HauntedMTL Original – Applesauce for Life – Kristen Seikaly
Applesauce for Life by Kristen Seikaly
Susie began to pull her teeth out as
soon as they grew in. One by one, her pearly whites would emerge from her gums
and one by one, she would yank them out. No one ever saw her do it, but if they
had, they would have grimaced reflexively. Susie pulled out her teeth in the
most gruesome ways imaginable.
The first time, she simply
yanked it out with her pudgy little fingers. It hadn’t required strength so
much as brute force. After the second one, this method grew dull, so Susie
found a pair of her father’s pliers and tugged and tugged until the third came
out. When she released it from the pliers, it turned to dust in her hands,
crushed by the force. She smiled her toothless smile as the dust scattered in
the wind.
Her favorite method of removal
became the tug on the door. She heard a mother suggest it to her young son, a
son older than Susie whose teeth were ready to come out. The boy wailed at the
prospect. Surely his mother must be joking? Susie did not think the mother was
joking. She thought the mother was a genius. So when tooth number nine came in,
Susie waited as long as she could for that little sucker to grow. Then, she
tied one end of a string to the pebble of a tooth and skipped to the door
handle to tie on the other end. Stepping away from the door, she slammed it as
hard as she could with a broom to make sure the distance was just right. She
could not stop smiling at all the blood and gore.
Susie’s parents, after a bit
of time, grew concerned about the absence of their daughter’s teeth. Surely she
should have grown some by now? They took her to a pediatric dentist, a
specialist they never knew existed and asked what was wrong while clasping
their sweaty hands to Susie’s dry ones. He took an x-ray and could not fathom
what he saw.
“It looks as if those
teeth did appear because they’re not in her gums anymore,” he said while
scratching his chin. “See the adult teeth in there? And see how some baby
teeth have yet to come up?” Susie’s parents nodded at the news, while
Susie’s eyes widened. She’d get a whole new set of teeth? What a delight!
That night, her mother tried
to comfort her daughter who did not seem distraught enough at the news.
“Your teeth will
come,” she said, not at all convinced. “And when they do, the Tooth
Fairy will come and bring you money!”
Susie had no interest in
money. So, as far as her parents could tell, her teeth never came, and they
brought her back to the pediatric dentist once more.
“That’s odd,” he
said, scanning the fresh set of x-rays. “See how there had been baby teeth
here before? They’re gone now!” He pointed to the old x-ray, then the new,
while the parents sat and puzzled with him. Susie licked her gums, then smiled.
The pediatric dentist glanced over.
“May I have a moment to
speak with Susie alone?”
This made Susie’s parent’s
uncomfortable, yet everything about the situation made them uncomfortable. So,
they left the room. The pediatric dentist sat in his chair and stared down at
Susie while she laid on the patient chair.
“Susie,” he said,
“do you know where your teeth went?”
She smiled her gummy smiled
once more and pulled out a baggie she kept hidden in her pocket at all times.
Inside were seventeen lumpy, bloodied pearls of teeth, one for each she had
pulled (minus the one that had turned to dust). Some were too small to have
fully formed. The pediatric doctor had never seen anything like it in his
thirty years of practice.
“But Susie… why? What
have you done?”
Susie shrugged her shoulders.
“Haven’t you ever wanted
to control your own body?”
The pediatric dentist had
nothing to say to that. He sent Susie home, telling her parents he would think
over her case a little bit more.
That night, the pediatric
dentist stared in the mirror, lips sealed, until finally, he bore his own teeth
to himself. Each one immaculate and cared for, he had never once considered
doing to himself what he had done to others. His teeth were fine, he thought.
Or were they?
He clasped one of his dental
tools in his hand. Meant for a child, it felt small for the first time. Then,
he brought it to one of his teeth and pulled. Blood gushed everywhere as he
examined what had been a perfectly healthy tooth. He smiled.
“Ah!” he cried.
“I understand now, little Susie.”
THE END
Kristen Seikaly is a Michigan native who lives on the outskirts of Philadelphia. Her work has appeared in Thrice Fiction, Story Seed Vault, Lost Balloon, and Flash Fiction Magazine. Her piece “Planetary Disappointment” was longlisted for the Wigleaf Top 50.
Somehow I came across an older Midnight Panther comic book, Feudal Fantasy #2 from the late 1990s to be precise, and I thought I’d reappropriate it into a new story as a collage. Anyway, this is what evolved. Honestly there wasn’t a lot of content to work with, but that isn’t surprising seeing as how that wasn’t really the point of the original… And sorry, I saved the erotic bits for another project, though even that was pretty tame in this one – just a bunch of boobies.
