once bitten

thud.

Thud.

THUD!

Maggie sat in the chilly humidity of the basement, her fingers poised falteringly over the lower register of the ivory keys. The piano sounded as though it was underwater and she sighed heavily. Didn’t her mom know anything? Pianos shouldn’t be put in basements.

THUDDDDDDDD!!!!!!

Just for emphasis.

The cinderblock walls echoed the muddy notes. The piano was a total pile of garbage: The cat had used it for a scratching post for years and the kids had used it for an emotional punching bag. She unhooked her right foot from underneath her left knee where she’d curled it for warmth in the basement’s damp atmosphere, and shook it a little to loosen the pins; it felt as though someone were pouring cool, dry sand over her bare foot.

At the top of the stairs, a shaft of light jutted through the dim basement, lit with only one overhead bulb. A shadow appeared at the top of the stairs, then an ungraceful and angular figure swung down the stairs, three at a time, using the handrails like monkeybars. Laura.

“Hey,” Maggie said, turning her face back to the tops of the ivories, which gleamed in the double light. The tops were slightly scratched, giving them the appearance of the underside of a leaf.

“Hey,” a husky voice echoed, slightly out of breath. “Where’s Mom?”

“I don’t know. I thought she was upstairs?”

“Good. Can I borrow five?”

Maggie’s eyes shot back towards her older sister, standing outlined by the light of the open door. One hand was on her freshly shaved but still faintly blonde head.

“What did you do to your hair? You look like a total asshole.”

“I didn’t ask for an evaluation; I asked to borrow five bucks,” Laura annunciated, a tiny bit irked that she had pointed out the obvious. “And watch your mouth – you swear way too much for an eleven-year-old.”

“What do you need the five bucks for?” Maggie asked discriminatorily, reaching up to close the cover of the keyboard with a firm indication of what her answer should be.

“A pack. I’m out.”

“You’re gonna get cancer like Grandpa Mike and have to shove a piece of plastic up your nose just to breathe before you’re out of high school. You’re going to look stupid and die.”

“I’m prepared to deal with that.”

“Where’s Jerome?”

Jerome was their five-year-old brother.

“He’s in the bathroom, doing lord knows what.”

“What do you mean, ‘lord knows what’? Aren’t you supposed to watch him so he doesn’t fall in the toilet?”

“I have exceptional hearing.” Laura stuck out her hand covered with a black-inked homemade tattoo of an enormous open-mouthed skull. “I’ll hear the splash and come running,” she guaranteed. Impatiently, she said, “Listen, Maggie, you don’t need to buy anything and you get a killer allowance, so you’re the richest little kid in Detroit. What gives? I’ll pay you back.”

“I charge interest, remember?” Maggie gritted her teeth and pulled crumpled bills out of her back jeans pocket. She reached into the other pocket, and pulled out a small flip notebook. She dated a line, and wrote: FIVE BUCKS. She was into page thirty or so. The thirty pages spoke volumes of her innate idealism.

Laura sucked her breath in sharply, imagining that first, blessed hit of nicotine. Suddenly, she seemed to realize the embarrassing quality of the situation, begging a child five years her junior for money, and got flustered and anxious to keep the continuum of motion in play. “Alright. I’ll be back in a few minutes, okay? I’m just going to the corner.” She turned to go, her sneakers squeaking, but stopped suddenly at the foot of the stairs. She was wearing a lime green thermal that emphasized her paleness and freckles. Her eyes, black in the dim light, lifted Maggie’s up to make sure she was listening, “Can you stay upstairs to make sure Jerome’s okay while I’m gone?”

Maggie dropped her eyes and mumbled, “Sure.” Her sister was always covering her ass for something she wasn’t doing, anyway. Always multitasking.

Maggie looked up. She was gone.

SLAM! The door shook the windows.

Maggie reached up to grab hold of the chain switch between her fingers. She pulled. The basement stairs lightened with each step, and she soon found herself in the bright, drenching sun of the living room: beige carpeting, white walls, mirrors, family photos. The air had gone from basement-damp to late-October--indoors, windows-shut dusty.

She heard the water in the upstairs bathroom running, a dull, inner-wall sound. What the hell could a five-year-old be doing in the bathroom with the water running?

Surprisingly, the door opened right up when she test-jiggled the handle. Jerome was standing in front of the mirror, his huge head of black waves sticking out to shield his face. His hand was in his mouth, wiggling something.

“Dude, you got a loose tooth?”

The wide-eyed expression that met Maggie’s eyes was one mixed with surprise and fear, as still-baby fingers tugged and shook cautiously at the rooted foundations of primary teeth.

“Yea –aeah,” Jerome gurgled, spit and blood making a tiny river down his chin. Obviously, brave curiosity was at play, and he wasn’t crying y-e-t…so.

