What Big Teeth

by Rose Szabo

  He collapsed into my arms. The light from below went out, and in the dark around us I could feel Grandma Persephone, cold and electric, pressing in on all sides, while in a slow leaden voice he began to speak. This is what he told me.

  * * *

  “Arthur Knox came to Winterport in the fall of 1908, to be a schoolteacher, and to escape some trouble in his hometown. The Zarrins had moved there shortly before, and he—I—learned of them because they’d donated the new stove to the schoolhouse. I saw their name for the first time on a plaque they had installed on the stove.

  “I didn’t know much about them, except that they had bought some land on top of the hill, an old abandoned hunting lodge, and on its skeleton they were building some kind of palace, or fortress. It was half done already. The shape of the new wings loomed amid a clearing of felled trees. The workers were milling the boards on-site as they cleared the land.

  “The Zarrins had no children yet, although the woman was expecting. She had white hair that made her look much older than she was. The man’s hair was black and thick, and he was short but strong. He had a habit of standing with his legs spread and his hands planted on his hips, like a king surveying his lands.

  “Dogs and cats disappeared often from the village, and some people said there was a cougar or a wolf hunting in the woods at night, but no one seemed to mind so much, with the money rolling in as the young Mr. Zarrin ordered all kinds of supplies and goods from the town. There was talk that he had been a gentleman in Europe, and that he had fled from persecution, or from something he himself had done. Whatever the case, he was rich, and he had no accent that they could make out.

  “The young missus was a nurse, maybe. She grew herbs in big pots in the windows of the old wing while they built the new, and she kept the fire going at all times for the sake of her plants. Sometimes she brought gifts to women in town: baked breads, things in bottles. The man was different. He kept to himself except for sudden bursts of generosity. But whenever he saw me, I got the impression he was staring at me. I told myself that I was imagining things and that I shouldn’t stare back. I didn’t want to get myself in trouble, I suppose.

  “Then one night he came to the schoolhouse. He knocked on the door persistently. When it opened he stared at me again. He picked me up by the arms and carried me clear to the back wall of the schoolhouse until my back was pressed against it. I thought he was going to beat me. I’d been beaten before. As a child, and later, by other men. But no beating came. Just Miklos, staring, and waiting. He’d caught me, and he wanted to see what I would do.

  “I don’t know what impulse made me kiss him. Maybe I wanted to make him angry, to make him kill me. But I didn’t die. It was what he’d wanted. I don’t know if he knew it was what he wanted, but it was.

  “And then: passion, I suppose. It’s strange to think now of how I loved Miklos then, now that I have hated him for so long. You understand. But Arthur Knox, the man I was, did love him, to distraction.

  “I was happier, after that. Kinder to students, friendlier with parents. Waiting for the young Mr. Zarrin to knock again. But then … the missus came to visit me.

  “I was terrified that she would be furious. But she didn’t seem that way. She didn’t seem to know anything; she just said she had seen me, and admired me. She wanted to … be with me. And so it was.”

  * * *

  He seemed to hesitate, the way someone else might pause for breath, but I knew that wasn’t it.

  “Is it hard to remember?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. “But it’s like I’m watching it happen again. As though it happened to someone else. That boy doesn’t feel like me.”

  A part of me wanted to silence him again. I knew I could. I didn’t want to hear what had happened next. But I quieted myself. I wouldn’t be like my father. Whatever my family had done to Arthur, it was my business.

  * * *

  “The Zarrins started to invite Arthur … me … to dinner. They supplemented their food from town with wild game, which raised eyebrows—most men were afraid to hunt in the woods, ever since they’d started hearing a wolf, seeing mangled animals. People in town asked me all kinds of questions: About the house. About the furniture, the food. What they wore at home. How they were with each other. I can remember pulling up my collar to hide the scratches on my neck. Indentations from teeth, from fingernails.

