Strange Folk You'll Never Meet

by A. A. Balaskovits

  Dada tried to feed the baby the rest of his breakfast, but like its mother, the baby did not like eggs. They dribbled down its chin in a yellow spittle. Mama told him, using her helpful voice, which sounded less like a suggestion and more like rusting nails, that babies don’t eat solid foods.

  “Put the baby back,” she said, adding that he was doing it wrong when he held the baby up to her eyes. “I miss you both.” He placed the child in her stiff arms and uncovered her left breast, but the baby shook its head so hard Dada feared it, too, would pop off.

  “Not there,” Mama said in a whisper. “Give me my family back.”

  At a loss, Dada held the baby over the hole where her head should have been. The baby fit into the space of her neck just fine, so Dada turned the baby round and round until it snapped down into the pit of her and was swallowed by the darkness. He leaned over her to try to see where the baby had gone, and once his face was aligned with that dark swirl, Mama’s arms grasped him around the shoulders and lifted him up into her as well. He dropped into those shadows headfirst, screaming all the way. Mama sighed her contentment on the mantle and closed her eyes.

  The other kids got coins for their bones, but when my little sister’s teeth fell out, my grandfather snatched them up before she could put them under a pillow. He kept them in a leather bag tied to his waist until he had the full set. The last one, a canine, fell out right before her sixth birthday with a plop. His gnarled hand trembled under her mouth, and he croaked with glee and rubbed it between his wrinkled fingers and muttered how strange it was they had fallen out so soon. My own gummed-in until I was twelve and a quarter, and I had the mint under my pillow to prove it. That night, he went into the yard and dug a little hole. In the morning, the bag around his waist was gone, poof, like he never had it at all. Little sister wailed for her teeth back, because she’d grown at least thirty coins by her estimation, and there was a dolly in a window she spied months back. But no matter how much she pleaded, and how much she made her voice the screech of a banshee, and how much wet she could scrounge up under her eyes, he would not tell her where they were. All he would say was my sister had not been truest-blue, and there were consequences to fibbing. When I asked what he meant, he said he had seen her throwing rocks at the steel bear traps we used to catch our breakfast and dinner, and they’d shut their teeth when there was no meat in their maw. Why else would my sister’s teeth fall out so soon if she’d had flesh to chew? Those little bones were hungry, and hungry things bite unless they were buried. When I could not stand little sister’s wet fish-face anymore, I went into her room and took her to the window and pointed out the little lump of disturbed earth where her bones were placed. She hooted and wanted to go out there and pull them out of the earth, but it was raining, and I told her to let them soak a bit first, like the roots of a sunflower, and we would get them in the sunlight. She smiled up at me and said I was being silly-willy and went out her window into the dark. In the morning, my mother stirred raisins into porridge and told me she was sorry there was nothing heartier. The wolves had eaten all the rabbits outside. I ate it happily until I heard a holler from my grandfather’s room and ran to his door. He sat on his bed holding his hand to his face. There were marks on his skin, ugly little indents, red and pink, and weeping trails of blood running to his elbow. My mother put her hands on her face and asked what took a bite, but he said he did not know. Behind me, my sister grinned ear-to-ear, and said it must have been a beast.

  No matter how much Wren stomped her feet and flailed her arms and told her parents it was illegal and she’d have them arrested as soon as she found an officer who didn’t laugh at her, they grabbed her elbows at the first of every month and dragged her to the red brick building with the cartoon toothbrush with braces and gleaming white teeth. Her parents refused to believe that the orthodontist was anything other than the short balding man who politely answered all their questions about straight molars and pink gums. They always left the room before he transformed into an eighteen-foot-high monster. Then he’d get sick thrills by shoving his hands into the mouths of young kids and yanking on the metal he cruelly wrapped around their teeth. He had great big hairy arms and a voice like an eagle. He smelled like wet, soggy salt.

