Marlena first heard it on a Tuesday morning while grinding coffee beans for the breakfast rush. A low, persistent scraping that seemed to emanate from beneath the floorboards of her grandmother’s café. She paused, listening, but the sound vanished as quickly as it had come.
The café sat at the edge of Millbrook, where the old growth forest pressed against the town like a green fist. Marlena had inherited it three months ago along with her grandmother’s collection of peculiar ceramic teeth that lined the windowsills—molars painted with tiny flowers, canines glazed in midnight blue, incisors that seemed to gleam with their own inner light.
“Grandmother’s little obsession,” her mother had said dismissively when they’d cleaned out the upstairs apartment. “Probably worth something to the right collector.”
But Marlena had kept them all, arranging them exactly as her grandmother had, though she couldn’t say why. The locals found them charming in an eccentric way, and they’d become something of a signature for the little café.
The scraping returned that afternoon, more insistent now. Marlena crouched behind the counter, pressing her ear to the worn wooden floor. The sound was rhythmic, methodical—like something gnawing its way upward through the earth itself.
Mrs. Chen, her only customer at the moment, looked up from her crossword puzzle. “Everything alright, dear?”
“Just checking for mice,” Marlena lied, straightening up with what she hoped was a reassuring smile.
That night, after closing, she pulled up the loose floorboard in the corner where the sound seemed strongest. The beam of her flashlight revealed dark soil and the pale tangle of tree roots that had worked their way beneath the foundation over the decades. But there was something else—small, white objects scattered among the root system like seeds.
Teeth. Dozens of them, pristine and gleaming.
Marlena reached down and plucked one from the earth. It was warm to the touch and seemed to pulse gently against her palm, as if it contained a tiny, beating heart. As she lifted it, the scraping sound intensified, and she realized with a chill that it was coming from the tooth itself.
Over the following days, more teeth pushed up through the floorboards like strange flowers blooming in reverse. Marlena found herself rising before dawn to harvest them, drawn by an compulsion she couldn’t name. Each one was different—some sharp as razors, others broad and flat, all of them alive with that subtle, persistent scraping.
She began incorporating them into her grandmother’s collection, and the café’s atmosphere shifted in ways she couldn’t quite articulate. The coffee seemed richer, the pastries more fragrant. Customers lingered longer, speaking in hushed, reverent tones about dreams they’d had the night before—dreams of running through moonlit forests on legs that weren’t quite human, of tasting wild honey and morning dew, of belonging to something vast and ancient that had no name.
The local dentist, Dr. Morrison, became a regular. He would sit for hours, staring at the ceramic teeth with an expression of professional bewilderment.
“The morphology is all wrong,” he murmured to Marlena one afternoon. “These aren’t human dental structures. But they’re not animal either. It’s as if someone imagined what teeth should look like and then grew them from pure intention.”
Marlena nodded politely, all the while aware of the fresh row of living teeth she’d arranged on the kitchen windowsill that morning, their surfaces catching the afternoon light like small, pearlescent suns.
The scraping had evolved into something more complex now—a symphony of grinding and clicking that rose from every corner of the café. Only Marlena could hear it, but she sensed that others felt its presence in the way they unconsciously touched their own teeth while drinking their coffee, in the way they smiled just a little too widely when they laughed.
On the night of the new moon, Marlena understood. The teeth weren’t growing up from the earth—they were growing down into it, extending invisible roots that connected to every living thing in the forest beyond. Her café had become a mouth, and through it, the ancient woods were learning to taste the modern world.
She ran her tongue across her own teeth and felt them respond with that familiar scraping sound. In the morning, she would open as usual, serve coffee and pastries to her devoted customers, and watch as the boundary between wild and tame continued to dissolve, one perfect, impossible tooth at a time.
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