  “I liked them both. Or maybe I only liked the feeling of being wanted. I’d been alone for most of my life. I didn’t know how to say no to the feeling. I remember sitting across from the both of them in their home in a cold sweat, wondering what they knew. I lied to both of them while they stroked my legs under the table. But it was also exciting. They were both so important to the town, so beautiful and, seemingly, so happy. But I was stealing from both of them and neither of them knew. Maybe that made me powerful, too.

  “But then, Mrs. Zarrin had her baby.

  “They both stopped coming to see me after that, for a while. Arthur Knox, the man who had been for a moment so powerful, was alone again. They didn’t need me. I’d just been a moment’s distraction. So I went back to doing what I had done before. I taught sums. I went to bed early. The snow fell, and melted, and fell again, as I waited to grow old alone.”

  This was what it was. This was the secret. In the dark I could feel my face getting hot. I thought about the way Grandma Persephone had looked at Arthur, or Grandpa Miklos, trying to parse if I’d seen any flicker of that passion they used to feel. I didn’t think so. They’d left him behind.

  * * *

  “After a year had passed, they invited me to the house again. It was different. There were three of them now: Miklos, Persephone, and a baby. But the baby wasn’t right. It was too big, too strong, already running around on hands and feet. I knew about Miklos, but the baby was wild. It had no control. A few times I saw Persephone scoop it up to hide it from me while it changed shape.

  “About a year after that first visit, one of the girls from town disappeared in the woods by her house. It was one of Andy Haywood’s little girls. She turned up a few days later, disoriented, with bites on her arms and legs like she’d been gnawed at. She had to be sent to a hospital in Boston to be treated and didn’t speak for weeks. The wolves, people in town said.

  “The next time I went to dinner, there were bolts on the insides of the doors. High up, where a child couldn’t reach them. Before the Zarrins sat down to dinner, the missus put the baby to bed.

  “While we ate rabbit stew, I decided what must be done. I decided that it had nothing to do with them abandoning me. That it was the right thing to do. That it was what anyone would do.”

  * * *

  “What did you do?” I asked.

  “I waited until they’d put the baby to bed,” he said. He tilted his face down, almost looking ashamed, if that were a thing he could feel. “The second floor was still under construction, so the baby was sleeping in a crib by the hearth in the kitchen. I excused myself—I forget what I said. I went into the kitchen, while the Zarrins chatted and held hands across the table. I told myself that it was the only thing that I could do. But when I did it, I knew I was doing it for myself.”

  “You killed him,” I said.

  “I hated them,” he said. “For letting me know what it felt like to be happy, and then taking that away.”

  My chest ached. I thought about Lucy.

  “I choked him to death,” Arthur said. He put a hand to his lips. “He fought hard. He scratched me here. But he was a child. And he died.”

  In the cold of the cellar, I stopped breathing.

  “When Mrs. Zarrin saw me walk out of the kitchen she knew right away that something was wrong. I hadn’t been planning to hide it; I assumed they’d kill me. But when she shoved past me into the kitchen, and Miklos followed her, some part of me still wanted to live. And so I ran.

  “I made it halfway across the lawn before Miklos hit me. The weight of his body felt familiar. I didn’t realize he
was hurting me at first. The pain, when I felt it, was welcome. I was ready to hurt for what I’d done. My vision went dark. I was sure I would die. And I almost did. But then I heard Persephone yelling from across the lawn, and I felt Miklos’s jaws open, and he dropped me.”

  He stopped and held his chest. He looked like he was in pain, like he was dredging up all of this from somewhere deep inside himself.

  “She grabbed me,” he said. “And started to drag me. And when I woke up again, I was like this.”

  “What did she do to you?” I whispered.

  He laughed, but without anything like joy. “I can’t remember,” he said.

  The shadows around us felt thick and sticky, like cobwebs, and the air grew so, so cold. And in that darkness, I felt my own mouth open, and a voice came out that was not mine. There was something in me, sharing my body. And that voice said, “I remember.”

  I forced my own voice forward. “So tell me.”

  And she did.

  * * *

  Trapped in this house since the moment of my death, all I can do is remember. Memory feels as real to me as the present, and I am forced to watch it all happen over and over again. Fleeing my home. Coming to America to find Miklos. I live it all again.