  “This is cruel and unusual,” said Wren, dragging the heels of her black and white shoes. She’d learned that phrase in school and used it on everything from vegetables to teeth to homework. “You can’t make me go in there again.”

  Her parents made her go inside and sit in the plastic chairs in the waiting room. They held her arms down as Wren squirmed and tried to bite them.

  “Wren,” said her mother, her smile stretching her lips thin. “Not in public.”

  “Not at all,” said her father. He turned pages of a magazine with one hand and rested the other heavily on Wren’s shoulder.

  A woman in matching blue pants and shirt came out of the monster’s lair and called Wren’s name. The woman looked at Wren and her face firmed up.

  “Oh,” she said. “Hi, again.”

  “You’re one of his,” said Wren.

  Wren decided, if she was to face this monster time and time again, she wouldn’t let him see her cry. Even Gizmo, the blackbird with the pink beak who lived on her sill, explained that monsters can’t hurt you if they don’t know you’re afraid of them. He was always saying, “Wren, you have to be brave. Be as brave as you can be.”

  So Wren held her head up high and stiffly as she walked into the small room with the huge chair and the metal tray that held thin torture instruments: pokers and pinchers and slicers and mincers.

  The monster man came in with his arms covered in the plastic he had taken to wearing ever since the time Wren drew blood.

  He asked, “How have you been, Wren? Teeth okay?”

  “I’ll eat your fingers,” said Wren.

  He jammed his fingers in her mouth and felt all around her teeth and gums. He tightened the tiny screw on her braces. The metal pulled on her teeth and scrunched them together until her entire mouth vibrated in sharp pain. Wren tried to bite his hands but he moved too quick for her, and the woman in blue would pinch her gently on the upper arm whenever Wren caught his pinkie between her incisors.

  Her parents never believed her about the monster man, no matter how much she sobbed and said it hurt, hurt, hurt even long after they had left the lair. This visit was proving to be no different than any of the others, so Wren covered her eyes with her hands the whole way home so that they couldn’t see the water.

  Her parents were tough to be around sometimes. They always smiled at her, and while Wren liked to smile, she also knew that she didn’t like smiling all the time. Sometimes she liked frowning, or laughing, or crying. Often, she wanted to do all of these things at once. But her parents, they only had smiles. Warm smiles, cold smiles, stretched to their ears smiles, and smiles that were so small it was almost like they weren’t smiling at all. The only difference between them was that when her father smiled he always opened his mouth so she could see his tongue and the dangly bit at the back of his throat. But when her mother smiled she never opened her mouth and, if by chance something inside her made her so happy she couldn’t help but show all those teeth and tongue and gums, she’d put her hand over her lips and look at her feet.

  Gizmo couldn’t smile, what with his beak and all, so when he was happy he raised his wings above his head, pushed his feathery butt out as far as he could and pooped a white and black turd.

  “You’re gross,” Wren always said whenever he was happy, but secretly she was jealous that she couldn’t poop every time she was happy, too.

  But Gizmo wasn’t ever happy when Wren was crying, so when she came home and ran into her room Gizmo shuffled his feathers into a tight ball, balanced on Wren’s thigh and held his smooth, cool beak under her chin. Because she could not fall asleep with her teeth thrumming, Gizmo stayed up with her the whole night.

 
Wren avoided her parents for as long as she could, which was only until morning when they knocked on her door and asked her down to breakfast.

  “Waffles,” they said cheerfully. “With blueberries. Your favorite.”

  Wren grudgingly followed them downstairs and sat at their table and ate the creamy,gooey waffles with the sugared blueberries they had made, but she refused to look at them or talk to them, even when she could feel their smiles looking at one another and struggling to stay in place.

  Later, Wren was sitting in her room running her hands over Gizmo’s soft feathers when she heard her mother say her name. Curious, she crawled on her hands and knees to the edge of the stairs and listened.

  “Angry,” her mother was saying. “All the time.”

  As carefully as she could, Wren tiptoed her way down. Gizmo spread his wings at the top of the stairs and beckoned her to come back.

