Category: flash creative nonfiction

Antique Fluted Crystal Doorknobs
by Noah Lane Browne

Antique fluted crystal doorknobs with brass mortise locksets are awfully pretty until there’s a crying baby behind the old pine door and the glass knob comes off in your hand when you twist it a now-useless piece of art deco vintage and the door won’t budge because the latch bolt is fully engaged inside the strike plate so you push harder but still nothing and the wails are insistent as it’s time for a bottle and you curse under your breath because you knew the knob felt loose but ignored it for weeks then you have an idea the inside doorknob the one with the spindle is still engaged so you run downstairs for the screwdriver and needle-nose and unscrew the faceplate and insert the pliers inside the borehole to catch and turn the spindle mimicking the knob’s twin but instead you nudge the remaining knob straight through the other side and it thuds on the hardwood inside the door where the baby is crying even harder then you have another idea perhaps the old door would give with some oomph so you run downstairs for your thick-soled Timbs lace them tightly no socks there is no time for socks and you line up for a right-footed well-placed kick or two next to the faceplate and grasping the corridor walls for leverage you picture your heel passing clear through the door just like Bruce Lee striking the evil Han in Enter the Dragon and you think what the hell because a broken door jamb a busted lock and splintered wood are better than a hungry howling baby your baby and goodness he’s only 10 days old and you’ve locked him in the bedroom 10 feet away but it might as well be 10 miles and as you are about to strike with all the might you can summon your wife touches your shoulder gently to suggest maybe googling this issue prior to resorting to naked force and you quickly discover a dozen videos explaining how to wedge a screwdriver into the borehole to squeeze the inner assembly disengaging the bolt a technique that once employed immediately releases the latch causing the door to swing open and you rush in and grab the baby your baby apologizing to him for pretty antique fluted crystal doorknobs with brass mortise locksets and for nearly destroying a perfectly good old pine door and for your anxiousness and your incompetence because after all you’re still learning how to do this and he takes the bottle stops crying and looks into your eyes, reminding you these early days are treasure.  

About the author:

To The Boy Who Looks Like My Ex
by Rachel Noelani Bovee

It’s strange, don’t you think, to cycle through the rote normality of daily life, of an everyday Tuesday, when a ghost from the past suddenly appears. Has that ever happened to you? Probably not… you’re what… 21? 24? You haven’t lived enough lifetimes yet to have ghosts. Your faded tee hangs off your lean, broad frame like it was custom draped across your body before you headed to work this morning. There are no paunchy bits spilling over the taut ties of your utilitarian barista apron. You are full of everything untapped: energy, potential, dreams, desires. You are still just in your first lifetime, the one where I was with him. 

The warmth of a new spring, painting a grey world in pastel, makes me reckless, eager to socialize, to commune, to chase insta-worthy curated glimmer that shouts, 

yes! 

I am alive! 

I am waking up! 

That’s why I am here, in this trendy, white-walled café with high wooden beams and giant windows, here at your gleaming marble counter, here watching the way your glasses slide down your long nose like his did. 

You are saying something to me, probably asking me for my order, but my eyes are sliding along the sharp line running from the bottom of your earlobe to the curve of your tightening jaw muscle, and I am flung years back to a sticky corner table in a dark bar off a Gangnam alley where, amidst a makgeolli-fueled haze and a background soundtrack of early BigBang, I could only just barely hear him say in disappointment, 

“I was going to marry you.”

Would it shock or frighten you if I traced your jawline with my finger? It’s only that I wonder if my fingertips will remember him too, if he still lingers in the recesses of my touch memory. Maybe your skin is smoother; he always ignored my pleas to 

“moisturize! 

 moisturize! 

 moisturize!”

The line behind me lengthens and you’re growing impatient. I notice and I’m sorry, I really am, but I’m frozen by the timbre of your voice, the way your thick brows arch and taper off suddenly at the ends, the long pale fingers you gesture with—they are the same fingers he used to play late-night piano recitals, just for me; the same that drummed against the inside of my wrists when we watched movies; the same that gripped the backs of my thighs with an aggression, a confidence I ached for. The same fingers that, in that bar, on that night, jabbed in my direction, accusingly,

“You didn’t come to me.”

Did he have a little brother or a cousin I’m not remembering? Would it be inappropriate to ask your last name, your hometown, if you have an aunt who is a composer and an uncle who is a judge? 

