"Unincorporated" by Melissa Faliveno
Originally from the 2013 issue of DiN, this story opens with this line: “I know a thing or two about teeth dreams,” says an old man. As a reader, you just have to ask, what in the world is a teeth dream? Faliveno effectively answers just that in “Unincorporated,” a short story about a wayward young woman stumbling into a gas station situated in the middle of nowhere. There, she finds two crusty old folks working the station, an old man and an old woman, drinking dusty soda and smoking cigarettes. On a road trip to nowhere in particular, the young woman finds herself victim to bizarre nightmares and general illness. In a daze, she tells the old man some of her troubles, and he offers her some advice. This seemingly mundane tale about a traveler arriving at a gas station in a tumbleweed town gradually turns into a Lovecraftian horror piece where the woman attempts to reckon with some kind of grief or past trauma. There is much left to the imagination in this piece, and the ending is very circular in its execution. The way Faliveno explores a young woman’s addled mind coupled with the exhilarating feeling of examining the mental and physical state of the narrator makes for an enthralling experience. In the end, the tactic that the young woman employs to confront her nightmares is a tough pill to swallow and if you're looking for a Halloween thrill, this is an excellent place to start.
Julia Castillo
Fiction Editor
Unincorporated
“I know a thing or two about teeth dreams,” he said. The old man could have been fifty or eighty, maybe older. He chewed on the wooden stick of the orange cream pop he’d just sucked down, his lips and fingers slick with orange glaze. It was a hot day in late July, hotter still inside the store; the man’s forehead was damp, and there were dark circles under his arms. The pale wood of the popsicle stick was stained a sick yellow, the ends all torn up and ragged where he’d gnawed the thing like cud. “Thing about ‘em is,” he said, his words a jumble as he chewed, “they mean more than you think.” Hunched over an ancient issue of People, the old woman behind the counter peered over the wire rims of her glasses and wrinkled her nose. “Since when was you a dream expert?” she asked, one eyebrow arched high above the other, her lips pursed tight. Her short hair was a curly shock of white, her skin was thick and tan, her voice like grinding metal. She drank from a can of Grape Crush. “You ain’t know shit about dreams,” she said, taking a long pull from the can, leaving a ring of sweat on the counter. “Or teeth, for that matter.” The old man grinned a toothless grin, and pulled a Pall Mall out of the pack he kept in the breast pocket of his denim shirt. The pack left a permanent indent in the pocket as he slipped it out, and fell back into place perfectly as he dropped it back in, as if that pocket were made for that pack of cigarettes, and every pack that came before or after. “I do so,” he said, still grinning. He spat the popsicle stick into the trashcan beside him and lit up. It wasn’t legal to smoke inside anymore, but it didn’t matter out here in the middle of nowhere Montana, in a town without a name, where the next gas station, or cop shop, or grocery store, or any other living soul, for that matter, was at least another hundred miles down Route 12. “I know a lot more than you think,” the old man added, snapping his brass Zippo closed and sucking on the cigarette hard.
