Teeth
He sat on the porch swing on one of those bright blue and white winter mornings, sipping his first cup of coffee of the day when he noticed the lump. It was pea-sized and just inside his right wrist, raised a little bit above the skin and slightly red.
He poked at it, felt the fluid inside shift a bit and the skin became shiny with tension. He thought he could feel something hard inside, a little node of flat firmness underneath the pliant flesh. Bone, he thought, unalarmed, or cartilage.
He sipped his coffee and looked out over the crystalline white yard, breath steaming, evergreens peeking through where snow had fallen off the branches. He absently scratched at the lump. He dug deeper with his fingernail, could feel the outline of the object inside the lump. It seemed to recoil deeper into his arm at his probing. It had a sharp but smooth ridge and was about a quarter-inch long. Alarm woke in him, distant at first, then closing in as he continued to feel around the lump and explore it. The lump was familiar and alien at the same time, him but not him.
He pressed harder and felt a slight pop as the fluid released and trickled down his forearm. As he did, he noted a new lump arise just inside his left wrist, a smaller one beside it. The recessed object now rose from the original lump like an undersea volcano, white and streaked with red, sharp and hard. A tooth. A fucking canine tooth. In my arm. As the oddness of this registered, new lumps arose on his thighs, shoulders, feet.
He tried to shake the first tooth out of his arm, panic taking hold and whispering in his ear like a lover, but all he succeeded in doing was to splatter blood out over the pristine white yard, each droplet sinking in as it lost its warmth to the snow.
Lumps erupted and swirled on his scalp and on his genitals. Teeth, legion in number, erupted from these newly formed lumps, sprouting up and coalescing, moving centrally to line up, his navel at the center. His navel tore open, the lines radiating out to form a mouth in the middle of his abdomen. The pain was like fire, the sensation of tearing muscle, skin and sinew so unbearable he nearly swooned.
He felt himself bent into an angle, his head forced into the mouth at his midsection by the draw of this new opening. He felt the bones of his spine crack, realign and break as he doubled over. In up to his shoulders, further. He curled in, a thick slurping sound emanating from the mouth at his center. Tighter and tighter he went until his feet disappeared into the mouth. Like a reverse Cheshire cat, the mouth folded in on itself, emitting a final breath of graveyard air into the chilly morning, then it, too, was gone.
