First Tooth
"Arata tek yu rɔtin tit. Gi mi mi fayn tit…"
Six. That was the boy's age, when he lost his first tooth.
His mom stood by him, breathing through a smile. "Sɛn am ɔp di pan, Muvs." She gestured towards the dust-covered roof. A couple of birds, pigeons, idled there like madmen.
Muvs looked down at the tooth on his palm, lips pursed. "Do I have to?" His gum had let go of the tooth, but his heart, infantile, innocent, still held on.
"Yep. Wanna get bad teeth like daddy?"
That image of daddy's brown and crooked teeth struck hard enough to cut any attachment the boy had with the tooth. "Yuck!" he said. And he flung the tooth to its graveyard, or heaven, of zinc-sheets and rooftop things. It landed with a dull clank, scaring away the pigeons.
Second
Trying to climb a tree, the boy had fallen and broke his wrist. So, when his second tooth came out, about a year after the first, his left hand hung in a cast, his mom not pleased with him.
He showed her the tooth.
Not looking his way twice, she said, "You know what to do."
Sun but a murmur in the sky, shadows about, Muvs strode alone into the chilled and quiet dusk.
And he said the thing: Arata tek yu rɔtin tit. Gi mi mi fayn tit.
He glanced at the tooth he must discard - how lonely it laid on his palm. How much lonelier it'd lay on the roof the September rains must've cleansed by now. He couldn't do that to his tooth. Cast it into desolation. He placed it in his pocket. There and then, Muvs made up his mind to keep all his teeth, maybe in a mason jar under his bed, where they'd never need to be alone. Just like the ones in his mouth. A family.
The evening breeze breathed about him, cooling him. He lifted his foot, to return into the warmth of home, but… but… he didn't. He couldn't. He tried again. He stood transfixed. Not a muscle could he move, or twitch. He rose off the ground, floating, like aliens in their spaceships had come for him.
But Muvs' abduction didn't take him far into the cosmos. It stopped above his house. There, the boy hovered for a moment. Then they let him drop on the roof, unfrozen and struggling for balance.
But they wasn't they. The boy's abductor was no alien - not as those in the movies, anyway. But he also looked strange and grotesque, towering on the roof. "I am Arataman," he said, dragging slender, black fingers along his whiskers. "Ancient Collector. You have a thing of mine, boy." Speaker was a rat, but also a man, six foot tall and thin. He'd pass as a giant rag doll stitched together on a gloomy Sunday.
"You really real? Cool," said the boy, brushing past the spirit. He'd thought Arataman was one of those stories his mom told, which you chose to believe in today and not tomorrow and maybe believe in again next week. The boy dashed to the edge of the roof, looked below, then into the distance, at the houses jotting from the tumbling hills. The sparrows flying home. "I've ALWAYS wanted to be here, on the roof!"
"Give me the tooth, boy…"
"Nope."
"Why?" asked Arataman, a faint squeak in his growl.
"Because..." Muvs' eyes darted around, taking in the view: the skyline, the ocean, the shacks at Cockle Bay, the settling shadows. "I'm going to keep them. Brothers in a jar."
"Do you not know what I could do? If you refuse to give over your tooth, boy? I could give you horrid teeth. Like your daddy's. Brown. And black. And crooked. And you would never dare smile again. And you would have no friends. And you would live alone. Or maybe I should just eat you, for insolence!"
"Oh please," said Muvs, unmoved. He turned around, his eyes made four with the spirit's. "I know why daddy's teeth are bad. I heard mom say it's those cigarette things he smokes. It has nothing to do with you, Mr. Arataman. Don't fool yourself." Then he added, "and I don't even have friends so…"
"Are you not afraid of me, boy?"
Muvs chuckled, running his fingers over Arataman's outfit: a gown with all the colours of oil in water, which blossomed to the heels. "Hm-hmm."
"Why?"
"I don't really know," Muvs said, but he knew; Arataman seemed a mean, tall teacher, who wasn't quite mean once you got to know him. "You have funny ears. Anyone told you, Mr. Arataman? I’ve got funny ears too, the boys in school say."
"No one has said," Arataman answered.
Muvs didn't hear him. He thought of his mom, as he walked off and lodged in a corner. Could she hear him on the roof? She'd have come out if she did. Did she worry he'd taken long in the whipping cold? And he thought of his daddy, too; had he returned home? He always came late these days. Would daddy cane him if he met him on the roof, as he had done when he'd fallen seeking plum?
"What's your name?" The strange collector slumped next to the brooding boy.
"Muvah. Mom calls me Muvs. My best friend Abdul did too."
"I thought you said you had no friends."
"Had friends when Abdul was still at my school, but he goes to a new school now. And all the boys stopped talking to me when he left, even Aiyu and Tareq. They say I'm not funny, and cool, and smart. Not like Abdul. I'm wired, they say."
"Weird," Arataman corrected. "Give me the tooth, and when I come by next time, Muvs, I will show it to you. And you'd see I keep all teeth safe. Give me the tooth and I will even be your friend."
A glint in the boy's gaze. "We'll do friendstuff?"
"Sure."
"Why do you want them so badly, anyway?"
"To live, boy." Rat pinched his lower lip. "Just as you need air, I need teeth to live."
"Now that's wired, Mr. Arataman."
"That's just how the universe has forged it. As I can only walk from roof to roof, come only on a summon, I need the essence in children’s teeth to live. Why do you want to keep yours?"
"Just didn't want it to feel as lonely as I do sometimes, on the roof." Muvs closed his eyes. "But okay. Here." He dug in his pocket for the tooth, handed it to the collector. His face softened. "Let's shake hands on it. That you'll always keep them safe, my teeth, and with friends. And you'd show them to me when you come back around." Spit flew from his mouth, landing on his palm.
Arataman did the same. "Till the next losing."
Then they shook on that.
When the boy let go of Arataman's hand, he found himself back on the ground, beside the white flower-pots before you entered the house. Like he'd never been abducted by not-aliens. He hurried inside, faster than his mom could say, "Muvs, bring yusɛf ya!"
Victor Forna is a poet and writer from Freetown, Sierra Leone.