The girl in the aisle didn’t remember the last time she saw someone smoking in a store, or the last time she saw a can of Grape Crush. Out on the highway, she had spotted the sign for gas and food – that coveted blue beacon with the white cartoon gas pump and a fork and knife crossed like swords – the first sign of life she’d seen in hours. When she’d exited off the highway, she’d seen only an empty bar, its neon lights burnt out and windows long boarded, an abandoned Chevy pick-up on blocks, and the gas station. She’d passed the familiar green sign that, in towns she’d passed before, had announced the name of some forgettable place – Smithsville, Plainfield, Westland, or Burke – but this one had said, simply, “Unincorporated.” She’d had another dream about her teeth falling out. She’d been having them for weeks, every night since she’d been on the road, and had woken every morning with her head throbbing. She told all of this to the old man in the store as she searched the narrow aisles for aspirin, not quite sure why she felt compelled to tell him, or anyone in this strange, sleepy place in the middle of nowhere, anything at all. She’d had to pull over a few times the last couple of days, she said, the pain was so bad, and now her jaw ached something fierce. That was something her mother used to say. Something fierce. The girl had never said it before, and had no idea why she’d said it now. All the words just seemed to spill out of her mouth like buckshot, pouring onto the floor and scattering around her. Outside, the wind from the high plains rattled the lone gas pump on its cradle. The rope on a flagless pole snapped against the steel. It was dark in the small store and the aisles were tight; the fluorescent lights flickered and buzzed, and the air smelled like smoke and freezer burn. The hum of talk radio, turned down low, seemed to lull the room in such a way that made the girl think of home—or at least a place that she imagined home to be. She thought about the emptiness of the place, and wondered about the old man and woman, about where they lived and ate and slept. She was suddenly overcome by the desire to stay in the tiny store with them—pick up a night shift or something, drink cans of Grape Crush, maybe try to make a life of it. She paused at an end-cap of Hostess cupcakes. She hadn’t had one since she was a kid, and now, staring at the packaging, which was thick with dust and covered with that inexplicable grease that collects over time when things are left untouched, she was desperate to taste the weird, spongy cake on her tongue again, feel the sweet cream ooze out of the middle. She grabbed one package and then another, and then a bag of beef jerky, and then some Doritos. She was on the road, after all, and on the road you were supposed to eat nothing but junk. It didn’t matter that she’d been on the road for at least a month, or that she would be on it for another month or maybe more. Eating shit – like sleeping in your car or picking up some pock-faced, not too ugly but certainly no kind of handsome man at a roadside bar after too many whiskey Cokes – were just the rules of the road, and she planned to stick to them. “Will you tell me what you know?” she asked the old man as she clutched the bags of food to her chest. “About the teeth dreams, I mean?” The old woman behind the counter snorted, not looking up at all this time from the glossy pages in front of her. She lit up her own Pall Mall then, and let it hang from her lips in such an expert way that it made the girl want to pick up smoking herself. Another thing she could do out here, she thought, in bumblefuck, in godknowswhere, out of sight, in no man’s land. “Sure, honey,” the old man said, leaning against the cooler, the heel of one muddy boot propped against the glass. “Thing is,” he said, “there’s different kinds of teeth dreams. I seen a thing on TV about it. You got the ones where your own fall out, you got the ones where other people’s falls out.” He paused, and took a long drag of his cigarette, his cracked lips curling around the paper. What was left of his thin gray hair was swept back in strings at the top of his head; his eyes were small but kind, his nose and cheeks were sunburnt. “And then,” he added, pausing to suck on the cigarette again, “you got the ones where you pull them out yourself.” The old man said this as he exhaled, the smoke hanging thick in the air like dust. The girl tasted something in the back of her throat she couldn’t name. The room began to feel unbearably dry, and her skin all at once felt hot. “Them’s the ones,” the man went on, “that you gotta watch out for.” He scratched the stubble on his chin with blackened fingers, the lines of dirt beneath his thick yellow nails permanent. “Them’s the ones that mean trouble.” The old woman slapped her magazine down on the countertop. “Goddamn it, Charlie,” she spat, “quit fillin’ this poor girl’s head up with fool-headed ideas. You ain’t know shit about shit, specially not no teeth dreams. And get your goddamn boots off the glass.” The girl tried to speak, tried to say something – maybe in defense of the old man, or maybe that she very badly needed a drink of water – but she couldn’t find the words. Or rather couldn’t get them unstuck from the back of her throat, couldn’t even move her lips and tongue—which had become so thick and dry they felt glopped together in her mouth like a wad of cotton and dried up spit. The sharp, stabbing pain in her temples had returned, and she felt dizzy. She closed her eyes tight, and saw pink and yellow dots against the darkness of her lids. “You all right, baby?” the old woman asked, forgetting for a second about the old man. The