the feeling of nylon rubbing against itself, if it were as nice as smooth legs when they touched.

“No,” Emma said. She spoke in the same tone in which she used to repeat herself. “I think everyone is sort of an idiot.”

Emery didn’t know what to say.

“I like my job,” he said. “It’s fulfilling to work in healthcare. I enjoy helping people.”

What he meant to say was I want to feel helpful.

Emma smiled at him. It was a polite smile. She looked back down at her drink, holding the stem of the maraschino cherry, swirling. The cherry inaudibly thudded along the side of the glass, smearing a translucent yellowish-pink reminiscent of lip balm. Emery wanted to run the inside of his lip along the edge of the glass.

Oh God, Emery thought to himself. What if she thinks I’m boring?

“What was your theory about children?” he asked, to keep the topic on her. “You said they were in different bodies?”

“Oh,” she said. “I’m not sure why I said that. I thought you might know about changelings.”

Emery looked at her. He couldn’t tell if she was making a joke.

“People used to bury teeth,” she said. She licked her lips. “They thought it would keep away fairies, to stop them from kidnapping children and replacing the stolen children with changelings.”

He didn’t know what a changeling was. She explained, adding, “Of course, no one is burying teeth now. They’re put under pillows, or kept in coat pockets.”

The bartender came back for the last call. Emma’s thick red ferret of a braid slipped slightly on her shoulders.

“Will you walk me to my car?” she asked.

He did not know how to ask her what she meant about teeth.

Outside, the air was unbreathable. The cold stung their faces and burned the inside of their noses. Emma tucked her chin into her scarf she had wound twice. Emery insisted that he was not that bothered by the temperature, offering her his coat. She took it. He wished he had more to drink.

When they were one block away from Emma’s car, she asked Emery if he would like to come home with her. She had her hand in the pocket of the coat.

Emery felt his tongue numb. He had forgotten the bag of teeth was in his coat pocket.

“Alright,” he agreed, because there was nothing else to say.

Their relationship seemed to be defined by a series of unspoken, universal truths that only existed when the two of them were in isolation together; Emery understood that the moment they were separated, or the moment someone else was in their presence, these truths would evaporate, and he would feel wiped clean of any understandings he had come to know over the course of his life. He wanted to hold onto these truths to carry with him as he moved through the parts of his life that were separate, a child’s sweaty fingers clutched around the slick ribbon of a balloon. This was the primary difference between himself and Emma: he felt he needed to cling, whereas she wrongly believed she did not. Neither one of them was able to discern if they felt superior or inferior to one another. The ends of Emma’s braid rasped against her face, wrapped up in the swaddling of her scarf.

Emma’s apartment was the sort that looked both homely and as though no one lived in it. The floor was carpeted in a beige bordering on brown, covered in Turkish rugs. All over her walls were sketches of human ears, most of them fleshy and blushing. Among these sketches were molds, half-finished clay modelings, and completed ceramic ears: fired and glazed.

A few years ago, neither out of an obsession nor out of boredom, she began to study people’s ears. All sorts of ears passed her, attached earlobes, unattached, loose earlobes stretched from jewelry or plugs or pulling, missing earlobes from accidents. And that was just the lower region of the ear – the ears were all moving away from her too quickly to see anything else! Suppose there was something noteworthy about the tops of the ears? Did it point? Fold over? Was it entirely unremarkable? And how uncanny the rest of the ear was, in relation to the person’s head! Did it connect at an odd angle, like a door opened wide on a hinge? Or was the ear pressed flat to the side of the head, like an animal’s, undetectable with a hat, or hair?

As of yet, this ear-watching was only a preoccupation, something with which to fill her time. She began to conceive of sketches, an idea she wanted to feed into an obsession, but not yet, the idea needed to grow hungry first, needed to wake her in the middle of the night, turning itself over and over in her mind. She felt her brain, in that way, was closer to a hand; it wanted to press its thumbs into everything, to treat the world like peaches or eyes or bread.

The sketches were not all given the same amount of effort. Some captured light and texture and tone, feeling so intimate it bordered on voyeurism. Others were rushed, no more than a gesture, a suggestion of a shape. Across her walls, collections of ears appeared, first the ears of her students and other faculty: unlabeled, not for privacy but out of a lack of necessity. She knew which ear belonged to which individual, always. She had that sort of memory.

