by Rose Szabo
I started trying to crawl, and then saw the shiny shoes of Father Thomas. I lay very still and played dead. He did a hasty anointing of the sick, and then a blazing chunk of wood fell between us from the upstairs, and he jumped back and ran out of the house.
I tried to lift my head, but the air was filled with smoke, and I could barely see. My skin felt hot and ragged, blistery. I didn’t want to burn to death, but it didn’t seem like I could do much else. At least my family was safe. I wondered what would become of Rhys, if he would ever get better. I felt to see if I could control him, wherever he was now, and found nothing. That seemed like a good sign. I let my head sink down and imagined the cool cellar beneath me. Imagined lying still in the dark. I could die like this.
And then I felt hands lift me up, hands that burned to the touch.
“You do like feeling sorry for yourself,” a voice said beside my head. I thought I recognized it, but then I wasn’t so sure.
* * *
I woke up with cool grass pressed against my face and the sting of burns all over my body. I sat up, and all around me was my family.
Luma and Grandpa Miklos sat on their haunches, their heads tipped to the side, watching me. Mother was a little ways off, but when she saw me sit up, she dragged herself across the grass and threw her arms around me. Her damp skin hurt and soothed my burns at the same time. Margaret squatted a few feet away, holding a frying pan in one hand and a butcher knife in the other, looking furious. But when she saw me awake, she nodded soberly.
Beside me on the ground was Rhys. He was breathing, I could see, but only shallowly. And his open eyes seemed to stare up at nothing.
“I swallowed him,” I said. “Luma, I’m so sorry.”
“I saw what happened. You tried to protect him.”
She looked sad and glanced from Rhys to me and back again.
“He’ll be alright,” she said. “I know he will.”
I could feel the heat on my legs, but it took me a few minutes before I could bear to look forward. I knew what I’d see.
The house had gone up quickly: it was late summer and the air was dry. The place we’d called home was now a skeleton, or a drawing, spindly lines that climbed toward the sky, blazing. The carvings, the shingles, the baroque trim were all gone. It was now just a house of flames under a sky filled with billowing clouds of smoke. A wall fell down and suddenly I could see in, as though it were a dollhouse. A family of flames seated at the dining room table, flickering children racing up and down the stairs.
We heard a noise like a gunshot, and I realized the roof of the greenhouse must have fallen in. That was when I started to cry, thinking of all the drakondia dead, the snake lily that had come all the way from Crete to be here, and all the things inside me that were useless to smother the flames. Luma reached out her arms and pulled me in, and I sobbed until I couldn’t breathe anymore.
“We lost everything,” I said, and I had to say it again, because I was muffled by her lap.
“We didn’t lose everything,” she said. “We’ve got Mama, and Grandpa, and Rhys, and Margaret, and you and me. And you know Arthur won’t let anything too terrible happen to us.”
I started crying harder.
“I let him go,” I said. “I let him go, and now we’re never going to see him again.”
She rubbed her palm along my back in circles.
“Silly,” she said. “He’s the one who carried you out.”
She pointed to something standing closer to the house, hard to see against the flames, because it burned so brightly itself. A man made of wildfire.
I tried to walk to him, but all I could do was crawl. So I crawled to him. When I got closer, I reached out to touch his leg, and yanked my hand back—he was too hot to touch, too bright to look at.
“Wait,” he said. A little ways away, on the lawn, I could see a body. It looked like nothing without him inside of it, barely a skeleton. But he bent over it, and the fire curled around it, and he slipped it on. He stood up, Arthur again, but different. The creature inside of him still burned, but more faintly.
I forced my legs under me. When I got up, he held out his arms. I took them to keep from falling. I still felt like I was made of lead, heavy with all that mass and nothingness. He was warm from the inside out, and all the burns on my arms and legs seared in response to that heat.
“You came back,” I said. And then I thought about the procession of torches. “Did you bring the mob?”
He pointed to the house. The column of smoke was the color of Grandma Persephone’s old dress. “The house had to go,” he said. “Persephone didn’t deserve to stay trapped there.” He looked down at me, and the light that blazed from his eyes was so bright that it hurt my eyes.
“You know what it’s like,” I said. “So you let her go.”
“And you, too,” he said. “This is too much house for anyone.”
I laughed. I was weak, but the tension in my muscles built, the feeling of wanting to leap onto him and tear into him, rip him to shreds, bury my face in his chest. The feeling overwhelmed me. I laughed and cried and couldn’t wipe my eyes, because my hands on his arms were the only thing keeping me upright.
“I’m going to leave your family,” he said.
“That’s fine!” I said, laughing, crying.
“I haven’t been alone in fifty years. There is so much I want to do and see.”
“Then you should go.”
“You could stop me.”
“But I won’t.” Why would I? I’d already let him go. My reward was this: to see him remade. To see him, one last time.
He smiled, light streaming out from his mouth.
“This was real,” I said. “You really—”
“Yes, I did.”
“Then no matter what else happens, that will never not be true,” I said. “And if we never meet again, that will be a happy thing.”
“And it will be happy if we do.”
I realized I was crying. He wasn’t. I don’t know if he is something that can cry. I don’t know what he is; he is nothing I have ever heard of.
My love is a haunted house, a ghost possessing his own body, a fire that burns itself alive. A light almost too bright to look at, but I forced myself to look as long as I could.
I kissed him. He was startled at first, but he held on. I bit him a little; it was like biting into the sun. I felt the void in me open up and panicked for a moment. But it couldn’t devour what he was.