girl nodded and forced a few words from her lips. “Where’d you say the aspirin was?” she asked, her thick tongue clicking as she said it. “Aisle three,” the woman said quickly, pointing to the far row filled with decades-old greeting cards, motor oil, and wiper fluid. “Charlie, give that girl a crate to sit on.” The girl grabbed a small box of aspirin and fumbled it open in the aisle. The old man pulled a bottle of water from the cooler behind him and handed it to her, then slid a milk crate to her with his boot. “You take that, honey,” he said, “and sit here a while. You ain’t looking too good.” The girl sat down on a blue plastic crate and took three aspirin, dropping her cupcakes and jerky and chips on the floor. The tile beneath her, once white, was cracked and grayed, sprinkled with thick, black circles of ancient gum, and covered in a layer of dust. She looked at the things on the shelves beside her—WD40, flashlights, double-A batteries—which were all covered in dust, too. She wanted to run her fingers through the grime, feel the slick grit on her skin, but took another drink of water instead. Her hands felt cold and damp, like the bodies of bluegills she used to catch as a kid, which her father would slap on a wooden cutting board and gut before frying them up. She thought of the stains that their blood left behind, seeping deep inside the cracks of the wood. “Tell me more about the dreams,” the girl said, rubbing her cheeks with the palms of her hands. “Please.” The old man looked quickly at the old woman, who stood behind the counter with her arms crossed and one hand pressed to her lips, and then looked back at the girl. He leaned against the cooler again, keeping a close eye on the girl as he spoke, the cigarette in his mouth burnt down to a stub of gray ash. “What they said on TV,” he said, clearing his throat, “is that it means you’re afraid.” He peeled the ashen stub off of his lower lip and flicked it into the trash. The girl could feel her heartbeat in her cheeks. She thought about the dream, about the old man and woman, about the town without a name. The pain in the sides of her head felt like ice picks. She recognized the taste in her mouth now, felt the warmth of it on her lips. “They said that it means you’re trying to fix something that can’t be fixed,” the old man said. “That you’re runnin’ from something but can’t get away.” The girl closed her eyes and tried not to think about the dream, but it was all she could see. It was just before dawn, and she’d parked her car on the side of the road to watch the sunrise over the mountains. As she sat at the wheel waiting for the light, she’d run her tongue over her teeth, and discovered that one was loose. The canine or eye tooth; she could never remember which one was which. She’d wiggled the tooth with her tongue—front to back, side to side, feeling it move at the root as she guided it back and forth with the tip of her tongue. “So, honey,” the old man said, pulling another cigarette from his pocket, “What is it that you’re runnin’ from?” As the sun began its creep over the dark range of mountains whose name she didn’t know, the girl had reached into her mouth with her index finger and thumb, which tasted like salt and dirt, and pulled. “Honey?” the old man asked. But the girl didn’t hear him. Her head was spinning, her vision had gone dark, and all the sound around her – the warm gravel of the old man’s voice, the buzz of the lights, the soft lull of talk radio in the background – hushed to a faint, high-pitched hum in her ears. The tooth had come out in her fingers. She’d looked at it for a moment, sucking up the blood that pooled in the empty socket. The tooth was yellower than she’d imagined, than it had appeared in so many mirrors for so many years before. It was sharp and smooth at the same time, the root long and forked. She’d wiped the small yellow thing on her thigh, the blood trailing in streaks on her jeans. At the counter, the old woman picked up the can of Grape Crush and took a long drink. Through the hum in her head, the girl could hear the slow slurping of soda, of teeth on metal, and the loud clank of the can as the woman slapped it back down on the counter, which seemed to echo endlessly inside the girl’s head and shake the walls of the store, the metal shelves trembling in every aisle. The girl had run her fingers over the edges of the tooth. She’d held it up to the dirty windshield of her car, through which she could see the sun begin to swell above the dark peaks to the east. She’d put the tooth back in her mouth then, and let it float for a moment in the dark pocket of space between her lips and gums. And as the sun crested those nameless mountains, sending a cascade of light over the endless miles of prairie below and beyond, there in the middle of nowhere, she swallowed. Back in the store, in the town without a name, there was a milk crate with no one on it. An old man leaned against a cooler, the heel of his boot against the glass, smoking a Pall Mall. An old woman behind the counter read an ancient issue of People and sipped from a can of Grape Crush. The soft lull of talk radio, turned down low, crackled for a few seconds as the wind kicked up outside, making invisible waves falter somewhere far away. The ceiling lights flickered and buzzed, and the smoke from the man’s cigarette hung in the air, circling above them like dust.
Melissa Faliveno received a BA from the University of Wisconsin and an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. Her work has appeared in DIAGRAM, Isthmus, and Lumina. She was the Diana & Simon Raab Editorial Fellow at Poets & Writers.
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