Fake Teeth
We didn’t play Shark Attack anymore after I face-planted on a marble slide and banged my two front teeth. He pushed, she fell, me and my brother each told as I bared the cleaved teeth to Ma’s horror. I had been in a storytelling competition before that. The story was about two sheep and a goat. What I wanted to show and tell about my two fake front teeth was that they were like those knee-high socks that made your legs look like a geisha’s face. Underneath it, one tooth had its nerves severed, pulled out, and replaced with a pin. The other had a live nerve intact and Big Uncle, who’s a dentist and who got me the fake teeth, said it would die on its own but it didn’t. Hasn’t. For years, Big Uncle made me a new set of fake choppers every now and then and glued them on with his super dental glue. There, he’d say, all pretty again.
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Tiffany Hsieh was born in Taiwan and moved to Canada at the age of fourteen. Her fiction and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in Cosmonauts Avenue, Gordon Square Review, Juked, The Malahat Review, Passages North, Poet Lore, Room, Salamander, The Shanghai Literary Review, and others. Her work has been nominated for Best Microfiction and Best Small Fictions. She lives in southern Ontario.
Photo by note thanun on Unsplash
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The Waking is an online literary magazine and a part of the Ruminate creative community that houses high-quality literary writing about what it’s like to be human. We are interested in short-form prose and image-text hybrid work. This art can be beautiful, it can be strange, we just ask that it feels true.