You’re angry now and that shakes me out of my mental multiverse. I want to explain it all to you, to tell you about the end and the way we were young and indelicate—breaking each other’s hearts. I want to tell you about the year before that when he went abroad and said,

“Come, if you want.”

But I thought that meant, I don’t care if you come or not, and he thought that meant, I want you to want me like I want you. I want to tell you how when he first left, I missed him so much I stopped taking care of myself and ended up hospitalized from pneumonia in a particularly frigid early February but kept it all a secret. I want to tell you about starting and ending every day with cheery messages sent to his KakaoTalk—messages that smoothed his worries about his job, messages that made him suddenly call just to share his laugh, messages that teased the parts of me that had always made his breath catch. 

I meet your eyes, stumble out a bumbling,

“I’m sorry,

I’m so slow. 

I’m holding up your line!”

And your face softens, your eyes lift, and a small grin splits across your face. You tell me not to worry, to take my time and, after I order, you smoothly, professionally, distantly ask me what size I’d like my iced oat milk matcha latte to be. 

It’s then that I see how full your lips are, the small beauty mark on the left side of your chin, the Adam’s apple that dramatically juts out from your throat, your hairless forearms—all the ways you’re not him. 

In an instant, I am steadied. You and I are strangers, standing on opposite sides of a neutral counter, playing our customer service roles. And today, you’re the better actor. I pay and move forward, waiting for one of your coworkers to give me my order. When the buzzer vibrates in my hand, I grab my drink and head towards the door; I don’t bother to look at you. 

The cherry blossom trees are raining delicate pink petals, slow, slow, slow. They flutter in the warm breeze, settle on upturned faces. 

He and I, we never saw the flowers bloom that spring.

About the author:

Danger, Will Robinson Wannabe…
by Jarrod Campbell

Who is this striking person? I must have wondered, seeing the cute blond kid in action on TV, black and white, complete with robot and sneering, older, queer-coded male forever in the periphery. An obsession with being obsessed was born. For days, nothing else mattered. This incident also marked my debut of falling dangerously hard for unobtainable guys. Guys who graced the small screen in my living room. Guys who populated the pages of Sears catalogs. Guys who were straight. This one existed so far out of my league, he lived in outer space. I remained lost on Earth back then when I was six years old and had no comprehension of how television worked at all. 

Around this age, I also fixated on a boy named Pete and his cartoon dragon to the point of exhaustion. He was the first to represent what I wanted to be since I already looked a bit like him. Enough to inspire family members to call me Pete as a nickname. The preoccupation existed because I thought the actor cute. My will to resist blonds deteriorated then and there, making my attraction to Will Robinson even easier.

At that age, I too had very blond hair. I could see me in the space boy and the space boy in me. I liked his look, which meant I could like my looks, if only I looked more like him than I did myself. Another first for me here: the desire to lose myself by taking on the features of someone else. How beautiful I could be if I pretended a haircut or style of dress gave me even imaginary closeness to someone I found attractive.

One day, to my great delight, mom announced haircut time. With violent insistence, I demanded my hair look like the space boy’s or else. The basic cut and style came from a bygone era but still topped the heads of young boys everywhere. Whether or not my new hairdo looked like my crush’s, I couldn’t say. I relied on the unified confirmation of my mom and the woman barber. All I needed. For the rest of the night, I was over the moon in his ecstatic company. And free to believe myself worthy of anyone’s desire because, in my mind, I resembled exactly who I desired. 

The happiness sank from the crown of my freshly coiffed head down into my swelling heart. Such joy in feeling like I looked like someone I thought so appealing. So handsome and curious a young man, that Will Robinson. Me too, by proxy.

The rapture of feeling like I resembled my space boy became too much for my overflowing heart, moving the rich blood to a new ecstasy felt in spirit, just below the waist. Then in rising flesh made red with blushing blood on a high simmer. The novelty of that event confused me for years until I better understood the physics of desire. 

The only person able to tell me anything that mattered after the haircut was the woman who paid for it, my mom. She told me I had to go to bed. With reluctance, I did. How painful to have been given everything only to then have it taken away — shot from the sky to crash woeful back on Earth. Feeling myself like that was new and I relished the sensation. I never wanted it to end and feared going to sleep held the power to steal these memories and ruin days’ worth of effort needed to inspire the most insignificant amount of hope. 