“Well, you need anything? An ice cube? A hug? A knuckle-sandwich?”

She knew this would make him laugh. It worked.

Blood sprayed all over the bathroom mirror in gleeful, red droplets.

“Thtop it. I’m thrying to thoncenthrate.”

Maggie squinted both visibly and mentally as she evaluated the situation. Should she just let her little brother go to town on his tooth without ‘adult’ supervision, or should she do the whole coaching thing that’s expected in these childhood milestones? She recalled her loose teeth memories, and just wanting to be left alone. In fact, she might’ve swallowed half of her loose baby teeth in her sleep, by accident anyway.

“Want me to stick around to watch the fun, buddy?”

“Eh.” Jerome stated, closing his mouth and visibly wiggling the tooth with his tongue. He had a lumpy cheek. He turned his attention to the mirror, opening wide to reveal the multitudinous future of loose prospects. Maggie looked cockeyed at the red-spattered mirror and shrugged. What more could he do, anyway?

“Well, if you need some help, just let me know,” She looked him in the mirrored eyes – the hazels were more calm now. “I’ll be right…” she pointed outside the bathroom door, “out there.”

“Othay,” he agreed, his tongue wiggling away at the tooth, again.

Maggie closed the bathroom door, and went back into the dusty warmth of the living room. Outside, dry, blowing leaves were wreaking havoc on pretty much any plant life that was still in existence on the ground. She looked out the window, and down the sidewalk. The thin, defiant figure of her sister appeared, her very jeans even arguing her every step, their hugeness blowing in the wind; any other direction than her. Her hair just existed. No movement. The original shoulder-length pigtails were just phantom images now. She looked so goddamn ridiculous. Maggie rolled her eyes, but went into the kitchen, anyway, to be there when she came through the door.

“Lose something?” Maggie shot at her as soon as she appeared through the door.

“What?” Laura asked, looking down and around at her sneakers, baggy jeans, green thermal shirt. She felt her pockets. “What’d I lose?” Her eye looked even more green with that shirt. Confused.

“Your hair.” Maggie inquired, “Where’d it disappear to?”

“Eff you,” Laura slapped down a crinkly, plastic supermarket bag on the kitchen countertop as she bent down to unlace her black Adidas. Maggie saw more than one object in the bag.

“Jerome’s losing a tooth right now,” she announced, craning her neck to get a better view of the contents of the bag. Cigarettes and something else…

“Huh?”

“Yeah. He probably has it out by now.”

“Why aren’t you up there with him?”

“I was. He doesn’t need my help, I guess.”

Laura raised her eyebrows for a minute, then finished shaking off her sneakers. She strode past Maggie authoritatively with her bag and within seconds could be heard knocking on the bathroom door. She waited and toed the kitchen floor. “You forgot my change!” she yelled after a full minute. She looked up.

Laura stood in front of her. “Come with me for a sec.”

Down the stairs and into the basement; on went the lone lightbulb.

“Everything okay?”

Laura was at the piano, lifting the top and peering inside its depths where shiny tines lay like musical teeth. “Uhm-hmm,” she responded. “It’s out – the tooth.” A flash of white paper was handed off to Maggie before the update could register.

“What’s this?” Maggie held a slightly wrinkled and very lumpy envelope in her hand. Opening it, she found several singles, fives…a bunch of twenties. “What is this?” she repeated. “Why’s there money in the piano?”

“It’s yours,” Laura said.

Maggie blinked.

“It’s pretty much everything you’ve ever lent to me over the last few years. I knew you never expected me to pay you back, but I didn’t want to disappoint you by following through on that.” She eye-cornered Maggie with a glance and nervously laughed. “You expect nothing but the worst from me…you’ve got every reason: I’ve been a pretty crappy sibling, but I always wanted to pay you back no matter what, so I’ve made sure to put everything I borrowed into that envelope within a week of borrowing it from you…I just didn’t want you to know yet. I wanted to give it all back to you in a few years to put towards a car, but I think you’d probably rather have a new piano right now? Maybe one that can stay upstairs?”

Maggie looked at Laura, then at the dilapidated piano, then at the envelope full of tightly packed bills. “How many packs of cigarettes is this?” she asked as she gave her sister a hug. She didn’t want Laura to see that she was probably going to cry.

Upstairs, Jerome tucked his freshly yanked tooth underneath his pillow, and ran outside to play catch with his pal, Casper. Maggie went upstairs and looked at the baby tooth under the pillow covered with flying Supermans. It had traces of now-brown blood at the root and caught the glint of the late-afternoon October sun from the window. She cradled it for a few seconds before pulling a fiver from the bulging envelope from her back pocket. She soundlessly slid them together under the flying Supermans and went into the bathroom to brush her teeth.