Prompt My Pen- The Tooth Fairy

Prompt My Pen…

Prompt my pen is a super fun feature I run whereby my reader group THE TIDAL TELLTAILS suggest visual prompts and i pick my favourite to write a flash fiction, poem, or short story each week.

Here’s this week’s prompt!

Submitted by Jaimie Cordall!

The Tooth Fairy

By Kristy Nicolle

They appear, inky incisors protruding instantaneously from the endless jawline of the horizon.

I inhale, clutching the pouch of dried red ochre to my chest, saying a silent prayer to Odin in a flurry of my cracked, dry lips, before flinging the carmine dust skyward and into the grey.

The horse beneath me shifts, terrified as the figures grow larger too quickly, their speed superhuman. The poor creature whinnies, sensing the chill shadows of their encroaching forms.

Tugging on the worn leather reins, the inky black steed hops from foot to foot, turning on the spot as the wind catches the bloody red stain, causing it to spread, an insidious warning in the air.

My leather boots are thin enough that I can feel the organs shift within the horse’s belly as I kick it into a canter, lurching from the spinal ridge of the beastly land and launching into a gallop over the uncompromising white of hoof compacted snow.

The wind prickles my scalp like a thousand wild flung splinters as we swallow the distance between the lookout and the undeniably meagre looking village. Horns rise in a wail of warning to all but are soon silenced after only three short blasts of melancholy and hollow sound, lest we anger the beasts. The village is formed of clustered rows of dark wooden shadows, their roofs melted of snow from the embers of burning hearths deep within.

The closeness with which they lean haphazardly one way or the other mirrors only the desperateness with which the residents huddle against the cold, and the precariousness of our continued vitality.

The sun here will not set again for another few lunar cycles, and it is on days like these that the lack of darkness is not a blessing from Odin but Loki’s curse instead.

The light you see, doesn’t expose the shadows of our deepest nightmares as a frightening illusion, but illuminates the ghostly translucence of their glacial blue irises. It sharpens their pointed teeth and ears, revealing them as both inhuman and inhumane, glinting from sharp edges of flesh and bone as though they were weapons.

At least in the darkness you can pretend the monsters aren’t real.

When they step out into the sunlight, there can be no denying their bone-hungry and inhuman faces, no denying the solidity and absoluteness of their existence.

We’ve known this was coming, and for days the tension within the small cluster of shacks we longingly call a village has been building like snowfall, the chill seeping deep into the hearts of all.

The butcher’s hatchet can be heard night and day during the zenith day, beheading one chicken after another, anything to keep his hands busy as endless scarlet lifeblood spills onto the earth at his feet.

Runic bunting flaps silently in the howling wind, flimsy seeming, as the threat we hope our prayers will vanquish once again returns, ever vigilant as they are cruel.

As the hooves of my steed slow and I pull back on the reins, I see the chaos of the village in greater detail. The message of the red dust is spreading, the melancholic triple blow of the horn echoing within the minds of every single beating heart.

The scramble has undeniably begun.

The surrounding ring of pine trees could not contain the veil of fear that has descended once more in a shroud of scarlet anticipation, turning the beauty of this landscape insidious and bare.

Fires are reluctantly extinguished and crying babes bundled to their mothers in muslin cloths, the cacophony appearing from the outside as the blurred silhouettes of fleshed in unwashed skin. The sudden hiss of water on hot stones followed by billows of smoke can be seen and heard as work-worn spines and calloused hands make heed toward their beds.

I dismount my horse, keeping the reins tightly balled in my fist and yanking him behind me as I jog downhill and past the flimsy ring of pines that separates the only land I’ve ever known as home from the barren snowy expanses on all sides.

Barren… except for today.

Today is the harvest.

The day they come, shrouded in black cloaks that sheen soft like captured moonlight, their clawed fingers and paper-thin lips the most human thing about them.

There is no time to lose. And where it’s taken me maybe ten minutes to ride back from the ridge where I’ve been keeping watch diligently, they will be here in half the time, maybe less.

As I reach the edge of the settlement, I slap my steed hard on the flank, letting his reigns fall from my fingers as he takes off toward the crude stable across the village.

I pull the furs of my wrap around me tighter, the wind charging around my ears as though it is pursuing long awaited pray, mercilessly and in every direction.