  “You’re spying,” accused Gizmo. “You wouldn’t like it if someone did that to you.”

  “Shhhhhhh,” said Wren. “It’s about me.”

  But Gizmo dropped his beak to his chest and headed back into Wren’s room. He stopped at the doorway and said, “It’ll make you sad, and then I’ll be sad with you.”

  “Oh shush,” said Wren.

  “Why must you look for an excuse to break our hearts,” said Gizmo, then ruffled his feathers and hopped up onto his sill.

  Wren rolled her eyes and turned back to her mother.

  “Don’t know what to do,” her mother said and lapsed into silence. Then she said, “twenty or so more visits. She fights us every time.”

  And then, “doesn’t know what’s good for her.”

  Wren ran back into her room and slammed the door, not caring who heard.

  “Did you hear, Gizmo?” she asked. “They’re going to make me keep going back to that horrible monster!”

  “Well yes,” said Gizmo. “That’s how braces work. It’s to bind your teeth together so they don’t fall out. Everyone gets it done these days.”

  “Everyone,” grumbled Wren.

  Gizmo was right. The next day at school Wren looked closely at the mouths of the kids in her class and everywhere she saw the familiar gleam on their teeth.

  Monsters have gotten all of us, thought Wren, and felt a heaviness in her chest for her classmates. She gathered them around her at recess on the hot blacktop and told them she understood their pain, their monthly agony that kept them up in the nights and how parents refused to understand.

  “Let’s go,” she told them, “to Africa. We can discover the baby of a lion and a giraffe. A Liraffe, or a Girion. We’ll be famous and can do whatever we want, then.”

  But her peers only stared at her dumbly or laughed, then they wandered off and ran around in circles, something they loved to do but which Wren never really saw the point of.

  When she told her teachers about Africa, they said animals can’t mate like that.

  “But it’s far away,” Wren said. “You don’t know everything that happens there.”

  “Yes, we do,” said her teachers, and handed her several books on the subject.

  Wren read each line and grew heavy because it sure seemed like the books did know everything about Africa.

  “I’ve got to get away from here on my own,” Wren told Gizmo later that day as they sat on top of the stairs and listened to her parents bang out a dinner in the kitchen. She said, “I have to go somewhere that’s new and nobody knows anything about.”

  “No place like that left,” said Gizmo. “Everything on Earth is all found out.”

  Wren pushed her forehead against the railing on top of the stairs and rubbed her cheek where the braces nicked the soft skin. She heard her parents smiling downstairs and felt her stomach bunch up like dirty laundry.

  “Then I’ll have to move,” she told Gizmo. “I’ll move up, up, up.”

  She told Gizmo her plan to escape and live on the moon, the one place her smiling parents could not follow and where nobody she knew had braces. And, more importantly, she knew monsters could not breathe in space.

  Though he poo-pooed the idea up and down her room, Gizmo brought her all kinds of thingamabobs he found on his daily flights to help her build a Rocket-To-The-Moon-Rocket. She didn’t know where he found these things, but he brought all sorts of gewgaws and thingys and even managed to find a long, thin doodad with wires coming out of both ends.

  She had to ask her father if she could borrow his screwdriver and hammer and wrench.

  “I’m building a rocket,” said Wren and lowered her eyes to her socks.

  “That’s wonderful,” said her father, beaming. “I always wanted to be an astronaut, myself.”

  The next day he gave her his tools and a stack of books from the library with pictures of long white shuttles with their butts exploding in fire as they zoomed straight up to the lining of the sky. She showed Gizmo the pictures and said she needed parts that looked just like that: white and smooth and able to pierce the atmosphere.

  She furiously worked at shaping the things Gizmo gave her into something that looked like it was from the book.

