Since I've seen him last, they have removed all of his teeth. It was stomach cancer, so you'd think this kind of thing wouldn't happen--couldn't they just aim the cancer ray gun a little lower?--but it did, the radiation rippled through the reflecting pool of his body and turned him jackolantern.
I am young, and colossally dumb, and I have done things like sat in church and prayed for a terminal disease: something to brighten the colors, coax out some gleaming eternal truth. I had wanted something to place a foot in front of the model train of my tiny, coursing life; I had not seen his breathless saxophone, or the cup that holds his new teeth, swimming carbon and bone. I do not know pain, know only slightly the feel of my tongue shifting in a mouth that is not my own, this jaw a bowl full of nothing.
drawing by Emily Jo Cureton.
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