It would have been nice if Bo could have waited to get his teeth
filled until after Flora got married, but he was 7 and very quick for his
age, which meant that during Reading Comprehension he would amuse himself
by poking his tongue around his mouth until the other kids finished the
assigned passage. This made the cavities hurt worse; two days out of three
they hurt so badly he couldn't eat lunch, and then Flora would have to 
leave work early to pull a lightheaded Bo out of State History. Principal
Sacks was supremely understanding, but Flora's manager laid down the law.
An appointment was made for the soonest possible date. Meanwhile, Bo was
given a special temporary seat at the back of the class and asked to
faint as quietly as possible, if it came to that.
	Dorie, 11, explained to her younger brother that when you asked
the tooth fairy to put extra tooth goop back in your mouth, you also had
to return some of the tooth fairy's money. If Bo thought back he could
just about remember the first time he'd gotten something from the tooth
fairy. It came as a surprise at the time, but with repetition he'd started
to feel entitled to the transaction. He wasn't sure just how fair the
fairy's buyback policy was, and it was downright rotten that Flora was
selling her new dress before the wedding for the sake of his teeth.

	"Look at this," Bo said.
	Flora slid another piece of wood onto the fire and joined Bo at
the threadbare living-room couch. "Look!" he said again; he momentarily
clamped his jaw around the edge of a pillow. When he stood up, a sharp,
black spot remained where each of his three amalgam-filled teeth had been.
	"Do your teeth feel okay?" she asked. Bo nodded. "Then don't worry,
honey. It'll go away."
	When Flora discovered the spots didn't come out with water, her
little brother was already asleep, beyond the reach of temporal justice,
had justice itself not been too tired to care anyway.

	Two years to the day after Flora's parents drove their car to the
bottom of Lake Erie, she married Antonin in a short ceremony at the West
Side Community Center. As everyone filed upstairs afterward for the recep-
tion, more than one relative approached Bo and Dorie to say "I'm sure your
mom and dad would have loved it anyway." Bo always flinched at the word
'anyway', having learned that it generally followed a soothing lie, and
Dorie hated her relatives for the oblique advice they'd started giving her
about "when you grow up". But the two of them had discussed what to do at
the wedding, so they took it with a smile, each squeezing the other's hand
when it looked like one of them might crack.
	While Flora pulled platters of cheese out of the fridge and served
them to the guests in her simple, homemade polka-dot dress, Antonin, the
very picture of happiness, ran down the steps with a cup in his hand. He
found Bo and Dorie quietly reading in one corner of the dais.
	"Here," he said to Bo; "Your mo-- your sister told me to give you
this." Bo nodded. "She said you might need it."
	Bo pretended to sip from the cup, lips pinched shut, until Antonin
was back upstairs. He knew about taking gifts gracefully and wanted to be
nice to Tony, but the fact was that he liked the taste of cotton; he didn't
want to replace it yet, not with fruit punch, not with ANYTHING.

written for Karen Black in my room 2/28/01

A certain friend, whose writing and opinions I respect a lot, has been poking at me to write something that unambiguously takes place in the real world. (He didn't actually use the phrase "none of that Aaron bullshit", but one email said "no alternate-universe social conventions", which is roughly the equivalent.) That was on my mind writing this one, though between my total ignorance of dentistry (never even had a cavity) and the ending I've probably strained credulity as much as ever.

I also had my own agenda, which was to try and really write the story around Karen's words rather than making each word's appearance an individual act of cleverness or a twist; the degree to which I've done that has gone up and down in the past, but I wanted to get back to it. That's why most of the words were implied, rather than used outright; memory comes up in a few places, and Bo definitely feels things viscerally, but neither word threw its own self in my path while I was writing.

Thirdly, I've been hanging out a lot with a new friend whose parents both died about a year ago, though not by suicide or anything else remotely scandalous, nor both at the same time; her situation (and slyly caring demeanor) float throughout.

And furthermore, Cindy of clinkclank.net just finished a series of anecdotes about her past, many set in childhood, and I feel like I've lifted her style as much as I had the skill to. It takes a village to write a story.

I'm going to have to get a lot better with names if I want to set things in the here and now, though.

- everything is by Aaron Mandel; please ask first if you're about to steal something -

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