Fiction: To Tell The Tooth

I didn’t actually intend to post this, but it’s my birthday and I don’t have anything better to post, so here you go.

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Sprix picked at the dirt around the base of a tree, found a twig, and gave it an experimental bend. It snapped. She discarded the pieces and poked some more. “I don’t believe you.” Cam said.

Sprix flexed a new twig and grimaced as it folded easily. She cast it to the ground. “I manifested ex nihilo before your eyes,” she said. “So either I am what I say I am or you’re having a psychotic break, and… Oh.” Her expression suddenly changed from frustration to sympathy and she put her hand on Cam’s shoulder. “I know it’s been a rough year. But you’re going to be okay. You’re not going crazy; you can trust your senses. You can trust me.”

Cam shrugged the hand away. “I can trust the weirdo in the theme park costume who says she’s a fairy godmother? Sure.”

Sprix moved on to another tree and started poking through leaves. Cam reached up, snapped the tip from a low-hanging branch, and offered it to her. Sprix slapped it out of her hand. “Don’t do that!” she said. She cast a quick side-eye toward the base of the tree and, through clenched teeth, said, “It has to have fallen of natural causes. Gift. Of. The. Forest. Gift. How’d you like it if I snapped off a bit of you for alchemical purposes?”

Cam took a step back. Sprix had not done anything so far that read as even mildly threatening. In fact, she gave off an aura of safety that defied explanation. It took effort to think about the fact that she was certainly dealing with someone who was… unwell. Who she’d followed out into the woods. Alone. Without witnesses. What was she doing?

“Besides, I wasn’t always. I’m working my way up. Used to be a tooth fairy.” She crouched by another tree and toyed with several more sticks.

“I’m sorry, no,” Cam said. Something was holding her back from reacting as strongly as she intellectually knew she should, but this was still a bridge too far. “There’s no such thing as the tooth fairy.”

Sprix looked up at her with a squinting look of condescension. “Then what happens to the teeth?” she asked. She dropped most of the sticks she was holding and continued turning the others over in her hand.

“No, really. I’m not giving you this one. I have children,” Cam said. “It’s the parents. It’s me. I’ve done it. There’s no magic elf-”

“Fairy,” Sprix interjected with a surprising venom in her tone.

“Fairy,” Cam repeated, hands up. “They go to sleep, we sneak in, we take the tooth, slip a couple of bucks under the pillow. No magic. No,” she cleared her throat, “fairy. It’s us. We take the teeth.”

Sprix seemed pleased with the stick she was holding and stood up. “Then where are they now?” She pinched the twig between her fingertips and gave her wrist an experimental snap. The twig slipped from her fingers and hit Cam in the chest. Sprix cringed.

Cam felt her face fall. “What?”

“The teeth. Where are they now? Two kids, forty teeth. Where are they? You didn’t just chuck them in the trash, I assume?”

“I, uh…” The question didn’t just catch her off guard. Thinking about it caused her active distress. “I…”

Sprix smirked. “I’ll tell you. Just like you said. They go to sleep, you sneak in, you take the tooth, slip a couple of bucks under the pillow. Then you go about your business, get distracted, set the tooth down, probably in a drawer on the nightstand, tell yourself you’ll find a place for it later… And that’s the last you ever think of it, because some, ahem, weirdo in a theme park costume slips in and takes it when you’re not looking.”

“What about the money then?” Cam asked in spite of herself.

Sprix had turned back to the leaves and detritus, looking for a new stick. “The nice thing about money is that it’s fungible. Would you even notice if there was an extra quarter in your purse the next morning? Would you question it if a dollar bill randomly showed up in the lint trap the next time you did a load of laundry?”

Cam tried to process the question, but her brain didn’t want to. “I… Um…”

Sprix tried more sticks with increasing frustration. “It’s okay. I get it. Your mind is blown. That’s all right. I’ll erase your memory when I’m done and you can go back to thinking you’ve got a secret horde of milk teeth you’ve somehow misplaced and that isn’t even slightly weird or creepy.”

That snapped her out of it. “Wait, what?”

“All part of the service.”

“I don’t consent to that,” Cam said.

The words stopped Sprix dead in her tracks. “You will,” she said. When she saw Cam’s expression in response, she backpedaled. “Sorry. That wasn’t meant to be a threat. Well kinda. Actually no, definitely not a threat. Thing is, you can feel it, can’t you? Your brain doesn’t like this. Most humans aren’t wired for exposure to magic. Either you will adapt, or it will get worse, and most people don’t adapt. Eventually you will decide that it would be more comfortable to go back to living in a world that behaves according to rational, scientific laws, and you’ll be okay with me editing myself out of your memory to make that work. Simple.” Then she head-butted the nearest tree in frustration. “Or it would be if I could find some decent wand-wood. Chestnut is great, but the American chestnut tree has been functionally extinct for close to a century.”

Then Cam surprised herself. Her brain didn’t like the magic stuff. That fit. But it could grab on to a simpler, rational, concrete, idea. Like the fact that the American chestnut tree had been functionally extinct for close to a century. “Actually, I can help with that.”