Queen of teeth, p.1
Queen of Teeth, page 1
“Piper’s evocative novel is an intoxicating mix of graphic body horror and lesbian romance. Painful questions regarding corporate accountability, personal redemption and forgiveness, mental health, and the nature of love revolve around the novel’s three fascinating main characters, Yaya, Doc, and Magenta. The elusive worldbuilding—When is the story set exactly? Is it on an alternate Earth in an alternate timeline?—serves the story well, heightening its menacing tone.
A powerful, beautiful horror story.”— Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Queen of Teeth promises teeth and tentacles, yet delivers so much more. The complexity of the world Piper crafts is believable and expertly done. The book defies strict genre definition as it dabbles in horror, science fiction, and romance to create a truly toothsome experience. Fans of Piper will adore this book and new readers will be quick to pick up her previous titles after this delightful initiation.”—Tracy Robinson, Rue Morgue
"Queen of Teeth by Hailey Piper is so fucking good, and so fucking gay, that I am absolutely in awe. Like a city-destroying monstrosity secreted within a human form, this dystopian body horror story conceals layers upon layers of romance, tragedy, guilt, and what it means to be human. I would happily be devoured by it again and again."—Lindsay King-Miller, author of Ask a Queer Chick
Published by Strangehouse Books
an imprint of Rooster Republic Press LLC
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Copyright © by Hailey Piper 2021
Cover Design by Don Noble
Edited by Nicholas Day
Interior Design – Don Noble
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written consent of the publisher, except where permitted by law.
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Dedicated to
Janelle Monae
and
Mel Blanc
for the voices and the tunes.
She should never have come.
White debris breathes through cracks in crumbling walls, and black smoke climbs toward the moon. The high school lies a broken eggshell, and beyond its lot, she finds the reason she has been called here. A new creation cries forlorn in the night, baptized in the blood of teachers, peers, and family. Once a teenage student weighed by purse and books and expectations, now turned a pale dragon, countless limbs thrashing as boneless ropes, eager to burn the world. There is monstrous beauty in the blood-spotted skin, and beneath, an intense desire to live. A desire unfulfilled.
She should never have come because, deep down, she can never leave, even when the dragon lets her. Guilt will follow her beyond these soot-coated ruins, through fires and chemicals and once-human screams. Wherever she goes, this night will haunt her for the rest of her life.
1
A red streak stained the baby blue fitted sheet between Yaya’s legs. She sat up, kicking away blankets, and let chilly November air crawl into the bed.
Fuck, not now. That wasn’t fair; she hadn’t even been spotting this week.
Her brain sifted through cloudy memories, filtering good water from sweet poison. Last night’s hookup—what was her name again?—had asked if her fingers were touching an IUD and promised in a dry tone that birth control wasn’t needed tonight. Yaya had been half-drunk, full exhausted, and figured her body just wasn’t getting with the program.
Now she knew why: pre-menstruation anticipation. She didn’t need this, especially not in another woman’s apartment, in her bed. What-Was-Her-Name would probably be cool about it, most women would, but that hadn’t been the case last time Yaya’s period popped in the morning after a one-night stand.
Come to think of it, she couldn’t remember that woman’s name either. Maybe that was the real reason she’d screamed for Yaya to get the hell out. She hoped this new stranger had a little more patience and understanding on all counts.
Yaya slipped from the bed onto cold plank flooring and found her slender black purse at her feet. She carried it to the bathroom, shut the door, and pawed the purse’s overstuffed insides—no feminine products. She hadn’t been prepared for this.
Any sympathetic paramour would certainly spare a pad and tampon without complaint. And if she complained, Yaya had already stained her sheets and forgotten her name. There were plenty of things to be angry over; borrowing supplies would come low on the list.
Yaya shoved her purse aside and raided under the sink. What-Was-Her-Name kept her pads and tampons in boxes beside folded washcloths, but she was running low on tampons. Fingers crossed she was extremely forgiving and this one-night stand didn’t lead to any synchronizing. Yaya sat on the toilet, got herself in order, and then unwrapped the tampon.