When he put me down and walked away down the hill and into the dark, I crumpled to the ground and stayed there.
* * *
I am on fire.
It doesn’t hurt, or it does hurt but I don’t care, because I can feel myself breaking into pieces. As I rise into the air, I can see my family on the ground below.
As I look at Eleanor, I can remember—not see, not live, but remember—a time when she was six, sitting on my husband’s knee, and he held out the watch that he loved so much, the one that gave him his name. She snatched it up, held it in her hands, and looked at me with her ordinary little girl face, and said, “I lived here before, but then you were my mother, not my grandmother.”
I had laughed at her then, thinking I knew where my son was—my son was the child Margaret had made me, the one who looked just like my Rhys. But knowledge twists and bends in your hands all the more when you hold it tightly. Does that mean that Eleanor is kissing her murderer on this hilltop while the house they both died in burns behind them? Or was that just something a child said once, a game? What power do I have, or what authority or reason, to say what should or should not be?
And that thought breaks something, some last connection between me and the earth. Beneath me, I hear a tremendous crash and a shudder as the house collapses in on itself: all those high towers and empty attic rooms, all those scratched floors and lovely rugs, the piano, the books, the ledgers and the joists and the walls and, somewhere, the box that held Arthur’s heart back before my first dead son ta
ught him my family’s oldest trick, how to let yourself turn inside out and become something else. And now I am inside out, too, spilling out in all directions in curling entrails of smoke that I have no desire to read, spiraling into the sky, little shreds of who I was raining down on my husband, on my children and grandchildren, on the village below, and into the wine-dark sea.
EPILOGUE
Love is hard for things like us. Luma says love feels like carrying an egg in your mouth. I know what she means: it is holding someone between your teeth and knowing how sweet it would feel to bite down, and not biting down, and letting that be sweeter.
After the fire burned out, we picked through the still-hot ashes of the house, looking for anything of value we might sell. There wasn’t much. We found a handful of fire-softened gold coins here and there, and a blackened tintype of Margaret as a young woman, hugely pregnant, looking pleased. And we found the pocket watch, glowing almost red, the face cracked and broken, the hands stopped. We pulled it out anyway. We put it around Miklos’s neck, once it had cooled down. He thumped his tail on the ground and yawned at us.
Margaret killed a pheasant with a frying pan and slit open its belly, and together we put our hands inside and felt for what we should do next. The only answer we could get was Go somewhere else. So at first light, we gathered ourselves up. We walked together down the long road through the birch forest in the pink light: Grandpa Miklos on four legs, Luma and me on two with Mother between us, an arm around each of our necks. Margaret bundled Rhys up into a singed blanket and carried him like a child in her arms.
Nobody in Winterport had gone to bed. When we reached the edge of town, they were milling around in clumps up and down the street. They stopped what they were doing to watch us.
“It’s alright,” I said, as loud as I could; my throat hurt from the smoke. “We’re leaving.”
Grandpa went through first, on all fours, the creature they’d heard and sensed in the woods but never seen. Whatever they had imagined, in the light coming off the water he was nothing more than a large, old dog with bad teeth and a lame leg. They parted to let him pass. Babes in arms stretched out their chubby hands to try to reach his fur, unafraid.
We followed the roads until we got to a place where we were unrecognizable enough that we could hitchhike, and then we caught a truck heading south. Four women, a boy, and a ragged dog.
We will eat and find shelter and sleep. We will protect Rhys until we see if there is anything left of him to protect. We will hunt in the forests and barter in the towns, until someday we come to a place where we can stop moving, where we can plant ourselves. Maybe then I will go back to school. Maybe I will learn how to be a witch. Or maybe I’ll be something else, something I can’t even imagine yet. Maybe that something will see Arthur again. But first, I want to be with my family. I have been away too long, and we need each other now.
We are Zarrins, I tell myself. We will be fine. We have always been fine. If I say it this way, I can make it true.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A book is not written by one person, no matter what I might tell myself while looking in the mirror and crooning softly to my warped and shifting reflection. A book is cowritten in two ways: by the people who shape the print material, and the people who shape the writer’s experience.
I owe a good deal to Jennifer Azantian, who read an early draft and rejected it so kindly that I sent it to her again three years later. She has since become my agent and has been instrumental to making What Big Teeth a book other people would want to read. Thank you, Jen, for not deleting my second email. I would also like to thank my editor, Trisha de Guzman, for believing in this book and for championing this project at every stage of the process. And a thank-you as well to the members of VCU’s Novel Workshop, who read this book over the course of a year, especially Cade Varnado, who read the whole thing twice, and Julie Geen, who gave me my title.
More personally: I owe a lot to my parents, who showed me Edward Gorey and The Addams Family and who suggested that I might try writing some stories down instead of shouting them, to the state of Maine (especially Anthony Elkins), and to my Hungarian great-grandparents who found each other in America by chance because they both had the same last name, Anglicized in the same way: Sabo. And finally: thank you to Anna, and Jake, and Khan. With you, all things are possible.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rose Szabo is a nonbinary writer from Richmond, VA, where they live with an assortment of people and animals. They have an MA in English from the University of Maine and an MFA in creative writing from Virginia Commonwealth University. What Big Teeth is their first novel. You can sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
What Big Teeth
Prologue
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
Copyright © 2021 by Rose Szabo
Farrar Straus Giroux Books for Young Readers
A part of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC
120 Broadway, New York, NY 10271
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All rights reserved.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
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First hardcover edition, February 2021
eBook edition, 2021
eISBN 9780374314316