Internal affairs by sarp sozdinler
The year my father stopped believing in dental hygiene, he covered the bathroom walls with curling Polaroids of our crooked teeth and announced that toothpaste was for the gullible, rationed it between my sister and I like post-war sugar, one dollop per child, Tuesdays and Fridays only, then locked the tube in the gun safe as if anyone might attempt a heist for fluoride, and after a while our toothbrushes became brittle sculptures standing on the edge of the sink, museum pieces no one dared look at, not even my mother, who went silent, constantly chewing on her nails, and soon I started loading my bag with gums, lots and lots of it, a minty contraband I traded off for answers to math homework, swapping flavors with Chloe and Finn at lunch like a Wall Street dealer, watermelon for spearmint, wintergreen for Big Red, the blue bricks called Polar Blast that I hid under the school desk until the teacher found the wrappers poking out and made me stay after school to clean it, and I counted them all while scraping each lump with a popsicle stick, thinking of home and my father’s voice bouncing around the walls (Do you want the fluoride to eat your brain inside out? Do you want to fill your cells with microplastics?), his teeth looking small and perfect at the same time, and I thought maybe he was right after all, maybe he was the walking proof that something was almost always wrong behind the façade, but my sister, who was older and less loyal, hid her spare toothbrush and secondhand tubes of toothpaste behind the sink, creating a mosaic of her multicolored rebellion—sugar-pink for strawberries, icy blue for mint, along with a constellation of other colors that she said had tasted briefly like another life—and when the air whistled through the roof tiles at night, before she went to sleep, she told me that cavities were the real family curse, not bad luck or diabetes or my mother’s migraines, but those tiny, dark holes that chewed us hollow from inside out, and some nights, after my father stomped in drunk from the yard and lined up his army medals on the kitchen table just to feel proud, I went into the bathroom to brush my teeth with one of my sister’s toothpastes, one with baking soda, eyes closed, pretending the fizz was a secret ocean rinsing everything clean, including my teeth, including my gums, including my soul, but afterward I always chewed a gum to chase the medicinal taste away, on and on until my jaw ached and the sweetness was gone and my mouth tasted like rubber and saliva, and I pressed the gum remains onto the bottom of the sink, near my sister’s stash, forming a secret map of all the days we’d gotten away with something, and when my father finally found them one day, he scraped up each sticky piece with his thumb, the colors fading into his palm, and for a long time he said nothing, just sat back on his heels, jaw working, as if he might cry or laugh or ask us to explain ourselves, but he only pressed the pads of his fingers together, one by one, rolling the gums into soft little balls, collecting all the toothbrushes and toothpastes and throwing them into the bin, and after a minute he stood up and checked our teeth one by one, slow and gentle, mine crusted with all the remains of bygone sweets and cavities, and he nodded to himself and left the room without looking me in the eye, and later that evening my mother made us all a pot of chamomile tea and lined up three mugs on the counter, and we drank it together in the kitchen, everything tasting faintly of spearmint and fluoride and things we almost said out loud to each other.
Sarp Sozdinler has been published in Electric Literature, Kenyon Review, Shenandoah, Wigleaf, HAD, Hobart, X-R-A-Y, Maudlin House, and Pithead Chapel, among other journals. He edits the literary journal The Bulb Region.