Slumber wanted nothing to do with me that night. I offered heart-felt thanks. Of course I’d trade a good night’s sleep for the sake of suspecting myself beautiful. Self-worth never came easy, so I clung to any crumb of possibility. The reality: I feared sleeping would mess up my hair and I’d lose connection to my space boy crush. 

Funny, or concerning, to see the early stirrings of stereotypical queer neurosis.

The next morning, who could say if my hair still looked like his. All outside sources said yes, even a few kids at school. So far, so good. Until my hair grew out, right along with my concern about whether or not I still resembled the space boy. I knew that no matter what he’d always have a special place in my heart for the effect he had on me and my budding sensibilities. But before long, my roaming heart reached out for some other boy I thought held the same power to affect me with similar shocks to the system. After all, the replacement lived on earth. Easier access. Just like with Will Robinson, I copied an aspect of this new infatuation. This time I affected a new manner of speech and a sturdier stride. To make me feel closer to him. Desired by him. Normal like him. That person’s name or what he looked like, I have no idea. 

About the author:

When Talking Gets Hard | Katherine Toler

I can still feel the outline of the blood bulb in my hand. When it’s full, it’s pleasantly cool, and fits in your palm perfectly like an egg out of the refrigerator. Deep red and primed with saline, my job is to stand there and squeeze. 

1 unit.

2 units.

3 units. 

The task is mindless, but my body is alert. Each chirp of the monitor, every waveform on the screen, could signal her deterioration.  

There are things that need to be done, and done well, to keep this woman alive.  

I do them and hand off to the next nurse. 

Home.

Dinner detritus litters the kitchen. A sauce-spackled spoon is on the floor. Half a glass of milk, spaghetti strands hanging over the lip of the cup, antagonize me in my post-shift haze. I am so fucking hungry. 

The kids are summoning me upstairs with excited pterodactyl screeches. Have I been gone for 14 weeks or 14 hours? From their reactions, you wouldn’t know the difference.  

My husband has checked off all pre-bedtime tasks. 

Two children: pajamas on, teeth brushed, books read, meds taken, stuffies found. 

My reward is giving the announcement, “The tuck train is coming! Choo choo! Better get in bed before you miss it!” 

“Hurry, Maxine, hurry! The tuck train!” My four-year-old Miles is the only one moved by the fake train leaving the station. 

Kisses are given, love is bestowed, departures are made. No one misses the tuck train.

I emerge from the nightlight-soaked sanctum, eyes adjusting, blood sugar hovering just above desperation. 

Nick is on his phone in bed. We make eye contact. Or maybe we don’t. 

When I interact with my kids, my face switches on. The muscle memory of joy rearranges the blandness in my cheekbones. When I introduce myself to my patients, the muscle memory of necessity fixes the scowl and the fuck this shit expression.  

When I talk to the doctor, the patient’s husband, and the housekeeper who scolded me for dropping the isolation gown on the floor, my demeanor, my attitude, and my disposition click into place.

Now I’m confronted by the face I’ve always called home. Brown eyes, hat askew, salt-and-pepper in the beard that scratches my upper lip when I let him kiss me. 

I want my features to rearrange like they’re supposed to.  

I want my eye contact to linger, a half-smile forming, the suggestion that snaps everything into sharp relief when I raise an eyebrow. 

I want to press my nose into that spot near his jawline, behind his ear, freckles dotting the skin wherever the sun hits.

I am so hungry. 

I microwave a frozen burrito and eat in silence. The relief of not being needed breaks the tension I still feel in my shoulders, the ache from logrolling my patient back and forth all day. 

She was an oversized rag doll, pumped full of vasopressors, antibiotics, and other people’s blood, too critical for consciousness, too heavy. 

Her husband, picking at his nails, asking obnoxiously obvious questions, because that’s what you do when the face you’ve always called home is swollen, bloodied, and bruised. When a machine has replaced every organ. 

Our room is dark when I come to bed. My husband is a ghost in his phone light. He’s reading another New York Times article about the genocide in Gaza. Face set in lines, his civic duty to stay informed. “What else am I supposed to do?”

I want to reach out, to shoulder some of his altruistic overwhelm. 

I can’t. 

I swallow magnesium, melatonin, ashwagandha, and a Lunesta prescription that isn’t mine—my cocktail of nocturnal desperation. A megaphone message for my mind in pill form: please, please stop. 

Now I’m a ghost too. 

We’re side-by-side. AirPods in. Noise-cancelling headphones on. Ears encased in cotton and stolen quiet. 

Maybe we say goodnight, or maybe we don’t. 

