Recurring Teeth

By Dizzy Zaba

I am a dog, and I convince my family to clone me. (I might be a person acting like a dog). When I run, the speed turns me into a bird. I fly away from the bullets whizzing past me. I land on the shoulder of the first human I see, Sergio. Quickly and without much effort, I become human again. I tell him the story of my transformation, and suddenly I am him. I am Sergio. I look out the window and notice several men with guns pull up across the street to kill his (my) (our) chickens.

I am on a train. My mom takes me shopping, and I faint. Later at home, she shoves a large rubber ball down my throat. I threaten to hit her if she touches me again.

I am in a large gothic church. Nobody else is here. If I look up at the ceiling I can see all the exposed floors, like in a hotel lobby. Then a rumbling starts, and I see knights on horses galloping into the church, hundreds of them. Towards me. I run to the doors, but they’re locked. The knights trample me to death.

I am dead, and nobody can see me. My room has been rented out. I put the clock on my nightstand on pause. Outside, everyone is immobile. There is a cop walking up to me, which is confusing because I had just put time on pause. Does he not live by the rules of time?

I am a doctor, and I am sick. It doesn’t feel ironic.

I am running with a man twice my age. Away from something? He is connected to homemade life support: a simple machine of two battery packs connected to his heart through a bottle he must carry. A stranger appears and unplugs it, and I only have a minute to get his heart connected to the batteries again. I’m not fast enough.

There is a battle. I’m with several friends but get left behind with the enemy. When they finally release me, several hours later, I give up my gun and wash the blood off my books in the bathroom.

I am young, a child. My mom and I are living in a house by the sea. It is full of dead plants and hay for a horse we do not have. When I leave the house, I travel by helium balloon while everyone below shoots at my small body.

I am visiting my stepsister. In her bathroom there are two toilets: one filled with sand and the other with underwater sea animals. Both are filthy.

I kill my dad by punching him to death. His body becomes really small, easily transportable. Mostly, I am scared of getting into trouble.

I slowly lose all of my teeth. I am on the run from an unknown danger. I find temporary shelter in a talking owl’s treehouse. The owl feels familiar as it tells me stories of its life. I can’t walk; I had just gotten an at-home amateur bunion surgery. My feet are throbbing. There are animals everywhere. Along the fence, I see slippery white eels.

Sylwia and I are in a bathroom stall. She unzips her pants and puts her new, limp dick into my mouth. I pull back, biting as I withdraw. The tip gets stuck against my teeth and falls off. There is blood everywhere. We don’t know what to do.

I am sitting in a car parked outside of my boyfriend’s apartment from which he has just been evicted. I step inside the apartment, open the fridge, and rearrange frozen chickens to make enough room for myself. I get into the fridge and close the door.

I am pretending to be a suburban mom, but for what purpose I do not know. There is a lot of sneaking around.

My teeth crumble away one by one.

I am at a magic show. The magician comes onto the stage with two hard leather balls the size of oranges. One is the weight of the sun and the other is the weight of a hand. She cautions for us to leave if we start to feel uncomfortable, and then proceeds to flatten the balls into a thin leather layer. On the stage, she covers a young boy with one of them and her husband with the other. The layers disappear as the two people are transformed. She throws the boy and the man against the walls and the floor. They bounce.


Dizzy Zaba is a community organizer and writer from Poland, now living in Oregon. Their writing considers grief, power, and the limits of the body. They can be found on social media at @dizzyzaba, and they write the newsletter Demarcation.

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Boy Needs a Bath | Johanna Ziegler

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The Weeper | Sarah Bradley