The Tooth
There had always been rumours about it. Ever since Tess was little(r) she could remember hearing it spoken about: in the playground, by the coat racks before and after school. Lots of questions and make believe answers that usually went something like this:
Child A: Did you hear it? Again? Last night?
Child B: Yes! It was so loud! Like a volcanic eruption or something!
Child A: No (with a certain ‘I know more than you’ tone) it wasn’t that. It doesn’t erupt because it’s not a volcano. There’s no lava, is there? And Zeus isn’t the God of fire is he?
Tess would always smile to herself when she overheard these exchanges. ‘They think they know’ she thought to herself. ‘But only I do. Only me.’
-
It stuck out of the earth like a frozen lightning bolt. Local newspapers wrote annual stories about it; how it was a part of a Greek legend and that was how their quaint seaside town came to get its mystical name. The restaurants and hotels loved this time of year. The streets were always busy and full of tourists stumbling on cobbles. Bakeries repackaged meat and potato pies as ‘Zeus’ Bolt n’ Mash’ and pubs would sell ale under names such as ‘Golden Strike’ or ‘Liquor of the Gods’ that tasted curiously similar to beer served as ‘Rabbit Warren’ just weeks earlier. The town’s few journalists would photograph the days leading up to the big event with rapturous excitement. They would run pun filled headlines like “Zuesical: A Bolt of Fresh Air!” when reviewing the (usually not very good) festival entertainment that accompanied the yearly celebrations. Tess loved walking the streets at this time of year; the smells of toffee apples and popcorn and roasted chestnuts that floated through the air like smoky question marks.
Would the people ever know the truth? ‘They think they know’ she thought to herself. ‘But only I do. Only me.’
Each night when she was in bed, and she could hear her parents’ snoring peacefully in the next room, she would raise herself up on her elbows and look out across the town to look at all of the white shapes that dotted the town like large golf tees. She would never grow tried of the salt in the air, the fishy smell that crept through every crack and loose latch of this or any other house. She would recall it fondly even as an eighty year old great-grandmother, cooking fish pie for her family, telling them what those big white bolts stuck into the earth really were. And, how she’d come to figure it out one night, long ago, when she was little(r).
“They thought they knew,” she would tell her family, their faces grinning with nostalgia at hearing the story once again, “but only I did. Only me.”
One evening she didn’t just look out her bedroom window at the shapes though: she took the family dog for a walk and headed for the beach. Misty yapped at her feet as though her ankles were the spindly twigs that she tossed over the heath. The purple moss always brought tears to her eyes. Even as a young girl she appreciated those colours, the bruised look of the land and how the dandelions that grew and butterflies that flapped seemed to beat and share her same blood. Her own grandmother told her this once; that the landscape was alive. That it just ‘knew’. That, her grandmother had told her, was what was so special about their town – nothing to do with a supposed enormous bolt from Zeus at all. She was convinced, she told Tess as child on more than one occasion, that it was just a poorly made lighthouse and that it was made to sound more impressive than it was by the owner, trying to make his folly seem an invaluable part of the town by selling stories of its ‘magical’ origin.
In fact, it was a lighthouse… or attempts had been made to use as it one. Its position on the bay and its height (for this one structure was the largest of the other white shapes up and down the town’s land) made it a prime location for a lighthouse. It hadn’t been able to be used as one though ever since some engineers realised that something in the rock prevented it from being drilled through for wires or to carve out windows and doors. It was only after that night, with Misty, that Tess first thought to herself her familiar refrain; ‘They think they know. But only I do. Only me.’
Now, slightly older than she was when she first realised the secret (and very much younger than when she made fish pie and recounted the tale for her grand children), Tess stood on the shore looking up at the white, luminous shape. It rose out from the sand like a finger pointing up to heaven. It was smooth as though made from velvet and if you looked close enough you could make out small grooves, little marks and scratches that criss-crossed like love hearts carved on bark. From a distance this shape did indeed have brothers and sisters; other white forms that jutted up and out of the sand and mud and fields of the town at different heights and widths, but with the same strength and knowing aura that this largest one did. Tess never knew why this was the one that all locals focussed on but presumed the sheer size of it caught the eye more than its smaller siblings. She hugged herself as the thought ran through her mind again; how little the people here really knew!
It wasn’t a lightning bolt. It wasn’t from Zeus at all. And the local brewery should really rename its ‘Thunder Ale’… for this shape, in fact all the shapes, were teeth. And those teeth spoke to Tess, for those teeth belonged to a living (though resting) troll.
-
“So,” Tess, aged eighty now, told her grandchildren as she spooned out fish pie and tore chunks of warm bread, “my dear, dear town, is actually sat inside the mouth of a troll. Those white shapes are its teeth. And every year I would hear him speak. His mouth would move ever so gently, just enough to dislodge a few boulders and shake a few trees; and certainly enough to let the good old local press run another earthquake and thunder story. Really, people would believe anything! A volcano, really! But the tremors were just him talking to me. He’d tell me how he came to be there, just lying down in the earth and face up. How our earth isn’t actually earth at all, and that we are living on slumbering trolls, like him, who are so old and tired that they’ve just been grown over with grass and mulch and time. I’d come and listen to him every year, that same day every year, and by then he’d have saved up just enough energy to tell me one thing more; one more piece of my town’s puzzle.”
One of her great grandchildren asked what he’d told her last year.
“Last year? Just that it was his wife who was lying beside him. The next town over. I’d always thought that mountain range between our town and theirs looked like locked fingers - you know, how the ridges seem to bulge at the top like knuckles. Turns out they are!”
A younger Tess now ran her hand over the white tooth. She had been listening to him speak for five years now and it had taken her three years to ask a question in response to his slow grumbling talk. She asked where his eyes were.
“The two harbours my dear” she said to another great grandchild who wanted to know the answer; “the harbour walls are his eyelids.”
In fact, she regaled to her rapt audience, parts of trolls made up the entire country: fingers were roads; nostrils were tunnels; aging knee joints were rubble and slate.
“I’m looking forward to this month’s celebrations though! It’s a big birthday for the town. He told me that his voice would sound less like thunder this year and that he’d finally be able to, well… he ran out of puff before he could tell me. Not long now though.”
-
Tess looked at her family across the kitchen table and breathed in the salt from the fish, remembering the same taste of this freshly caught supper as a child.
‘They thought they knew’ she said to herself, meaning her family, ‘and now they do. Only us.’
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