Ali Lazik, Weak Bones and More Than You Bargained For
Mother Root
Azia Archer
She is rinsing her mouth when the first tooth slips loose.
There isn’t pain at first, just that soft, traitorous shift, the sensation of something giving up. She presses her tongue against the back molar and feels its wobble, a door on a hinge that shouldn’t exist. Her stomach drops.
She spits and watches a ribbon of pink thread into the basin. The sink is full of half-used toothpaste, remnants of glitter.
“Mom!” someone yells, already offended by her absence.
She grips the counter and breathes through her nose. The tooth is still attached. It’s only threatening. It’s always something. She has been warned and prophesied at all hours of the day for years now.
Pregnancy did this, they said. Hormones. Minerals leached. Calcium borrowed without asking. Your body makes a baby and then keeps making demands long after the baby is out of you. Motherhood is a loan you can never repay, and the interest is your own soft tissue, your own enamel, your own bones.
She leans closer to the mirror. The mirror is filmed with mist and fingerprints, a whole family’s evidence. In the harsh bathroom light, her face looks thin and damp, like someone inhaling cold air. No edges. No finish. Her eyes are there, technically. Everything else feels temporary. Water vapor pretending to be a person. She turns on the faucet and uses her hands to rub and rinse the mess down the drain.
“Mom!” again, closer now. “He’s touching my stuff!”
She closes her mouth around the loose tooth as if she can hold it in place by sheer will. She wipes her hands on a towel that smells like mildew and bubblegum toothpaste, opens the door, and steps back into the day.
The house is its own habitat, with noise moving through halls like wind. A cereal bowl clatters in the sink. A child runs past without looking at her, the blur of a body in pajamas, sticky-footed, carrying a toy too big for his hands. The youngest is in the living room, crying because crying is sometimes the only language that gets immediate translation.
In the kitchen, another child–her oldest, or at least the one who speaks the most like a person–sits at the table with his workbook open and pencil gripped too hard, jaw clenched, as if the math is personally disrespectful.
“I can’t do it,” he says, not looking up. “It’s stupid.”
“It’s not stupid,” she says, hearing her own voice come out wrong–thin, too breathy. “It’s just . . . hard. Show me.”
“Mom,” another voice sings from the hallway, a long, bored, needing sound. “I’m hungry.”
“You’re always hungry,” she says, and it’s supposed to be a joke, but it lands sharp. The child’s face pinches. Her own chest flinches with guilt so immediately it’s almost physical.
She reaches for the banana bunch and half of them are gone, replaced by the brown stubs of stems. Later, she’ll reach for the bread and it’ll be the heel. She’ll reach for the peanut butter and it’ll be empty. The pantry holds its own kind of cruelty.
As she turns back toward the table, the loose tooth gives another small shift, a cold tremor. She tastes metal and her stomach tightens.
Not now, she thinks at her body, as if it’s a disobedient child too. Not now. She closes her eyes, willing it to oblige.
The baby cries harder. The oldest pushes the workbook toward her, demanding evidence that she has a brain and can solve things.
She leans over the paper. The numbers swim. Her own head feels full of cotton. The air in the house presses in on her, warm and stale. She thinks of how she used to read whole novels in a day, how she used to know the names of trees, the constellations. How she used to have teeth that did not threaten to abandon her.
She hears herself say, “Okay,” and then, “Just a second,” and then, “Please stop,” and then, “Let me finish this,” but the day keeps splitting into smaller pieces, and every piece is being handed to her, and none of them fit.
The baby is pulled against her hip now, weight and warmth, small hands grabbing at her shirt collar. The baby’s cheek is damp. Her shoulder begins to ache from the constant tilt of her posture, the way her body has reshaped itself into a rack of offerings.
“Mom, where’s my–”
“Mom, he–”
“Mom, look–”
“Mom, can I–”
She is the door everyone walks through.
In the bathroom again, she locks the door out of reflex, as if the thin latch could keep the world from her. She stares at herself. The mirror shows a woman with hair pulled into a knot that has given up. The skin under her eyes is bruised with fatigue. Her mouth looks too soft, too worn. She opens it.
The loose tooth is more than loose now. It’s a confession. It wants to run.
She touches it with a fingertip, very gently.
It moves.
A sound escapes her–small, animal, not quite a sob. She grips the sink, leans forward. The breath comes shallow. She thinks about calling the dentist and then thinks about the appointment, the paperwork, the cost, the babysitter, the drive, the shame of explaining this to a stranger with gloves.
She thinks of the way pregnancy is spoken of like magic, as if bodies are enchanted, as if it’s all glowing skin and holy softness. No one talks about the way motherhood is an extraction, a constant mining. They don’t mention the cavities blooming under the gumline, the teeth loosening as though they’ve grown tired of holding.
She spits again. This time the tooth falls out.
It drops into the sink with a hard little click, white and wet. A pebble. A small bone. The thing that once helped her chew and speak and smile.
She stares at it, stunned.
For a moment she expects her body to apologize. To reverse. To take it back.