It wouldn’t go in.
And after all that moralizing. Was it the same trouble as last night with What-Was-Her-Damn-Name’s fingers? No, Yaya was sober now and this didn’t feel like her muscles clenching. Something was in the way, small and loose, yet hard. Hooking her fingers, she did a little prodding, and it fell into her hand, dotting her palm with red splotches around the lump of bone.
A baby tooth.
She blinked. This had to be a calcium deposit that happened to form a molar’s shape. She tossed it between her legs, where it plonked in the toilet water, and grasped the tampon again.
It still wouldn’t slide in. She was almost afraid to find out why, but she had to know. Scant seconds after she set the tampon aside, her exploring fingertips brushed larger rounded bones inside her. She couldn’t guess how many by touch alone, but they felt set in the tissue.
“Yaya?” The voice bounced her name on a drowsy tongue. What-Was-Her-Name hadn’t noticed the state of her bed yet, only that she was alone.
“Just a minute,” Yaya said.
She rarely had a convenient cycle. Never did it strike while she was in the shower or already seated on the toilet. It always hit when she was walking to the bus stop, or manning the register at Jumpies, or right after sex, as if there was a button up there marked Push here for eggs, crimson-side up. As a bonus to poor timing, her period always struck with fun quirks. Acne rashes, fatigue, skull-splitting migraines.
By contrast, surprise teeth didn’t seem so bad.
She wasn’t misinterpreting the shapes, either. They were small, capped by corner lumps, like molars, and were that not proof enough, the baby tooth lingered in the toilet bowl below. Small and large teeth alike somehow hadn’t torn the vaginal wall, that she could tell. Her only pains right now were the cramps that stabbed her abdomen.
It could mean worse though. Her condition. Thirty-one years old, these things happened, and best have it checked before work today. She wiped her hands, dug her smartphone from her purse, its transparent shell case patterned by wires and circuits like a ‘90s toy, and called her Sibs station.
“Yolanda Betancourt,” she said when prompted.
“Yolanda Betancourt,” an automated yet feminine voice echoed. “Your next mandatory acute zygote manifestation syndrome appointment is scheduled for Monday, November 12th, at 11:15 in the morning at the East Newark Medical Station in Newark, New Jersey. Thank you for calling. AlphaBeta Pharmaceutical, making your world a better place!”
Yaya hit zero—no operator answered. She asked to speak with a human, but ABP seemed fresh out. Every visit to an AlphaBeta Pharmaceutical Sibs station had been on their time, but they couldn’t make an exception when she had chompers growing between her legs.
She gave up on the phone, unwrapped a pad, and stuck it into her underwear. It would only last so long on its own, but the tampon wasn’t fitting and she couldn’t exactly call the Tooth Fairy to swap the teeth for their worth in dimes. Maybe she worked for ABP. Yaya tossed the tampon in the garbage and blustered out of the bathroom.
The bedroom opened to one side, the living room and kitchen to the other, furniture neatly spaced, the photo frames even and uncluttered, the apartment tidy. Everything the opposite of Yaya’s cramped, messy studio.
What-Was-Her-Name sat up on her queen size bed. She couldn’t have been a few years older than Yaya, but her short hair was stark white, tussled in bedhead style. She probably bleached it. Her stern yet sleepy smile crossed her pale face.
Drums beat between Yaya’s legs. She scarcely remembered going home with the stranger, but her body sure did. Or maybe this was an odd cramp. Or more teeth.
What-Was-Her-Name stretched limber arms and yawned. “You’re going?”
“Jumpies called,” Yaya said, scurrying to the foot of the bed—leggings, bra—and then toward the living room’s white sofa—tank top, scarf. Her buttoned top lay draped over the dark wood bookshelf. “Surprise early shift.”
The stranger peered into the living room—what the hell was her name? It started with a D, didn’t it? She seemed half-waiting for Yaya to go, and also half-reluctant. “I was about to offer breakfast,” she said.