  The doohickey was delicate because the thin, copper tubes that made up its long body were super bendy, and the red and green and blue and purple wires that burst out of its head like fireworks gave off little shocks if they touched other metals. It needed to be slowly bent around the whatchamacallit which was so big it was taking up almost all of her bedroom. The whatchamacallit was a block of metal so large that when Gizmo brought it to her he had been so impressed with his own birdy strength he shat all over her bedroom in glee. The whatchamacallit held the fuel and once the Rocket-To-The-Moon-Rocket started firing up the fuel would roll around and spurt into the doohickey, and that would send all that energy and spurty-power into the rocket and take her up, up, up.

  Gizmo was the one who told her the doohickey couldn’t be tightened all at once. It was the same excuse her parents gave her when she said that if the braces were tightened really hard just the one time Wren would already have the stupid perfect teeth they wanted her to have. And, she wouldn’t have to be in pain at the beginning of every month. Even though they explained that that isn’t how teeth worked she knew they were silly. They were in real estate and that had, as far as Wren was concerned, nothing to do with teeth. But Gizmo was a bird and he had no teeth. No teeth meant he was trustworthy.

  With her father’s wrench and hammer and the screwdriver with the flat head she furiously formed all the contraptions into something that looked like it was from the book. She had to hide it under her bed every morning so that her parents wouldn’t find it and spoil her plans.

  But her parents were nosy and always liked being in her business. They knocked on her bedroom door and she could hear them smiling at her. “Wren,” they said, “don’t you want breakfast? Even astronauts get hungry.”

  “I’m very, very busy,” Wren said.

  “Wren, darling, it’s time for a shower. We can smell you through the door. You’re one little greaseball monkey.”

  “I’m busy!”

  “Wren, darling. You have to go to school.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “You do. It’s the law,” they said, and she could hear their smiles tremble.

  “That’s silly,” said Wren.

  Her parents started to push their way into Wren’s room, and even though Wren and Gizmo barricaded themselves against the door and pushed back with all their might, Wren’s parents were much stronger. It was her father that overcame Wren and Gizmo’s strength, and he pushed the door so hard that Gizmo rolled all the way under the bed, and Wren fell to her stomach.

  “You can’t shut us out Wren,” her father said, wrapping his large arms around her small frame and resting his smile on her shoulder. He added, “We are always going to be here for you.”

  “Bah,�
� said Wren.

  It took several days for Wren to properly bend the doohickey around the whatchamacallit without breaking it. She sent Gizmo out to look for Elmer’s glue but even though he showed how his wings were falling out from flapping so hard he couldn’t find any. So Wren put him to work making sure the veeblefetzer had enough dirt and water in it (that was the fuel to make the whole thing boom, boom, boom upwards and away) and that the thingamabobber was able to withstand all kinds of temperature, because that was what would heat up the veeblefetzer and make it all fly.

  She was very confident in the science of her rocket.

  Sneaking downstairs, she ran behind potted plants and dived into closets whenever her parents walked into her line of sight. She waited for them to go into another room before she scavenged in cabinets and threw pencils and pens and notebooks and calculators and brooms and the mop and even several coats onto the floor.

  “Honey,” said her mother, making Wren jump. “Can I help you find something?”

  Mother was wearing her I’m worried about you smile, the kind that was all wobbly on one side.

  “I need Elmer’s glue,” said Wren.

  “Why didn’t you just ask?” Her mother went and got a blue glue stick from a desk drawer in the kitchen and handed it to Wren.

  “There’s no cow on the label.”

  “It’s just as good as any other,” said her mother.

  “Cow glue is the best,” said Wren.

  “It’s all the same.”

  “Ughhhh,” said Wren, and ran back upstairs.

  “Wren!” shouted her mother. “You need to clean up the mess you made.”

  “I’m working on a top-secret rare assignment!” Wren shouted back and locked her door.

  Over the next couple of days Wren concentrated on nothing else except getting herself into the air even though she was nervous that when she was up there it might get lonely, because one of the books said there was no sound in space. Still, she didn’t want Gizmo to think that she didn’t appreciate all the work he had done, and anyway, the Rocket-To-The-Moon-Rocket was rather fun to make with him.