  When I was a little girl, I lived in the fishing village of Agia Galini. I killed a man by mistake. I fled into the hills and walked until it got dark. Eventually I came to a ring of stones. The grass around my feet was moving and rippling, and I realized it was teeming with snakes. I was frightened of the snakes, and of what was behind me, so I let them lead me to the middle of the ring, to a large flat stone, and I climbed up onto it. I was suddenly shrouded in heavy shadow that clung and stuck to me like cobwebs. And then I heard the voices.

  They asked me what I wanted. I tried to ask them anything else, get them to tell me what they were, but they refused. And so I said the only thing I could think of: that I wanted to understand. I wanted to know things. And so they began to tell me. In guts, in cards. Sometimes in invisible signs that I could not name. Sometimes they told me things I wished I could unknow.

  What I saw told me of a life I could have in another world, with a man who was like me. A monster. They led me across an ocean to find him. But on my wedding night, when Miklos looked at me, I suddenly saw past and under his lust for me, and through to something else, something I would never understand. I got so angry. All at once I was ringed in sticky black shadow, the kind that had pressed close around me atop that hill. I screamed at him so loudly that he, great grinning monster that he was, fled in terror from my rage and into the night. He always took refuge in being a wolf, in that part of him that would never, ever belong to me.

  The next morning I woke up with a weight on my legs. When I looked down I saw a wolf curled up with his head on my thighs. His muzzle was smudged with blood, and the sheets were flecked with blood and black feathers.

  I stroked his head while he slept, watching dust and feathers float down in the beam of sunlight from the open window he’d climbed through. And I thought: I will try to love all the parts of him, even the parts I will not see. I will try to let this go. And mostly I do. He will tell me little about his life before he came to America: I forgive him. He does not like to speak when he is angry: I forgive him. He disappears sometimes at night and comes back without saying a word, and I forgive that, too, or so I think.

  We make money, off of my poisons and off of investments: it is easy to be rich when you can tell the future. We flee many towns, many suspicions, before at last we find a town so small and so poor that we know they will need our money. We settle in. I get pregnant with our first child. Miklos, though, becomes distant. He begins spending time in town. He’s met Winterport’s new schoolmaster and they’ve become friends. Or so he says. But he cannot lie to the guts.

  I decide to investigate: I brew tinctures and teas and go to town to make myself useful. As I tend to the cough of young Betty Hannafin, her mother gossips to me about the new schoolteacher, whom I’ve only met once. Apparently all the young ladies love his green eyes, but he’s showed no interest in any of them. Something about that makes my ears prick up. I go to investigate, and to give him something to stave off the cough, which will inevitably make it into the village schoolroom.

  When I find him, he is watching the children run around a muddy yard next to the school at lunchtime. He is pretty: tall and thin, with high cheekbones ruddy from the wind, wearing a threadbare brown coat. So this is the man my husband has been sneaking off to see. I know it the way I know everything: metaphors, invisible signs.

  “You must be Mr. Knox,” I say, in my rough English. “From away, like us.” And he smiles at me.

  “Not quite as away, just a few states down. And you must be Mrs. Zarrin.” His eyes are lovely: dazzlingly green in a face like a Renaissance saint’s. I feel plain and ugly compared to him. He makes me jealous, and he makes me hungry. And more than that, he overwhelms me with a question: Who was my lover before he was mine? Who is he, when he is not with me?

  For years, I have tried to tell myself that his other self is a curse, that he is a victim who wakes up after his nighttime journeys frightened and confused, as though from a nightmare. But looking into the worried green eyes of the village schoolteacher, I, too, begin to feel like a victim of his curse. And that makes me spiteful.

  “Do you have a minute?” I ask him. “To step inside and talk to me?”

