Magic Takes Time
Some lies are small. Some of them take root. (B-Side #4)
There are lies we tell our children to protect them from the world. Some of them don’t stay small.
Sadie winced as she bit into her apple, holding her mouth in pain. Her eyes shone, glassy with tears. Before she could cry, she looked down and gasped.
“Mommy, look!”
Sadie pointed to the bite mark where the bloody stump of a tooth stuck out of the spit-shined apple skin. She grinned up at me, probing her tongue through the gap where her bottom front tooth had been. I beamed a smile back at her, trying to mask the sinking feeling in my stomach. Tonight, she would put that tooth under her pillow for the Tooth Fairy, and I had no money to spare.
According to her classmates, the Tooth Fairy paid twenty dollars for the first lost tooth. Including the change in the couch, I had maybe six dollars to spare until my next paycheck. I didn’t think she’d believe me if I told her the Tooth Fairy only picked up teeth on Friday nights. I had to come up with something, quickly.
“Maybe we should plant it,” I said.
Sadie wrinkled her nose at me. “What?”
“Teeth have roots,” I said, bullshitting logic that might pass for science to an eight-year-old. “You want to try it?”
I could tell she was skeptical, but she was curious. She wrapped the tooth in a paper towel and stuffed it into her pocket. I grabbed a plastic cup from the cabinet and we went out behind the apartment building to fill it with dirt. When we came back in, we unwrapped the tooth and planted it about two inches deep in the soil.
“We’ll water it every day and make sure it gets lots of sunlight,” I reminded her on the way to the bus stop for school. “And then something magical will happen.”
After I dropped her off, I returned home and retrieved the cup from her window. I dug a hole in the soil and planted a marigold seed. I told myself if this worked, it’d be ten times more magical than a crisp twenty under her pillow from the Tooth Fairy.
When I met Sadie at the bus stop that afternoon, I could tell she’d been crying. She didn’t want to tell me at first, but after much coaxing she revealed that her classmates had laughed when she told them what we did with her tooth. “The Tooth Fairy doesn’t visit poor people’s houses,” they had said. She asked if we could dig it up and put it under her pillow. I wanted to say yes, but I was still days from having cash.
“Magic can be slow. Can you give it a couple more days?” I asked.
She nodded and I hugged her tight. Two days. I’d have money in two days.
Sadie watered her tooth the next morning, setting it on her windowsill to catch the morning sun. After school, she moved it to the kitchen window. Before bed, she’d bring it back to her room to repeat the cycle the next day.
The next morning, I was jolted awake by a scream.
“MOMMY! COME SEE! IT GREW! MY TOOTH GREW!”
I was hardly out of bed when she burst through my bedroom door. She was shaking with excitement as she held out the green shoot that had sprouted in her plastic cup. The glee on her face was better than any Christmas morning.
She took her planted tooth to show-and-tell and was the envy of her classroom. I got calls from the other parents; all of her classmates wanted to plant their next loose tooth. I told them my marigold trick, thinking I’d just created the next Elf on the Shelf craze. It was the magical resolution I had hoped for, but it didn’t end there.
Sadie’s flower kept growing.
It grew bigger than a marigold, outgrowing the small plastic cup where it sprouted. When we transferred it to a flower pot, I could still see the tooth tangled up in the web of roots. Green leaves unfurled the taller it grew, taller than Sadie, taller than me, with white flowers along a slender stalk that tapered to a feathery, spiked tassel at the top. As ears formed down the stalk, I was certain that we’d picked up a corn kernel in the dirt behind the apartment, digging up some squirrel’s secret winter stash.
Not that Sadie minded; everything about this was magic to her. It would be the type of story we could look back on and laugh about when she was older. Remember when you were eight and we were so poor I convinced you to plant your tooth?
Before bed, Sadie came in with one of the ears she’d harvested from the plant.
“Look, Mommy, they’re finally ripe!” she said, peeling back the husk.
My eyes widened with horror.
Instead of corn, the cob was filled with rows and rows of teeth: molars, bicuspids, canines, and incisors – mostly white with the occasional yellow and red ones mixed in. The cob itself was pink and fleshy, like swollen gums.
Sadie wiggled one of the incisor-sized nibs from the cob. Before I realized what she was doing, she pressed the tooth into the empty socket in her mouth and bit down. The tooth sank into place with a sickening crunch.
“It’s just like you said, Mommy. Magic takes time.” Sadie grinned, and a thread of blood trickled from her bottom lip.
If this made you uncomfortable (but in a fun way), don’t suffer alone. Share it with someone who deserves to suffer with you.
Omg what an image! I'll never look at corn the same way again. Excellent story!
Ewwwwww. This is awesome.