Yaya tugged on her bra and then her tank. “I’ll get it on the way.”
Starts-With-D hummed. “Suit yourself. You were hungry last night, tried to take a bite out of me.” She flashed two fingers that must have brushed against secret teeth.
Yaya cringed; she could almost feel them gnashing inside her. Fingernails scratched fingertips as she hastily buttoned her top and yanked leggings over her waist. She wasn’t the kind to hang around. The night was over, and so were they, never again would their ships cross in the night, all fish shall be set free in the sea, and so on.
The mattress creaked. “Did you bleed in my bed?” the stranger asked.
Yaya found her winter coat in a pile of shoes beside the door. She threw it on and looked back with a sheepish grimace. “Sorry.”
Starts-With-D shook her head, smile practically glowing. “It happens,” she said. “They’d ambush my ex, too.”
Yaya thanked the sex gods for exes. “Do you—” She tried to stop the question, but it tore loose anyway. “You ever find teeth inside when you get your period?”
The stranger cocked her head. “Periods have been odd the last few years, but no.”
Yaya couldn’t stay here any longer. Bad enough that her blood had to have soaked through, ruining the sheets. Hopefully not the mattress, but she wasn’t going to stick around for Starts-With-D to find out.
She turned to leave, where her own reflection stared from a mirror clinging to the back of the apartment door. Her winter coat puffed over her, and black curls tangled around her face, flushed from running around, nose and cheeks already red with cold. The glasscutter jaw she’d inherited from her grandmother stuck out when she grinned, but that was her usual. Red vessels painted her blue and hazel eyes, also like any other day.
Perfect. She didn’t look like a woman with teeth up her vagina.
2
Yaya had never visited a private doctor’s office before. Other people with her condition sometimes went to the emergency room, but that had never happened to her. She stuck to AlphaBeta Pharmaceutical’s Sibs stations, easier that way. The waiting room for Sunnyside Fertility was alien territory.
To the left, half a dozen people sat in plastic seats and tapped at their phones. To the right, a gorgeous brown pillar of a woman loomed behind a sunken countertop where she worked at a computer.
Yaya slinked toward the reception desk and said, “Excuse me?” A wooden nameplate said Jessie, but Yaya didn’t want to assume that was the receptionist’s name by saying it aloud. Her Jumpies nametag said Yolanda, after all.
Jessie smiled down at Yaya and slid a clipboard toward her. “Name, appointment time, and who you’re seeing.”
Yaya stared at the lined paper. She had no appointment and filled in her name, wrote ASAP for the time, and question marks in the physician column.
“And can I see your insurance card?” Jessie asked, teeth peeking behind her smile.
What was with the third degree? No one at the Sibs station ever asked Yaya anything beyond her name and card. ABP workers and doctors didn’t like questions, giving or getting, and she’d figured it was the same for everyone else. Controlling as ABP was, they handled everything.
“Miss?” Jessie grasped the clipboard’s corner and pulled it into her shadow. “Do you even have an appointment?”
“Do I need one?” Yaya asked. “You got to take walk-ins sometimes, yeah? For surprises.”
Jessie adjusted herself. She had to spend half her evenings benching parked cars. Yaya was nothing in this shadow.
A weird pulse ate down her abdomen. She’d never felt cramps this strange, usually more knife-like than itchy and squirming. Her hormones had to be protesting the change of scene. They wanted their usual Sibs station.
Jessie’s customer service smile shrank. “Insurance?”
Yaya reached into her purse and withdrew her red and white ABP card. A clinician swiped that little plastic rectangle each month when she came and went from the Sibs station. Swiping it here would probably send the bill to ABP, and they could bounce it back and forth with Sunnyside while someone actually helped Yaya for a change. ABP’s apathy had surrendered their say. They wouldn’t kill her for getting a second opinion once in her life.
But Jessie didn’t swipe the card. She wouldn’t touch it. “You’re one of those chimeras?”