  I tell myself that I only want to know what Miklos sees in him. I will seduce him, and therefore I will understand Miklos, and if I can do that, I can love him. I can forgive him. The edges of my vision go red. I imagine claws erupting from the tips of my fingers as I dig nails into the teacher’s back, covered in scratches Miklos has left there. My nails find them and rake, reopening them, and when I leave I have blood caked in the quicks. But when I am leaving, for a second, I glance over my shoulder, and I see … Arthur.

  Not the young schoolteacher he was, although there he is, disheveled and confused in the doorway, watching my retreat. No, a ghost behind his eyes, trapped in his past, as I am trapped in mine. A ghost like me, watching it unfold over and over again.

  I want to talk to him, but then he vanishes, as though he was never here. I wonder if he is flickering, too, trapped between the past and the present. If he is …

  It was my idea that we have Mr. Knox to dinner. I remember I wanted to see if Miklos noticed, if he could smell me on the young schoolmaster, if he ever noticed the triumph in my eyes. Miklos thought he was stronger than me. He thought I was his possession, to love or not love as he saw fit. He had no idea what I was capable of. I liked making the young schoolmaster squirm, too, letting him sit across the table from us wondering who knew what. It made me feel like a lord of life. After so long working so hard to protect myself from men, I was their master. I would have both of them until I decided it was time to stop.

  But then the baby was born.

  And Miklos and I changed.

  Suddenly he didn’t want to go anywhere. Suddenly, I didn’t want to go anywhere. We could sit for hours playing with our baby, whom we named Rhys. We could spend forever watching him sleep. We all slept together in front of the fireplace, in a dreamy haze. Miklos brought us food from the woods and roasted it over the fire. I nursed our baby. We ordered him toys from the Sears catalog. We stopped working on the house and did nothing and wanted nothing more than to be next to each other, next to Rhys. We were invincible and perfect bodies.

  And then I began to feel magnanimous. It was a shame that the young schoolmaster should be left out of this. He should see how happy we were.

  My younger self can’t see it from here, but I can: how charity can be just another kind of spite.

  And soon, young me is sitting across the table from young Arthur, and I spot him again, inside himself. Arthur and I are looking out at each other through the prisons that we used to call our bodies. I cannot say how I know, but he is there with me. Trapped, too. Watching.

&n
bsp; Watching it happen again, watching our hands move to the plates and lift food and drink to our lips. Eating dinner together, something we did before, something we have done hundreds of times since. I want to whisper to him across the table, but I am bound tightly inside my younger self. She is rigid in her triumph. She has a husband, a beautiful baby, a big fine house. And he has nothing anymore.

  I did this. I made Arthur. As surely as I have ever known anything I know this. And now my punishment: from inside myself I must watch him stand up from the table, brush the crumbs from his shabby jacket, and leave the room while my unsuspecting idiot younger self laughs and whispers to my unsuspecting idiot husband and kisses him across the table in the presence of my enemy.

  When he comes back into the dining room, walking quickly, young Persephone knows something is wrong. She shoves past him through the door to the kitchen, and as she does so, Arthur and I are suddenly touching.

  And then we switch bodies.

  It happens so fast that at first I don’t realize I am running the wrong way: not toward my baby, dead in his crib, his throat lined with black bruises. I, instead, am sprinting out my front door, across the lawn. I feel something strike me hard from behind; I recognize Miklos’s weight on my body—Arthur’s body, I remind myself, as Miklos knocks me to the ground. His jaws clamp around my leg, and he drags himself up my body with his claws raking through my jacket and into my back. The pain is enormous. It’s like being hit with a wave, and then he grabs me by the neck and shakes, and I feel almost nothing.

  I am rolled onto my back as Miklos yelps and falls away in fear. And then, towering over me, I see a woman bearing down. Tall and clad in black with white hair. Black sticky shadows cling to her. She does not so much walk as glide along the ground. Her hands, like talons, grab hold of me by my clothes. It’s me, of course, whom I’m seeing. But it doesn’t feel that way; not right now. The wind blows the way she wants it to, and it whips and snaps around us as she pulls me across the grass and up the steps. She reminds me of … no. I’m not quite like the creature that’s taken over my house. But seeing myself from outside of myself, I am terrified.