Because this is when talking gets hard. 

And I wish I knew how to say what I needed. 

To tell him about the blood I transfused. The stroke they suspected. 

The high-risk operation that did not go well. 

How pointless it feels to pour energy, resources, and hope into someone who won’t ever walk out of the hospital. 

How my fingers ache from squeezing. 

How I ache in the space between us in our king-sized bed. The one we bought to make room for the tiny people always climbing in. 

How I want to be held, but being touched makes my skin crawl. 

But I remember how good that cool egg blood bulb feels in my hand, and I know I’m going to keep squeezing. 

Keep dumping all the resources, energy, and hope into our high-risk operation because that’s what you fucking do.

Keep aching.

Keep trying.

Bonus audio of Katherine reading her piece…

about the author:

Katherine Toler is an ICU nurse who writes about the physical and emotional work of taking care of other people—at the hospital and at home. Her essays focus on routine, rupture, and the moments when language falls short. Her work has appeared in Raw Lit and Intima and is forthcoming in Survive and Thrive: Journal of Narrative Medicine and American Journal of Nursing: Reflections. She lives with her husband and two kids.

Beauty Like That | Laura Westby Cannon

Bonus Audio of Laura reading her piece…

about the author:

The Dark | Chelsy Diaz Amaya

We are making cement, my father and I, our foreheads angled toward the sun. The cement mix oozes out of the wooden frame on the ground like it’s protesting the heat. I used to watch my mother garden here. Too much money spent on watering, my father had shouted over dinner, years ago, grains of rice spilling from his mouth, and so much coughing. I used to wish he’d choke for real, but kids think things they don’t mean sometimes. This man and I, we take more cement mix and more sand from the lot, and we make two things into one. When he turns the brass faucet for water, it objects with a lone creak. There is so much we wait for and so much we never receive. He says he’s reminded of Saturday mornings at the orphanage, the only day of the week the children didn’t drink diluted milk. In one of the rooms of the house, my mother wears black and cries for her garden while she makes lunch. She will pour three cups of juice and dilute all but one. Everything this man has prayed for has come at the wrong time. He heads to the basement to figure out what’s going on with the water. I follow him because that’s what I have always done. He must remember his other daughters in my reluctant steps that trail behind him, like ghosts of relationships he’ll never repair. One of them must be thirty now, around the same age his father was when he died from drinking, and he asks my mother for a beer along the way because you can’t be an alcoholic if you hate alcoholics. In the basement, the air is so humid I can almost see the water particles if I don’t blink for long enough. He starts whistling a tune and I flash my cellphone light so he can inspect the pipes. After a minute my arm shakes. He tells me his friend at the orphanage used to wet the bed and had to hold the mattress over his shoulders under the sun as punishment. If the nuns saw his arms quaking downward, they’d add another minute while all the kids chanted insults. He says this instead of saying hold still. We’ve been growing apart from the moment I was born but I still speak his language. By the time he catches the small leak, we hear thunder. He throws a wrench across the dark room in anger. He scurries to the window where the rain pelts. It’s so quiet I do not believe in gravity but in change. The cement mix turns into grout. A thing becoming another thing. How quickly it happens. This man was a boy in an orphanage and then became a father. We sit together, father and daughter, and the lightning creates scars on our faces. We hear my mother belt out for us that lunch is ready, and I remember the German Shepherd who would steal my food that he bought for me as a surprise years ago instead of saying I love you. All that noise can wait. Side by side, we both breathe in. He leans, resting against the wall, and tells me he danced once in Manhattan, in a club, studio something. They took the party outside and danced in the rain, like a movie. It rained so hard the streetlights went out. He tells me that night he had left with a friend who caused a multiple car accident near Queensboro Plaza, and there’s a long pause between this fact and his next word, and that silence, the one I recognize as song. My father isn’t the kind of man that asks you to stay with him in the dark; he tells you what it means to have survived it.

about the author:

Blessings, Mormons, and Olive Oil | Ginger Tolman

My body is hot with fever, and I push out an asthmatic wheeze. I am delusional and list a bit in the kitchen chair. My skinny bare legs stick to the Naugahyde. Panic sets in as less and less oxygen enters my lungs. I am crying and gasping and terrified. I am eight.

Men encircle me and hands are placed on my head, steadying me, capturing heat. Deep voices murmur invocations. Warm oil seeps onto my scalp. I reach up to itch it. 

