Issue No. 02Spring 2026
Teeth
Hunger, appetite, and the mouths we hide behind our smiles.
Fiction
Milk Teeth
by Ezra Quill
The jar lived on the top shelf above the stove, where the grease made the glass the color of weak tea, and my brother would lift it down on Sundays and shake it next to his ear the way other people hold shells.
Forty-one teeth. He counted them out loud with his eyes shut, and if the count came wrong he would not come to dinner until he found the missing one.
The last time he shook it I was sixteen and I was sitting at the table, and he held the jar up to the window and said that he was short by one, and that he knew exactly which one.
I have not lost a tooth since.
He still counts. He says the count is getting better, that it is nearly right, and he looks at my mouth when he says it, and I have stopped eating with my lips closed.
Fiction
Dinner Party, 1987
by Mara Vell
The invitation said eight, and eight came, and the ninth chair was laid anyway because the host believed in a full table the way other men believe in a god.
He carved with his sleeve rolled to the elbow, and the knife went in and out of the roast in long even strokes, and every guest was served before any of us had taken off our coats.
Halfway through the soup, one of the women asked where the meat came from, in the joke-voice people use at tables, and the host smiled with the whole of his face and said that it was a family recipe, and that family had been very generous this year.
Nobody finished the roast. Nobody left early either, and I have thought about that more than I have thought about anything else from that night: how the room stayed full, how the conversation got louder, how we all sat in our own small portions of it and let the hours pass, and how the host refilled every glass the moment it dipped, and how he never once sat down.
— end of transmission. photocopy & pass it on. —