The Glass of Teeth

My grandmother’s house sat at the edge of a salt marsh, a three-story Victorian that had weathered a century of storms. It was the only house on that stretch of road, and at night, the fog rolled in from the water, swallowing the porch lights and turning the windows into pale, staring eyes. I spent my childhood summers there, and the house always felt like it was holding its breath.

My great-grandmother, Elena, was the family’s living relic. She was a tiny, wizened woman who spoke only in fragments of an old Basque dialect, a language no one else in the family could understand. She had come to this country as a bride, and by the time I knew her, she was confined to her third-floor room, a place that smelled of camphor and old paper. Every Sunday, my mother would drag me up those creaking stairs to say hello, and Elena would fix me with her jet-black eyes, as if she could see something behind me. She never spoke to me, never smiled, just touched the glass of water on her nightstand and said a word that sounded like ‘itsu’.

A month before I turned thirteen, my great-grandmother died. The family gathered, and her room was cleared out. In the back of a closet, wrapped in a yellowed lace tablecloth, I found a small, rosewood box with a brass clasp. Inside, nestled in black velvet, were a set of human teeth. Not dentures—these were old, worn molars and incisors, yellowed and cracked, with roots that had been filed smooth. I didn’t tell anyone. I slipped the box into my duffel bag and took it home.

That night, I put the box on my nightstand. Sleep came quickly, but I woke to a whisper from the yard. I turned on my lamp and looked out the window. The yard was empty, but the clapboard siding of the house across the street was covered in what looked like a fine, gray mold. The smell of the marsh had crept into my room, thick and briny. I heard a faint tapping, like fingernails on glass, coming from the window. I pulled the curtains shut. The tapping stopped, but then I heard it from inside the room, from the box. A dry, rattling sound, like teeth chattering.

I didn’t open the box. I shoved it under my bed and lay still until dawn. In the morning, the mold on the house was gone, but the box was on my pillow, its clasp open. The teeth were arranged in two small rows, like a jawbone. I felt a chill of wrongness, and for the first time, I was afraid of a family heirloom. I decided to return it to the marsh, to throw it into the brackish water.

I walked to the marsh’s end, where the water met the reeds. The day was overcast, and the air was still. I opened the box, and the teeth caught a glint of light, and for a moment, they seemed to shift, to align, as if forming a word. I flung the box as far as I could. It landed with a soft splash and sank. I felt a relief so intense that I laughed out loud. But as I turned to leave, I saw a figure standing among the cattails. It was my great-grandmother, but young, her dark hair loose, her lips moving silently. She raised a hand and pointed at me, then vanished into the reeds.

I ran back to my house, my heart hammering, and locked the door. The box was in my bed, dry, with the teeth arranged in a perfect smile. I thought I saw a cloudy film on them, like the residue of a mouth. I decided to drive to the city, to find someone who might know about the box, an anthropologist, a historian, anyone. But as I reached for my keys, I heard a voice behind me. It was my great-grandmother’s voice, but soft, almost a whisper: ‘Ekarri itzazu.’ Bring them.

I froze. The voice had come from the box. I opened it, and the teeth were vibrating, chattering together. I slammed the lid shut and held it firmly. The chattering stopped. Then the lid suddenly flew open, and the teeth scattered across the floor. I knelt to pick them up, and as my fingers touched one, a vision flooded my mind. I saw my great-grandmother as a young woman, standing before her husband, a stern mayor. She was old then, but in the vision, she was speaking Spanish in a low, urgent tone, and the mayor was shaking his head. She pointed at a glass of water on the table, and the water turned to black. The mayor stared in horror. I understood: she had a curse, a power she had inherited, and the teeth were the key.

I snapped back to reality, my body covered in sweat. The teeth were back in the box, arranged neatly. I knew I couldn’t destroy them, and I couldn’t keep them. The only clue was the Basque word, ‘itsu’, which I looked up later: it means blind. She was telling me something about blindness. Maybe the teeth were from a blind oracle, a seer. And the vision of her pointing at the marsh—maybe she wanted me to take them back to her birthplace, to the mountains of the Basque country.

But I didn’t go. I couldn’t. I buried the box in the backyard, under the old oak, and planted a rose bush on top. For a while, nothing happened. The nightmares faded, and I thought the curse had been contained. But last week, I was walking to my car, and I saw a glint of white in the soil near the rose bush. I bent down and found a single tooth, clean and polished, as if new. The rose bush had withered and died, and the ground around it was covered in that fine, gray mold. I dug up the box. It was empty, save for a note in my great-grandmother’s handwriting, in Spanish: ‘They multiply.’

That night, I looked into the mirror and found two more teeth on my pillow. I cannot sleep now. I keep them in a glass by my bed, and every morning, there are more. My reflection sometimes lags a half-second behind, and when it smiles, its teeth are wrong. Too many. They are growing inside me, pushing out, but no dentist can see them. Only I can. And I understand now that the glass was never a vessel for my great-grandmother’s remains. It was a portal, and she was not a keeper. She was a gate. And the teeth are the lock, and I am the key.