The Teeth: Part 2

This week at The Writer’s Block, I’m posting Part 2 of my original short story, “The Teeth.” If you missed part 1 from last week, just scroll down and voila, there it is. Stay tuned for next week’s final installment. I hope you enjoy, and thanks for visiting my blog. AN

Part 2

The dream was really a recurring nightmare that began for Max when she and Lou were just little girls. It all started after Max saw the dead body of a small baby when walking home from Sally’s Candy store one Saturday afternoon. She made this same trek a million times before, but who would’ve guessed that a trip down the hill for a bag of barbecue corn chips and a can of grape soda, would end with an experience that would change her life.

Max was on her way home when she saw a crowd forming in front of a house just about a block away from where she lived. Wanting to see what was going on, Max pushed her way through the crowd to get a better look at whatever was attracting so much attention. Just as she pushed past old man Wilson, she saw it –the baby, her limp body being lifted out of a shallow grave.

The baby was covered in dirt, her hair tangled atop her head and her brown skin tinted blue. She was wearing a diaper and nothing else; against her dark skin the diaper appeared to be the whitest diaper Max had ever seen -almost as if it were glowing. Max was in shock, having never seen a dead body before. Her instincts told her to run, but she was pressed in by the crowd of onlookers who were eager to get a glance at that tiny lifeless body -so Max was trapped there, unable to tear her eyes from the terrible scene.

Max felt dizzy, she thought she might pass out, and it didn’t help that the din of the voices around her made her head spin. Then Old Man Wilson’s voice kicked in loud and clear, the self-proclaimed Mayor of Hartford Street knew everything about everyone, and he seemed to know a lot about the baby and her family. “Her name is Annie.” He said “And that’s her folks up there on the porch; her mamma and daddy been lookin’ for her for hours.” Max managed to turn her gaze towards the house and noticed that it was an odd peach color, with a white wrap around porch. A woman in a flowery dress stood there whimpering, her whole body shaking, then suddenly she ran screaming into the house, a man -the baby’s father according to Mayor Wilson, quickly followed her inside. 

Max watched in horror as the coroner lowered the child’s dead body into a bag and sealed it. That very night the dream began -and for a year it plagued her. It would come one night than disappear for weeks on end -always to return, no detail in it ever changing; it was like the same scene from a movie being played over and over. 

In this dream, Max was in a strange house, roaming the halls looking for a crying baby. She went from room to room, the cries seemed to be getting closer but she just couldn’t find where they were coming from. She could hear strange voices yelling in one of the rooms, than a screaming woman, followed once again by the baby’s crying.  The crying grew louder and louder and led Max to a white door that was painted with dozens of colorful flowers. When she opened it, she saw baby Annie with that bright white diaper on, lying in a crib. Max walked towards it, and when she looked down it was Annie, her limp body lying there, just as Max remembered from that Saturday afternoon. 

She would awaken in a deep panic, and to make matters worse, whenever Max had the dream it would be followed by some horrible crime occurring in her small mostly Black middle class neighborhood. The dream would happen and a murder would occur a few blocks away; or a theft down the street; even Max’s uncle became a victim after one dream, when he was mugged around the same time Max was caught up in the nightmare. She was afraid to go to bed, terrified at the thought of her nightmare creeping into the real world. 

The dreams didn’t stop until baby Annie’s killer was taken into custody a little over a year after her body was discovered. Max found out the details while snooping in on a conversation between Old man Wilson and her father. He was helping Max’s dad tie some flies, and brought up the baby’s death as matter-of-factly as if he were talking about the football game from the day before. Turns out that baby Annie was killed by her mother after her husband found out that the baby wasn't his. She did it because she didn’t want him to leave her. Max held back an urge to scream, and slipped away to her room where she sobbed until her mom called her down for dinner. But after she found this out, the dream suddenly stopped, and after a while the memory faded until the whole experience felt like was just a bad dream. Now, as an adult the dream has returned, and once again Max was worried about who would be hurt in the wake of this recurring nightmare.  Lou was the only person Max confided in, she never even told her parents.   

“What made the dream come back?” Lou asked. Pulling a surprise box of jujubes out of that abyss she called a purse.

“I’m getting there just wait!” Max said. She didn’t want to be rushed.

Lou began whining before Max could continue. “When is this movie gonna start?”

“It’s still early Lou, so stop complaining. As I was saying, I started  having the dream again, and every night for about a week it woke me up at exactly the same time -3:30 am. The first night I get out of bed to watch a little TV and guess who’s on the tube? That hypnotist guy with the white teeth, Tony Robbins; what are the odds? Then I hear a strange noise outside, so I peak through the blinds.” 

“Didn’t know you were the nosey neighbor type.” Lou says, turning up her nose in a manner that said she didn’t approve of her friends behavior.

“Don’t look at me like that, you know you would’ve done the same thing.” Lou shrugged and stuffed a handful of jujubes in her mouth. 

Max went on. “I see my neighbor with the not so white teeth come home, than 10 minutes later he leaves again, not to return until 5 am –I know this because I couldn’t get back to sleep. The next night, it happens again. At 3:30, I wake from the dream to hear The Teeth leaving his place, he had that ugly bowling bag with him and it looked as if it were busting at the seams. It was so full in fact that he was having trouble closing the door and holding the bag at the same time. But when he returned, the bag is noticeably lighter.”

“What the hell was in that bag?” Lou asked. Clutched in her right hand was a Snickers bar that Max hadn’t seen before.

“I don’t want to get ahead of myself, just listen!”

“So sorry.” Lou said sarcastically, and then devoured the candy bar in two very large bites.

“A few days after The Teeth starts making these mysterious late night runs, I have the dream again, but for the first time ever, it’s a little different. This time, I’m in front of that weird peach colored house and I see the family on the porch -watching me. Standing with them is a young woman wearing a yellow blouse and jeans; she has red hair, pale skin and looks sad. She definitely was not there that Saturday, and I couldn’t figure out why she was in the dream. I could feel myself getting anxious, and then I knew why; standing next to the red headed woman was my neighbor –The Teeth.”

“Whoa.” Was all Lou could say.

“Whoa is right.” Max said, still shaken by that night. “I wake up in a cold sweat, spooked by the neighbor guy with the teeth in my dream. So I get up again, because obviously I can’t sleep, even the hypnotist Robbins would be better than seeing The Teeth in my dream. As I’m flipping through the channels, I stop on a late night news broadcast. They were doing a story on a young woman who’s been missing for weeks; the reporter spoke with her family and friends who were pleading for any information on her whereabouts. Then I nearly piss my pants when they show a photo of this missing woman -she is the woman in the yellow blouse with the red hair that I just saw in my dream. As far as I know, I have never seen that woman in my life until the dream. I tell ya, I was freaked out Lou. You see what I didn’t tell you earlier, is that in the dream the red headed woman was moving her lips, at first I couldn’t make out what she was saying, then it hit me, she was asking for help.  Lou, the red headed woman in my dream was asking for my help.” 

End of Part 2

Click here for the finale of “The Teeth.”

Alice from The Block