With time, she expanded to grocery store clerks, gym regulars, the bus driver, mail carrier, police officer who had pulled her over twice for speeding, dates she had been on, the dentist’s, and the dental assistant’s. A town distilled into only ears, compromising nothing.

Many of these sketches turned into sculptures. It wasn’t enough to have a two-dimensional ear; Emma wanted to run her thumbs along the cartilage folds of each ear, to graze her fingernail along the lobes, the insides. Ears collected on shelves, countertops, along the perimeters of her floorboards. They filled dresser drawers and coat pockets. Some hung from the lights like wind chimes, or ear chandeliers.

But then what? This project would amass into something eventually gathered and discarded, tucked away at the bottom of a cabinet, indistinguishable from any other unremarkable material.

To Emery, looking at this series filled him with a jealous mixture of inadequacy and awe. Here were years of documenting, of seeing something in the world and doing something. Emma was the sort of person to set out to do something, with clear ideas and clearer execution. Emma had ideas and the skills to run with those ideas, of knowing what was worth pursuing and how to pursue it.

Emery didn’t do this. He collected teeth and then did nothing with them, something childish and faltering, a compulsion of which he had control of only through keeping its secrecy, and now no longer.

They sat on two different sofas, one green and one orange. Emma licked her lips, took her shoes off, and handed Emery his coat back, almost shyly, without looking at him. This made Emery want to stare at her longer, willing her to look at him. She did not. One of her stocking-clad feet pressed on top of the other, and she looked down, watching them as if they did not belong to her. There was not a single item out of place, as in Emery’s apartment. Emery was overcome with the urge to look through every single one of Emma’s cabinets. He lay his coat over the back of her couch, then thought this to be rude. The question of where to put his coat ballooned in his throat. He couldn’t bring himself to ask her anything now that she knew about his bag of teeth. He felt unbelievably sorry for himself.

Finally, she looked at him. Emery wondered if they would have sex, if he wanted to.

“Tell me a secret,” he said. The imbalance of vulnerability was too much for him to bear; he exposed, her looking at him, dressed, from behind a curtain.

“Alright,” she agreed. In recent weeks, she had fallen prone to interrupting her day with walks in which she would choose a single plant and eat it. It was important for her not to recognize the plant, and it was not important for her to eat the plant whole, just a sufficient bite.

She distilled her life down into smaller steps, experiences she hoped to pocket as brief moments of existence in which nothing separated her from life. These experiences, both in their pursuit and subsequent collection, would then amount to something, she figured, or would form a sort of tower in which she could climb, or a bridge between herself and feeling. Perhaps a river went underneath this bridge, which she could fall into and be swept away with, to actually be moved. Perhaps at the top of this tower was something alive, or perhaps she would simply be able to see beyond what was immediately in front of her, something so inconceivable it ruined her.

After eating this plant, she told him, she walked back home, and waited to see if she was going to die. She had not even come close to this, she added, at least not yet. Once, her mouth numbed, and she suffered a stomach-ache due not to any properties of the plant, but because of anxiety; she thought she might actually die, just a little bit, and would it be painful? Beyond this temporary nervousness, she still did not feel anything, and came no closer to finding anything life-changing from this exercise. Something, still, was missing. Something was always missing.

He knew she wanted the bag of teeth, and he obliged her. She extended a pale hand with long, thin fingers. They didn’t speak about it. She unfolded her legs and moved from the couch onto her floor, tucking her feet underneath her. He watched as she opened the bag of teeth, her eyes roaming the contents. He watched her throat muscles constrict as her breath quickened, looked higher up on her neck, closer to her ear for the thrum of a pulse.

The sound of the teeth touching one another, writhing to make room for her finger, made the hair on his neck stand, as if someone blew cool air behind his ear. She put a second finger into the bag, and then a third, scooping. The teeth collected in her palm. Emery stared. Emma paused for a moment, feeling the lightness of the teeth in her hands, their divots and rounded edges, the points of the two roots like pincers. She tipped her head back, and tipped the contents of her palm into her open mouth.

Unflinchingly, she chewed, the sound a muted pouring of gravel. He wondered if her own teeth would break. His eyes darted from her tensed jaw to her eyes, to her smooth forehead. She continued to look stoic, almost thoughtful.

Eating teeth was not unlike eating thick shards of hardened sugar, or brittle rocks that shatter when pressed against stone. The teeth gave way to her own, the taste calcified, like licking the inside of a cave. Her throat bobbed as she swallowed.