This is my first conscious experience with olive oil. As an anointment, part of the priesthood blessing of Mormon tradition; the laying on of hands to heal. My asthma wanes, my fever lowers, and I go outside to play. 

My father, Leo Tolman, owned Tolman’s Dry Cleaners in Downey, California. He’d traded potato farming and bone-cold Idaho winters for orange groves and fig trees. He found the wife he would adore for 55 years, raised eight children—six of whom were adopted—and practiced his faith with aplomb.

One can ask for a blessing at any age for any reason that feels credible. High fevers, upcoming finals, difficult pregnancies, terminal diagnoses, boyfriend travails, waning faith– all were fair game. Depending on the severity of the ailment, other priesthood holders were called to the home or hospital room, adding numbers to power. 

The ritual began with Dad pulling out a small bottle of Pompeii Olive Oil from the back of the fridge. As a bearer of the Melchizedek Priesthood, he consecrated the vial with prayer. His personal touch was to warm the oil by heating it in a small pan of water, the same pan used for decades to warm baby formula. He would drip a small amount on the top of the afflicted persons scalp and lay his hands gently on their head. Then he prayed, shifting his weight from foot to foot as if to gain steady ground. His voice alone could round a sharp edge and send the darkest fear running. 

When the hands gently holding your head were those of a loved one, a trusted one, and one who believed in his ability to heal, the conjuring of miracles became a common event.

As an adult, I introduced my father to the joy of olive oil as a culinary blessing, and he began to cook as well as heal with it. He purchased in bulk, large bottles of EVOO that were stored on cool, dark shelves, pulled out daily to drizzle, toss, sauté, dip into, and taste. He watched cooking shows on the sly to find new uses. Olive oil cakes soaked in lemon syrup, crisply crusted mushrooms, and fried parsley began appearing on our plates. The small bottle of Pompeii (non-virgin, not first pressed) still resided in the back of the fridge, standing its ground for a different purpose.

My Dad and I considered olive oil a divine agent, a transporter of both culinary and physical miracles. A fresh baguette dipped in a cold-pressed EVOO with a touch of balsamic was some nifty transmogrification. And you couldn’t shake a stick at an asthma attack that ceased mid-breath. 

Eventually, we traded California for Utah to be nearer the Motherland of Mormonism. Shortly thereafter, over a Thanksgiving weekend, Dad was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Over the next nine months, we fed him, stroked his head, laughed with him, and prayed with him. My daughter, eight years old, brought him sprigs of mint and white grapes from the vines he had planted in the garden. Her dog, a black Lab named Purple, would not leave their side. 

One Sunday, six of the brethren gathered in his bedroom to offer a blessing. I was there to hold the oil and give it to whomever was asked to administer it.

“I want Ginger to give the blessing,” said my father.

Every man in the room looked askance.

I was a woman, not a practicing Mormon, and not a priesthood holder. I used inhalers for my asthma now, not blessings. 

“It must be the medications,” said Brother Smart. 

“It’s not,” said my father. 

With a sharp glance at the men, I warmed the bottle between my hands, anointed my father’s head, and began the prayer. My father and I held secrets.

After the last blessing, the one meant to ease the passing, not save the life, he took his last rattled breath. As the hearse took away what remained of him, we prepared the house for visitors. I wiped counters and cleared out the fridge for the imminent arrival of endless Jell-O salads and funeral potatoes. There it was. The bottle of olive oil. The one for blessings, not for salad. I reached for it, knowing it would never be used again, and then returned it, gently, to its place. 

about the author:

Speaking in Tongues | Ayoung Kim

Her face hovered only inches above mine. Her rubbery lips parted, revealing wide white teeth. I smelled garlic and red chili. She inserted her fingers into my mouth, probed my buccals, and smeared kimchi residue along my gum line. This was before hygiene laws that required dentists to glove-up. 

Her cat-eye glasses reflected my distorted twelve-year-old self, exaggerating my too-long-too-pointy chin. The dentist exhaled into my face. My eyes watered.

“Your teeth are crooked!” 

She shook her hair, chopped in a straight line above her eyebrows and trimmed at the nape of her neck, and addressed my mother in rapid-fire Korean. I would need braces; they’d straighten my teeth and reduce my protruding chin. I hid my offending body part with the heel of my hand. 

Patting my head she said, “Good girl. See you at church, ah?” 

Dr. Kim was my dentist and the church deacon. She held a medical degree and had completed seminary. The Korean community hoisted her like their gold medal, representing the best of our race. To my mother, she was a god. 