Images: Black and white line drawings of wide-eyed anime women and men in various states of undress, looking cute, being coyly pensive, and hack ‘n slashing.
Text reads: I like… men who are dying. We ought to just kill everyone involved. The scent of blood!! I never see his face, he always wears a mask. What a waste of time. I don’t like this. The horny bastard. What a pig!! -Slash- Sounds like it could be fun.
Images: More black and white line drawings of wide-eyed anime women and men kissing and hack ‘n slashing.
Text reads: Mercenaries of glorious Edo, if you can make the flowers that bloom along the rivers during spring drop their petals, then do so. I’m the Ferryman of the River Styx. Whssh.
OK, OK – here are some boobies since you stuck with this so long. And here’s a link to some more of my comic book collages, in case you are interested.
And feel free to check out more of Jennifer Weigel’s work here on Haunted MTL or here on her website.
Black Friday.
You can’t beat the deals. So many of us. Waiting. Readying. Checking the time. Counting down the seconds. You better believe I earned my place at the start of the line. I’ve been camping out here since late Wednesday. Yeah, yeah, the holiday was yesterday. Whatever, I had my family’s full endorsement.
Because that new high-definition television beckons. The best in zoning out technology. All channel access. Cutting edge entertainment. Bleeding edge. That blade is sharp, baby. Like a razor.
But this kind of escapism is costly. A reality check says it’s not in my family’s budget. We don’t make that kind of money, and so here I am. Among all the others vying for the same prize.
Only one will get there first. Only one available. Must have TV. Must have T.V. Must. Have. T. V.
An employee approaches the door. Nobody noteworthy. A soon-to-be-casualty. No more. No less.
We rise and lurch into place. Ready…
On your mark.
Get set.
Go!
Original images generated with Nightcafe AI art generator.
And feel free to check out more of Jennifer Weigel’s work here on Haunted MTL or here on her website. Or if you just want more zombies, might I recommend either Elvis or the Fashionistas?
This time on Nightmarish Nature, in honor of Thanksgiving, we’re exploring scads of scat! And not just because of the aftermath of all that eating we’re going to be doing, given that everything that goes in must come out eventually. But because turkeys are weird.
But, how weird?
Apparently, the shape and size of a turkey’s poop can tell you the sex and age of the bird. Male and female birds poop different shaped turds, and bigger ones with age. Your poop can’t do that, we’re pretty sure. And no, we don’t want to check, even if it does come in a whole host of rainbow colors with all the dyes in our food nowadays. Keep your weird quirks to yourself.
Fecal Fetishes
Vultures have very acidic scat that helps to keep their feet and food clean of bacteria from hopping in and around dead things. Somehow, this doesn’t seem like a step up to us, but I guess if you’re a carrion crawler you take what you can get. At least you’d know where it’s been I suppose, and that’s more than you can say for some of your long dead food sources…
Rabbits must process their food twice in order to break down the grassy matter they digest (like cows chewing cud). And so they eat their own partially digested matter, the cecotropes they produce after the first digestion. This isn’t true poop per se, that fecal matter comes after second digestion, but it does work its way through the same way.
And that brings us to koalas. They are one of only a few mammals that can eat eucalyptus leaves (and are closely related to wombats, one of the other two). Koala offspring eat their mother’s pap, which is a specialized form of poop that allows the baby to transition from nursing milk to eating solid leaves. It is green, smeary, mushy, and can get everywhere. Just like you’d expect.
We aren’t exempt.
For all that we have learned to be poop averse, a lot of animals eat others’ scat and glean a lot of nutritional value from their detritus. It’s not just your dog raiding the cat litter box and then licking you in the face. And we humans have even fought wars over rights to seabird guano, which was used as a form of fertilizer in the late 1800s.
Anyway, that’s the scoop on poop for now. Maybe we’ll revisit this load later on, seeing as how there’s still plenty of content here.
If you’ve enjoyed this segment of Nightmarish Nature, feel free to check out some previous here:
-
Original Creations4 days agoBonus Black Friday story: Zombie Apocalypse by Jennifer Weigel
-
Book Reviews6 days ago
We Kept Her in the Cellar: a Lovecraftian Cinderella retelling.
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Book Reviews4 days ago
Lucy Undying is the Lesbian Dracula Retelling We Needed
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Original Creations2 days ago
The Scent of Blood: Comic Book Art by Jennifer Weigel