Emery wanted to put his lips around the protrusion of her trachea. She looked at him, running her tongue along her outer gums, searching for fragments of teeth she had not swallowed.

Emery’s mouth was dry. It was all over too quickly. He felt as though they had just been inside of one another, and that it was almost time to hand each other back their clothes. Something had gone awry, and there would be no morning coffee, sitting together outside. He didn’t know what to do.

“Tilt your head back,” she said.

He moved to sit next to her on the floor. He felt the weight of her knee on his thigh. He tipped his head back, felt her palm touch the edge of his open lips. The teeth scraped the roof of his mouth, clacked against his molars. She held the back of his head with one hand, speaking to him softly. He wasn’t sure if he could bite down on the teeth, but he didn’t tell her this. She was sure that he could, but she didn’t tell him this either. He felt the teeth splinter against his own, soften, the enamel both soft and tough, like leather, the crowns rough against his tongue. He realized he had been holding his breath and exhaled, a sound like that of a small animal leaving him. He swallowed, feeling the muscles of his esophagus work to push the teeth further into his body.

Afterwards, he told her he had never done that before.

“Haven’t you?” she asked.

“No,” he said, looking at her. “Never.”

Emma did not ask what he had been collecting teeth for, then, and he did not tell her. Emery himself did not know exactly what compelled him to collect the teeth, only that it was an unignorable impulse that seemed to be in preparation for what was to transpire between them. What did transpire between them over the next several months was an affair of the only kind that affairs should be: consuming and sordid.

It began like this: Emma went to teach her third-grade class. Third graders lose nearly all of their belongings, including their teeth. Emma would stoop down to pick the teeth up off the ground, and she would slip them into her pocket as she stood, telling the student the tooth was nowhere to be found. She wanted to save these teeth for Emery, but there were some moments where she was particularly overcome, and she ate the tooth, small and dirty, feeling disgusted with herself. It humiliated her to eat the tiny teeth, gritty from earth, slippery from spit, and it was humiliating to give the tooth to Emery, knowing he knew she had stolen it from children. She couldn’t stop. They both preferred these baby teeth.

Emery continued collecting teeth from his clients. These teeth were brilliant and clean and nowhere near as satiating as children’s teeth, but still pacifying. He did not collect teeth that had been extracted due to cavities or other maladies. There was a difference between a tooth unclean and a tooth in rot.

Over the coming months, the two were inseparable. Moments when they had to be apart, such as at work, were excruciating. They stopped seeing their other friends. Emery couldn’t remember the last time he played an instrument or read a book or saw a film by himself. That October was the last time they slept under separate roofs. Emma stopped calling her mother.

There was something thrilling about the sexlessness of their relationship. Both of them were quite sure they would never have sex, as the teeth felt like a somatic merging more intimate. Sex would be futile at this point; it would be a crude re-rendering, a cheap imitation of something more.

Often, he would sit on the floor, Emma sitting on top of him, and they would feed one another teeth, him pressing the heel of his hand up underneath her chin, feeling the insides of her knees against his ribs. Sometimes they would drop the tooth into each other’s drinks. They both liked to swish wine around in their mouths, feeling the tooth clattering amongst their own. Emery told Emma about his father, and she about her mother. Sometimes they ate the teeth naked, and sometimes they did not.

It was the sort of relationship that saps both parties of any redeeming qualities, so they are left to revel in the displeasure of one another’s company. Both of them came to hate the other in ways that are typically only reserved for the self, the sort of loathing that requires an intimate understanding of the subject. With this loathing came further vulnerability, which brought forth further intimacy, and the two were locked into an even deeper affair. They detested that they were in two separate bodies that would always be separated by physical material: clothing, skin, muscle, organs; there was no way to merge their souls except in this one act surpassing corporeality. Sometimes in the morning, they would both place a single tooth in the other one’s mouth, and they would each leave the tooth there throughout the day, holding it in the pockets of their cheeks or underneath their tongue, sometimes rolling the tooth up and down along the roof or along their own teeth. Throughout the day, they would remember that the other had a stolen tooth in their mouth, too, sending immobilizing pangs of longing, of urgency.

It was more intimate to eat other people’s teeth than it would be to eat their own or one another’s. Still, sometimes, especially Emma, they would fantasize about putting their open mouths together, scraping at each other’s teeth with their own, trying to bite down.