“Chimeras, double-zeroes, freaks—your preference,” Yaya said. The itchy squirming slid down her arms and legs. Her nails begged to tear skin, but she gripped the reception desk instead. “That a problem?”
“You’re supposed to go to those stations for the cute zygote thing,” Jessie said.
“Acute zygote manifestation syndrome.” Yaya leaned over the counter. Jessie didn’t lean back, but there was a shift. The itch sank between Yaya’s legs, as if to remind her why she would bother with Sunnyside at all. “There was a complication, and I needed help pronto. Don’t you ever have down-there complications?”
“You have no appointment, no insurance, and a genetic condition that no one in normal medicine studies for.” Jessie tapped the desk beside the ABP card. “If you have an emergency, head to the ER.”
“It’s not an emergency; it’s a complication,” Yaya said through gritted teeth. A hot flare shot up her spine. “Look, I just need to know if I got cancer in my cooch, or if it’s Sibs coming home to roost, or some new STD, okay? I’m not asking much. Can someone here please take pity on me for all of two minutes?”
A door opened behind the reception desk, and a harrowed-looking woman in white coat and blue scrubs leaned through. She handed a manila folder to Jessie and took the clipboard. “Yolanda?” she asked.
“Yaya.”
“I’ll squeeze you in.” The doctor scribbled across the clipboard. “If you can wait.”
Yaya peered at the clipboard. Her row’s physician column now said Dr. Ruby Kaur. Yaya settled back from the desk, and the squirming heat shrank to some deep place inside her.
“I can wait a little,” she said, her voice shrinking too. She wanted to run to the restroom and find out what the hell her downstairs teeth were doing, but their inner tantrum had taken the fight out of her.
Ruby called up a man from the waiting room, and Yaya took his seat. The others patients shuffled as if she’d disturbed a body of water, but no one spoke. A flat TV clung to the back wall, the news droning at low volume about the stock market, set against a graph full of squiggly lines. Yaya wondered if those same lines now curled through her guts.
Heat stroked her side, someone leaning past his seat and toward hers. She glanced left, where a white thirty-something with a blunt chestnut beard tried a reassuring smile.
“It’s okay,” he said. Wavy hair fell over his forehead.
Yaya kept staring, her brow creasing.
His smile widened. “No shame in showing up here. Everyone needs help with one thing or another.” He extended a hand. “Bryant Peters.”
Yaya looked to his hand and then back to his bearded face. “Free tip, Bryant? Fertility clinic—not the dating hotspot it’s cracked up to be.”
Bryant grinned, all hair and teeth, and held up his hands in surrender. “Yowzah, right to the bone. Got it, message received, loud and clear.” He leaned into his seat and looked to his phone, probably to tell his friends about the psycho he’d met while cruising for a date. Weirdo.
Yaya tried to clear her mind, but her internal radio’s every AM/FM channel seemed tuned to one distracting song on loop. Teeth, teeth, teeth. The beat was decent, but the lyrics needed work, their subtext unpleasant: She could look like a woman without teeth downstairs, but that didn’t help how she felt or what she thought.
~
Two hours passed before Ruby said, “Ms. Betancourt, follow me.”
Yaya’s joints cried as she stood. She had been to the restroom twice to switch pads. Ruby led through a door past reception, across a short hall, and into a stark examining room. From what Yaya had seen on TV, she guessed this was normal for non-chimeras.
But the pale light and long blue table reminded her of a morgue. She sat on crinkly paper.
“Is it serious?” Ruby asked. She didn’t shut the door.
Yaya shrugged. “Nobody on their period would come to a gyno if it wasn’t serious, right?”
“So, you’re menstruating.” Ruby scribbled at a notepad. “And you’re concerned about a sexually transmitted disease. Are you sexually active?”
“Wouldn’t that be a given?”
“Are you going to answer every question with a question?” Ruby tapped pen against paper. “If you’re going to be combative, the door’s behind you.”
