My Father's Teeth

The more I scrub, gray ash flows in liquid rivulets, it pours and trickles down each step, one-by-one.

One drop--to the next. It meets as a burned silver puddle at the base of the stairs and goes nowhere.

I keep looking at it. It feels like the more I scrub here, the more mess I make.

My heart is quickening in my chest; it pounds, but I’m doing nothing wrong.

I’m looking around, just to make sure. A silver shadow bounces off the mercury mess into a corner and back.

His teeth glint. I’m not scared, he has my father’s teeth.

Music blares--screeching in my head and pounds; the bite is familiar--I squint, sponge still in hand. The water spilling down my hand is dirty.

I wash.

That mercury-shadow person in the back is still there. Now he looks real.

‘It’s only my father,’ I tell myself.

The teeth glint neon and the spindle-fingers show lengthening black talons.

The humanoid shadow in the corner gets darker, closer, and solidifies. It’s not him.

It’s something new; something strange.

I turn the sound up on my playlist.

I scrub the stairs but not my hair.

I look away.

Only one monster a day.

2020

Original Artwork: Property of VVC 2021