Four-and-a-half months later, Emery came to bring Emma her lunch at work. Neither one of them took an interest in real food anymore, but it was important to keep up the illusion. Emma took great pride in sitting in the faculty lounge with other teachers, pushing pasta around a plastic tupperware bowl and taking an occasional oily bite, tasting lemon and basil and parmesan, wishing desperately that Emery’s knuckles were between her teeth. Emery had the day off work because someone more important than him was sick.

He came during her student’s recess, which came before their lunch (it used to come after, but the children were prone to vomiting). Looking at Emery walking across the parking lot, along the side of the soccer fields, his tall, thin frame in brown slacks and a cream-colored shirt, Emma felt differently about him than before. Emery had short, wavy, thick hair, nearly the same deep brown as his pants, and Emma thought about all her fingers entwining in his hair, ripping it out of his skull. For the first time, she wanted him inside of her, to feel him move amongst her. A wordless exchange passed between them.

Emery noticed this switch in her; the look she gave him that had never once come over her before. It disgusted him. It debased their relationship, he thought, to have sex as everyone else did, how animals did in swamps or sties amongst their own shit. He felt momentarily repulsed by her, and as he reached her, her hand coming to touch the back of his elbow, to kiss him hello, he cringed away from her. She tried again, sure he had made a mistake, and again he moved away. Some of the other teachers glanced away, embarrassed. One laughed, nervously, an outburst.

The wind blew the back of Emma’s skirt up in front of her, like a dog with its tail between its legs. Emma felt furious. Emery should be the dog.

“What is it?” she asked him, quietly, but the wind carried her words into the ears of anyone wanting to listen, which was everyone.

“I don’t feel that way,” he said, and it felt like she had been punched, hard, below her sternum, after she had exhaled, so upon trying to inhale, the spasms of her diaphragm prevented anything from occurring except for a blinding sort of panic, the realization that one has been hit and all future moments will be colored by this violence.

“Alright,” she said. That separation between herself and her life came back, the dullness spilling out of her body and seeping into the world around her.

He said nothing. A future that had carefully unfolded itself to him collapsed.

“I’m not sure I understand,” he said. He didn’t know how she could even conceive of sex after what they did together. Neither one of them knew how to say they felt debased: her in his not wanting of her, him in his disbelief that she could want to spoil what they had with something as degrading as fucking. Everyone fucked. Pigs and rats fucked.

No one had a clear recollection of what happened next. It came in flashes of an image, in snippets of a sound, like memories tampered with by alcohol.

In the staff lunch room, she unbuttoned her shirt. The early-March air hued her skin blue. Her own thin frame was a dizzying vacillation of concave and convex. She stepped out of her skirt, yanking it from around her ankles, screaming at him. Several teachers tried to intervene and she evaded them, throwing her arms open, standing in a brassiere and underwear he had seen many times before.

He could not meet her eyes.

“Who else could have done this?” Bruises stained the skin around her hip bones and arms where he had held her and where she had asked to be held even harder. Yellowish-purple teeth marks crowned the tops of her shoulders and feet. He knew what it felt like to bite down on her collarbones, to suck the dip at the base of her throat.

Emery’s own body looked like this too. Teeth-eating and the act of it had ravaged their bodies, had made them want to ravage each other’s bodies, had made them want to crawl inside one another, sharing the same body to experience the same sensations and satiations and pleasures always.

Several teachers had stepped back, making phone calls. Emma clutched at Emery, trying to unbutton his shirt. He grabbed her underneath her chin, his fingers wrapping around her jaw, forcing her face upwards. They looked at one another.

She was dismissed from her job. Emery drove her home. There, Emma lay on the cool tile of their kitchen floor, feeling the ground slightly purple her skin where her cheekbone, shoulder, hip, knee, and ankle made contact. Emery looked at her for a while, and then lay next to her. They did not speak. The winter sun, an ailing yellow, slipped away. Emery listened to the whistle of air from Emma’s nose as she exhaled. Both of them fell into a sleep that was not restful but comfortable. Emma, curled up, pressed her forehead against his jaw. Her lips almost touched his neck; they were so close that the carotid pulse brushed her mouth momentarily with each beat, a light tapping. Hours passed between them on his kitchen floor, and then it was the next day, and the day after, and Emery was undoubtedly dismissed from his job as well, and neither one of them knew what there was to do.