Deep Water Prompt #3126
“Selkie teeth”, my mother says, shaking a jar of them. “Grind one up and stir the powder into tea. Your true love will visit you, or come as a dream if they are already dead.”
"Ethically sourced!" my mother would insist, whenever protesters came by, or whenever a customer seemed on the verge of recoiling in disgust. "Not like hides! Not like skin at all. Teeth fall out all the time. You see? Rotten." She'd spill the selkie teeth out on the counter, their edges rasped like strange frilled fungi, fractal, branching, and turn them over, revealing the cracks in the yellowed enamel, the hollowed core, the rot. "Everyone loses teeth," she'd say, and smile widely, revealing the glistening sockets of her gums. It made her look more than her age. Doddering. Harmless. "Not like skin. Don't worry, don't worry. Selkies probably don't even miss them. I find them by the shore. The tide pools, if you know where to look."
This wasn't the sales pitch she gave to the men who showed interest. Then she'd lower her voice, cup her hand around the jar to hide it from the view of the street, as if it was contraband or worse. "What chance you think you have, finding a selkie skin?" she'd say. Voice low, eyes peeking up at them, almost seductive. "Running across a group of girls bathing by the shore? Lucky? Not that lucky, no. But these selkie teeth, you grind one up, put it in your tea. Your true love will visit. This - this is a piece of her." She'd hold up one of those rotten teeth, turn it, like it was a jewel catching the light. "Just a piece. But a tooth that her tongue passed over once in the dark behind her lips, embedded in her, kissing the bone. You can't make her stay, but you drink this, she'll come to you. She must. She'll visit you. You'll have a chance."
To the mourning, she'd tell another story. "It's like a missing tooth, yes?" she'd say, and smile again to show her gums, making herself look wounded this time, tragic, like the world and time had cut out parts of her, left those gaps. "I know it myself. Your tongue keeps coming back to the place where it used to be, feeling for something. The loss. The ache." She'd tap a tooth on the counter, letting it letting it ring out hollowly, turning it to show the cavity. "Grind this up. Put it in your tea as sugar. It'll be that old, sweet ache again. You'll see them one last time. I promise you that."
I don't know which of her stories were true. I never got to taste the tea for myself. We only had a limited number of selkie teeth, and they were much too precious for me to try one. After we ran out of teeth, we started selling selkie leather, a much more precarious proposition. The hide had been slashed up and ruined, but we cut it into strips, sold them as bracelets and charms. It was functionally impossible to argue that selkie leather could be gotten without exploitation, and so we resorted to a much seedier market, hawking contraband for real this time. With practice, I adapted my mother's tricks and honed them, learning how to lower my voice like she did, weave the lurid fantasies like she did. Other innovations, like clutching the leather beforehand so it would gain the warmth of a human body, displaying it draped over the brown of my skin.
The leather, I think, was total bullshit. Did nothing. We moved around too often to hear complaints. But the teeth were real, or at least no one ever came back to the store to complain about them. It was how my mother got the idea to start selling the teeth to begin with, grinding her teeth at night, dreaming. She never told me who she saw in her dreams. I don't think it was my father. I don't want to think it was him, but it might have been. Every time she'd put one of the teeth into a mortar, crush it, grind down the enamel, I'd flinch. Get sick just hearing it. That wound was love, everything she did to keep me fed and clothed and cared for. It must have been bloody once, newly-made and throbbing, a wound that ran all the way down to the heart.