At church, she positioned herself at the entrance, draped in a white gown, appearing as a heavenly being. Then she opened her mouth. She bellowed like an army sergeant, directing parents, children, elders to correct classrooms. We hustled to obey her commands. Dr. Kim scanned for slow-movers or late-comers trying to sneak past. “Mr. and Mrs. Choi, tardy again!” 

After the initial consultation, my mother dropped me off for my braces-tightening appointments, leaving me alone with Dr. Kim. I renamed her Dentist Kimchi. I dreaded her breath. I dreaded her naked fingers. She inserted fresh wires, stabbing my gums and cheeks. I jolted with the twist of each brace, shock waves of pain drilling into every nerve root. 

“Grace just performed Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto 2. Grace is studying AP French. Grace was elected junior leader for Revival Christian Camp.” 

Her daughter Grace and I were in the same Sunday school class. Dentist Kimchi knew I played the piano but hadn’t advanced past Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, or past French I, and she knew I wasn’t chosen to be a Revival leader. At the end of the appointment, I handed her a check from my mother.

I showed up for this oral torture once a month. I sat in her chair for three years; three years of lip-tearing braces that did nada, not one tooth straightened. She provided my mother with convincing updates, concluded with a laying-on-hands prayer. My mother bowed down.

By the age of fifteen, I had quit piano and stopped eating lunch with her daughter. I wore blue lipstick, painted my nails striped like zebras, teased and spiked my hair. Dentist Kimchi regarded me like a wild dog. 

“Grace won the Chopin junior’s piano contest. Grace was waiting for you at lunch time.” She cranked a wire with a viscous twist, as if yanking me on a short leash. “Grace is leading a Bible study class this Saturday. She said she invited you.”

She started to raise my chair, but I popped up—a ghoul rising from the grave. My grotesque visage with a cyanosis mouth, my upper lip caught on some braces as if I was snarling. As if. Dentist Kimchi recoiled. She could no longer pat my head, and we both knew it. 

“See you at church, ah?” I slipped out of the room. “Tell your mommy to come next time!” 

The following appointment, I was her last patient. It was nearly 8:00 p.m. when Dentist Kimchi completed tightening my last brace and set me free. I sprang into the reception area. 

“Let’s go home, I’m starving.”  

My mother reached for her purse and stood up. At that moment, Dentist Kimchi strode into the lobby and locked the door. She got on the floor. She ordered my mother to do likewise. Planted on hands and knees, Dentist Kimchi demonstrated how to speak in tongues: ree-rur-ree-rur-rah-rah-rah. This was considered a high form of speaking to God? Or a performance to exorcise the evil out of me?

My stomach sank as I watched my mother intimidated into kneeling on all fours babbling ree-rur-ree-rur-rah-rah-rah for half an hour. 

Dentist Kimchi shouted, “A-men!” 

Her breath filled the entire clinic. She stood up, her eyes flicking over my face. I tapped my black and white nails on the chair’s armrest. Pfft. She turned away from me and helped my mother, who wobbled to her feet. She thanked Dentist Kimchi and pressed a check in her hands. I wanted to rip it up. 

One month later, we discovered Dentist Kimchi had started an affair with the pastor, who was married with four children. In the ensuing scandal, the wife and children fled to a different state, and Dentist Kimchi’s husband retracted like a turtle in its shell. Grace transformed into a pale, brittle leaf. The congregation split with half supporting the new union, the other half drifting to other churches or faiths. My mother was so disillusioned she joined a white pastor’s congregation. 

I found a new orthodontist—also named Dr. Kim, but male and not church-affiliated—who ripped off my braces, extracted four molars Your jaw is too narrow so that’s why your teeth are still crooked, and fitted me with a retainer which I tightened via a tiny tool every week in the comfort of my own home. My teeth straightened in less than one year. I could’ve knelt on my hands and knees to bow down to Dr. Kim. He’d freed me from the abuse of wires, from metal braces shredding the inside of my mouth. Even during the months I wore the retainer, my tongue continuously swished across my teeth, relishing the smooth sensation. 

A boy liked my teeth. I liked his breath on my cheek, his opened lips over mine. He lunged and his front teeth clicked against mine. Maybe I was evil, maybe I was like Dentist Kimchi, maybe I liked to use my tongue to speak to God.

Bonus audio of Ayoung reading from her essay:

about the author: