When Her Teeth Fell Out

During dinner, Ahma’s dentures shot out of her mouth like a carp slipping off a fishhook, landing on the tile with a wet slap. Under the harsh white light, they gleamed strangely, jaws opening and closing. Brown sweet-and-sour sauce leaked from between the teeth, trailing a sticky path across the floor.

Her gums, now bare, kept working at the cartilage of a pork rib. Saliva pooled at the corners of her mouth, but she didn’t stop. Wet, smacking sounds filled the air. The veins at her temples pulsed from the strain. Sauce streaked her lips like dried blood.

I reached toward the dentures reflexively—ever the dutiful daughter. My mother struck her bowl with her chopsticks. The porcelain rang, shrill and sharp.

“Eat!”

I figured she didn’t want the food getting cold. My mother’s gaze flicked across the floor, past the twitching dentures, as if they were something shameful and long buried.

Just then, the dentures clamped shut. Open, then shut again. They began gnawing at the table leg. Clack, clack, clack. Tiny splinters scattered across the top of my slippers.

I asked, “Will the table leg snap first, or the dentures?”

Ahma spat out a shard of bone. It hit the table with a dull thud. Her throat moved like she meant to speak. Maybe her dentures were telling me how, during the famine years, she’d chewed bark and eaten banana leaves raw. And now, when rice came with every meal, her teeth had dropped out, one by one, too early.

Maybe this is a tooth’s true purpose: to carve hunger into the body. Not to feed, but to remind us what it means to go without.

Maybe that’s why, even without dentures, her gums still managed. Why the dentures on the floor gnawed so furiously, refusing to be forgotten.

“Does it taste good?” I asked.

Ahma made a quiet noise, somewhere between a grunt and a slurp—maybe a yes, or maybe just the sound of chewing—like I’d asked an obvious, stupid question that she’d long since stopped answering. Then she picked up a chicken wing and shoved it into her mouth. Her lips moved like wax paper, crumpled and smoothed again, making a slow, sticky squelch. A sound to tell me I’d never known hunger the way she had. Or proof that the hunger hadn’t left her—even if the famine had.

Huina Zheng holds an M.A. with Distinction in English Studies and works as a college essay coach. Her stories have been published in Baltimore Review, Variant Literature, Midway Journal, and other reputed publications. Her work has been nominated thrice for both the Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net. She resides in Guangzhou, China with her family.