I’d had black spots on my teeth since I was nineteen. I was twenty-five. My mother was—and is—disabled (Multiple Sclerosis) so I had grace: there is only so much room for me to moan over obsolete errors, benevolent little diseases. I can’t get too concerned. My nervous system works, so I’m fine. There’s a relativistic factor, your mother landing in the bushes like that, her nerves shivved into broken beads. While others might have pursued, for these black spots, a cure—because in fact it was embarrassing, tarry little bubbles—I maintained removal, a total apathy really. There was a worse affliction I could get: a maggot in the spine.

I brushed, flossed, but otherwise didn’t bother beyond that. Nobody said anything about it. Everyone assumed it was permanent, birthmarks, though the teeth don’t have much genetic propensity to flesh. But I just wasn’t built to care! I only want to walk. To have a sound spine.

But what I mean to tell, after all, is that the black spots did disappear. During the five or six weeks I fell in love with Felix Scraint, they went. And I have it figured out that it was his tongue in my mouth, disseminating a wild curative. I know this absolutely because of the uncanny timing of the spots’ disappearance, and my ability to locate our kissing against quite official blocks of time. I know, for instance, that the disappearance occurred exactly one week after our first kiss—when he’d posed over me on his couch which itself was a pose posing as the couch of a graduate student, the found-ness of that object, the dumpster pink velvet, endearingly rabbity, but a rabbit tangled in the motions of a dream.

We were both in Philosophy, and our interest toward each other grew during a mutual class on Thursday evenings. To relax in the afterward hour, we played the stupid game “I never” during which I said I’d never killed a man and Felix Scraint drank, to signify that he had, and he said—he had a beard—he never had anal sex, and I drank, and so on. But the game was contorted into a kind of double lying, so nothing was true and never was ever, or lover. I never was stunning, opening buttons. I never sparkled.

The timing of my curing was obvious, because if something big was happening on the incremental slope of genuine affection felt between bearded Felix Scraint and me, it was that Thursday, the kind that sifts through a sieve into Friday, leaving us feeling strung out on my bed, or, rather, strained, the hearts and other organs left to sit in Thursday’s exciting colander. When I noticed the missing spots—bare, clean teeth—Felix Scraint had just said his second Friday Goodbye, removed his beard, in a precious way, from my stomach.

While I showered, he’d run out to purchase, on student loans, a Plan B pill, which he left on my table for the taking. I’d put on neon violet leggings usually reserved for weekend fun in the small town we both moved to for this, for Philosophy: a northwestern valley, the mountains lit from inside in Autumn, as if earth rumbled with lanterns, Canada close. He’d come from the south and would go back to the south and I was northeastern, a total bagel. He kept a handgun on his bedside table, which had my friends squawking. But I’d tried to take the philosophical route. To deeply look at the thing of it. What is a gun? What is a particle? But unable to muster support from anybody—they’d asked, “How can you kiss next to a gun?” or “Does he beat women, too?”—I finally bleated: “He’s from the south, it’s just the south, it’s where he’s from,” which I’d hoped to mean, if I am good, that his father gave it to him, that it was a traditional object, not a shooting one, an emblem, not a weapon, but what I know I meant was: He doesn’t know any better.

The black spots were gone! I rubbed my teeth, tasted my fingers. My fingers tasted, on Fridays, like magical Felix Scraint.

The rest of the day was spent on the hormones I swallowed to smother any renegade egg who didn’t know I had loans and no desire to parent at all. The pill caused emotions. I felt sad. Wept spoonfuls. I dropped spoons into outdoor bushes, thinking, momentarily, about stirring leaves: greensleeves. Slurs and blurs: green, my violet legs, veins, hot vines. I felt… an electric lugubrious joy, then had highly licentious cravings. Masturbated in an atypical way, challenging myself to become another person, or, at least, another woman. I wrote poetry. My head “tossed full of wolf spit”. I started to hold out, in a very real, very genuine way, for the moon.

I chewed on a tea packet the way a boy alone in a house might go around in a cape.

I checked my teeth. It felt… incredibly convenient, that love has unknown benefits, which make themselves… known! I danced. I put on old clothes and danced with knees to the blues, which Felix had brought over in a series of burned discs, the moans of those who’d suffered his south. Blackness emoted from my stereo. Blues bubbles.

What was it about Felix Scraint’s tongue? What power? A clipping from his pinkest couch? What proteins tightly coiled inside of it? What enzymes? What pink chlorophyll, squirting light onto disease? What curative possibilities? It did not taste unusual. It tasted like a tongue, like a sweet summation of brain.

I seized upon the mountainous night.

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I’m in the northeast. I wanted to go more west and more north, a diagonal, upward thrust, passionate hypotenuse: to not return, because home again is a place one cannot go, like trying to bite open your childhood flesh, but finding what?: only purple air, stinging vapour. The bones are lost boughs of nettle.

I’m taking care of her. I am changing her underwear while she lays stiffened on the bed, but mostly I am a social presence in her life, so that she is not alone. She is still active. It’s not over yet. Multiple Sclerosis oozes out of her at night but she pulls it together in the day. If I can help her shower, feed her pot butter after dinner, she is fine during the day, just sick under the moon. I button her buttons. She is always sparkling. Is still political, in the city in which we live, which is plagued by gunshots, burrowing into childhood flesh: downy blood, light as feathers, it flies off. Migrates where? Comes back when?

“Guns,” she moans, as I change her laundry, picking out the wet underwear she wants dried on the sill. She insists I let it lie on hand towels on her window sill, where the pigeons very well can shit on the line of crotches: blotches. Is insistent about that. Lives in a Grace Paley America, a Jane Jacobs’s. “How do politicians live with themselves?”

She has a right to be bothered. A snowball fight erupted earlier down the street and it ended as a bloodbath, with seven twelve year olds dead, their brothers’ guns and their fathers’ guns, seven black heads disappeared in the snow, sunk or slumped, the fuzzy crowns a series of bubbles blown up from the ground, as if earth were the problem.

When I came home, she didn’t notice I’d been cured. I’d expected her to ask what happened. I’d wanted to tell her all about Felix Scraint, because I wanted to think about him, but I don’t know if I could tell her about his gun. His long pile of particles.

I fear that the black spots are coming back. I am prone to grace but I am prone to hypochondria. I look in my mom’s bathroom mirror and feel it to be true. I can’t see them yet, but there is something brewing underneath my teeth, I know, like staring into a white lake and perceiving the near burst of a black whale, or one thousand rising fins. Some troubling rippling. I don’t think I can sit here and wait for them to come back. Should I go find Felix on a Thursday far away from the others that are so gone?

If I found him, I would drag him up here, to my mom, order him to get down and lick her legs. I’d wring his tongue out all over her spine. Or I would just go south, and stay south, never leave, ever, lover, have him lick only me, so that I’ll never get Multiple Sclerosis, ever, or would he be too useful licking with his tongue the scarred trees?