As I think on what’s about to happen and turn the corner past the butcher’s shack, coming into view of my own humble lean-to, I find the streets desolate and suddenly silent as the grave. My footsteps are thunderous among the thin crackle of snow and snide whisper of pine needles, the desolateness of this land causing chills to run, mischievous as a child, up my spine.

To distract, I let my tongue explore the mapped past of this annual terror.

It snakes across my gums, finding deep craters where once bone monoliths stood erect. Where once the plinths of language, of appetite have been uprooted and served up as sacrifice.

When the Fae first started coming, back before I was born, or even my grandfather was born, they didn’t ask, they merely killed a villager and left his body toothless and bleeding in the snow.

Over time, we learned.

Learned that by sacrificing one adult tooth per year, we could earn the right to live another together.

When you ran out of teeth, you ran out of time. They came for you, when you had given your last shred of mouth bone, and they took you.

Nobody knows where they take the ones who run out of time, or what happens to the teeth. Nobody knows how they can tell so easily who is gum and nothing more.

All we know is that nothing in this world is free, and our payment for breathing in and out must be paid.

I push aside a thick fur partition that separates my hearth from the cruelty of the claws of winter outside.

Inside, my wife, Saga, is already beneath the furs of our humble home, the skins of wolves stripped bare from the once powerful muscle and sinew of the readily available pack animal that roams nearby rocky peaks.

Some other men of our culture keeps the canines as trophies, but not us, not in this village.

“Hurry…” is all Saga whispers.

Her form is barely visible as more than a lump topped with golden locks within our bed, as the smoke from the newly extinguished hearth fills every corner of the tiny space, being sucked too slowly out through the gaps in the wooden-boarded walls to make any real difference.

I bend to her wish, knowing I can do nothing else, kicking off my boots and slipping beneath the furs. I feel the hard warmth of her body as I wrap myself around her, mind racing.

“You put out the offering?” I ask, my whisper breathless and quiet as I can make it as it rushes past the shell of her ear. Her heart hammers beneath the chill of my palm as my hand snakes around her possessively, my own heart pounding into the back of her ribs.

“Yes,” is her lacklustre reply. It is all she has time to say, for after this single syllable falls into silence, I hear it.

The sound of nightmares, the sound that causes the children of this village to mess themselves, to scream silently into the palms of their trembling mothers beneath their own hearth furs.

It’s a tinkle to begin with, paired with the featherlight yet infinitely heavy tread of the Fae of Bone.

When I was a child, I thought it was the sound of glass being broken, or of death, but as I’ve grown older, I realise it’s the powerless lament of stolen teeth clicking together.

They hang, or so I’ve been told, in leather pouches drawn tight with human hair from the belts of the Fae. The sound of bone on bone is tinnier than any stone, more primitive than clashing steel. It is a sound with enough depth to crawl inside of you and bury itself deep inside your marrow like maggots that feed on the rot of your soul.

The Fae of Bone are a scourge, and yet we have lived this way for as long as anyone remembers. The stories say that this village was once home to twice as many people. The myths, that have been ingrained into the mind of every child, tell us that fighting is futile.

Immortal, certainly.

Powerful, without a doubt.

We are no match for them.

For we are only human.

I squeeze my eyes shut, breathing in the smoky musk of cooking rabbit and pine needles as I bury my nose into the hair of my beloved.

My gum is throbbing where yet another tooth has been unceremoniously yanked, offered up for another year of this brutal life, the feeling of my pulse radiating against the inside of my hot gums like war drums in my ears. The taste of blood sizzles within me like my heart is pumping from atop hot coals.

The steps grow closer, the stirring of the thin veil between my bed and the Fae of Bone fluttering, too fragile in the harsh winter cold.

I see a shadow, an immense and willowy form, stilling beyond the division of our worlds. The pillow has been set, hanging artfully from the top of the shack, teeth preciously held within the clutch of the softest fabric we own.

I shudder, the tinkling of bone on bone and the image of cold incisor against jagged canine haunting me and taking me back to this same ritual as I’ve lived it exactly twenty-seven times over.

As the shadow looms only greater overhead, I squeeze my eyes shut, and pretend like I’m asleep.

After all, the tooth fairies do not like to be bothered in their work.

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