A Kiss With Teeth Read Free

working with his son. She apologizes for missing their meeting. She suggests he return next week. She promises to be here for him then.
    Vlad does not examine the rest of the folder’s contents until he reaches home. He reads the note three times on his walk. He tries not to smell the camellias, or the chalk, or the slight salt edge of fear. He smells them anyway.
    *   *   *
    His wife returns late from the library. While he works with Paul, she does pull-ups on the bar they sling over the bedroom doorjamb. She breathes heavily through her mouth as she rises and falls. Behind her shadows fill their unlit bedroom.
    Paul works long division. How many times does seven go into forty-three, and how much is left over? How far can you carry out the decimal? Paul’s pencil breaks, and he sharpens it in the translucent bright red plastic toy his mother bought him, with pleasant curves to hide the tiny blade inside.
    Vlad wants to teach Paul to sharpen his pencils with a knife, but sharpening pencils with a knife is not common these days, and anyway they’d have to collect the shaved bits of wood and graphite afterward. The old ways were harder to clean up.
    â€œTell me about your teacher,” Vlad says.
    â€œShe’s nice,” Paul replies. “Three goes into eight two times, and two’s left over.”
    â€œNice,” Vlad echoes.
    Once his wife’s exercises are done, they send Paul to bed. “I miss cricket,” he says as they tuck him in. “I miss tennis and football and baseball.”
    â€œThis is only for now,” says Vlad’s wife. “Once your work gets better, you can watch again. And play.”
    â€œOkay.” The boy is not okay, but he knows what he is supposed to say.
    In the kitchen, the kettle screams. They leave Paul in his dark room. Vlad’s wife pours tea, disappears into their bedroom, and emerges soon after wearing flannel pajamas and her fluffy robe, hair down. She looks tired. She looks happy. Vlad cannot tell which she looks more. She sits cross-legged on the couch, tea steaming on the table beside her, and opens a book in her lap.
    â€œYou’re doing it again,” she says ten minutes later.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œNot moving.”
    An old habit of his when idle: find a dark corner, stand statue-still, and observe. He smiles. “I am tired. I start to forget.”
    â€œOr remember,” she says.
    â€œI always remember.” He sits in the love seat, at right angles to her.
    â€œIt’s wonderful what you’re doing with Paul.”
    â€œI want to help.”
    â€œYou do.”
    He shifts from the love seat to the couch, and does not bother to move slow. The wind of his passage puffs in her eyes. She blinks, and nestles beside him.
    â€œThis is okay for you? I worry sometimes.” Her hand’s on his thigh. It rests there, strong, solid. “You’ve been quiet. I hope you’re telling me what you need.”
    Need. He does not use that word much, even to himself. He needed this, ten years ago. Ten years ago she chased him, this beauty with the methodical mind, ferretted his secrets out of ancient archives and hunted him around the world. Ten years ago, he lured her to the old castle in the mountains, one last challenge. Ten years ago she shone in starlight filtered through cracks in the castle’s roof. He could have killed her and hid again, as he had before. Remained a leaf blown from age to age and land to land on a wind of blood.
    She’d seemed so real in the moonlight.
    So he descended and spoke with her, and they found they knew one another better than anyone else. And ten years passed.
    What does he need?
    He leans toward her. His sharp teeth press on the inside of his gums, against the false yellowed set. He smells her blood. He smells camellias. His teeth recede. He kisses her on the forehead.
    â€œI love you,” they both say. Later he tries to remember which of