Instead, she feels the empty socket pulse, a tender cavern. She tastes blood, bright and familiar. When she smiles, the gap smiles back at her. She lifts her hand to cover her mouth, embarrassed, as if the children will see the absence through the hallway.
“Mom?” a voice comes from the other side of the door, soft now. The oldest. “Are you okay?”
She swallows. Her throat aches. Her voice is not hers when she says, “Yes. Just–yes.”
A pause and then, "Can you help me with the math?"
The world does not stop for tooth loss. The world does not stop for grief. The world . . . it just . . . does not stop.
She opens the door and walks back into herself the best she can.
All day, interruptions keep landing on her like small stones. A spilled cup. A scraped knee. A missing shoe. A disagreement that becomes a war. A child who needs a signature, a snack, a hug, a witness. She keeps nodding, keeps answering, keeps touching, keeps being available.
Her mouth feels wrong. Her tongue keeps drifting toward the gap, unable to accept the new geography. The empty space is a kind of silence she can’t stop listening to.
By late afternoon, the light slants through the windows and makes dust visible. The house looks both lived-in and abandoned, like someone left in a hurry and never returned. She stands at the sink rinsing sippy cups and thinks I am evaporating. I am becoming steam.
Her oldest is arguing about screen time. Her second is crying because her favorite shirt is dirty. The third is dragging toys into the hallway like offerings to the God of Chaos. The baby is on the floor chewing on something she can’t identify.
“Spit it out,” she says automatically dropping to all fours.
The baby grins, all gums and delight. She kneels, fishes out a rubbery piece of something, wipes it on her own jeans. Her knees ache. She rises too fast and the room tilts.
Somewhere inside her, a thin string snaps, not like a scream but a gentle internal unhooking. The final thread that was holding her upright.
She walks to the back door without thinking. She turns the knob and steps outside.
The air is colder than the house, and it meets her face with relief. The yard is a patchwork of late-season exhaustion: brittle grass, bare branches, a few stubborn weeds clinging to the edges of the garden beds. The garden is the only place that doesn’t ask her to perform. It is the only place where the work has a visible outcome that isn’t immediately undone, asking to be done again.
She stands there, breathing. The sky is pale and wide. For a moment she can hear her own pulse. For a moment she can feel the weight of her body in her bones.
Everything hurts.
A child calls her name from inside. The sound muffles through the glass.
She doesn’t answer.
She walks to the raised bed along the fence, the one she built with her own hands one spring when she still believed she could become someone. The soil is dark. Damp. Full of last year’s roots. She kneels at the edge of it and presses her palm into the earth. It’s cool, alive. It doesn’t care about her missing tooth. It doesn’t care about her unkempt hair or her undone dishes, all the chores she never seems to finish. It only knows the language of returning.
Something in her loosens at the feel of it.
She slides one knee into the bed, then the other, careful not to crush the sleeping stems. The soil softens under her weight, forgiving. She sits back on her heels. Her hands dig in as if she’s searching for something she buried.
The air around her shifts. Not in a supernatural, lightning way. In a way so subtle she almost misses the world getting quieter, the garden holding its breath.
She leans forward and lowers herself down, chest against the soil. The smell of minerals, rot, old sweetness rises. She presses her cheek into it, filling her face and her hair with dirt. She does not care.
She closes her eyes.
And because the earth is the only thing that has held her without taking, her body begins to remember how to be held.
She can’t explain it better than that. The garden doesn’t fix her. It doesn’t magically replace what’s gone. But it does something to the part of her that keeps trying to leave.
It calls her back.
She feels the weight of her bones, anchored. She feels the ache in her jaw, the raw socket, and instead of panicking, she lets it be a truth. Or a cost. A place where something was taken. She lets grief have its own shape. She understands that grief is a hole that was once whole.
Above her, the light changes as the wind moves through the branches. Somewhere, a crow calls once, then goes quiet.
In the house, someone cries her name. The sound is farther now. Less urgent. As if the children have sensed that she is temporarily unreachable, that she has crawled into the only place where she is not a door. She stays there long enough for her thoughts to stop skittering. Long enough for her breath to slow. Long enough for the damp cool to seep into her skin and make her feel faintly solid again.
She opens her mouth and tastes soil on her lips, a little blood still lingering. She thinks of the tooth sitting in the sink like a tiny white casualty. She thinks of the way her body gave itself away, piece by piece, without asking permission.
“Okay,” she whispers into the dirt, not to anyone but herself. “Okay.”
When she finally pushes herself up, her palms are dark. Her knees are stained. The front of her shirt is smeared with earth. She looks feral and undone, like someone who has crawled out of a flood.
But her eyes feel clearer. Her skin feels less thin.
She stands and brushes off her clothes, though the dirt clings. Good. Let it cling. Let there be evidence that she touched something real.
She walks back to the door.
Inside, the house is still loud. Still hungry. Still full of need. But when the youngest runs to her and grabs her leg, she doesn’t feel herself evaporate. When the oldest asks her to check the homework again, she doesn’t feel the ceiling closing in. When the baby reaches up, arms out, she lifts him without resentment.
Her mouth aches. The gap is still there. The day hasn’t gotten easier.
But she is here.
And for now, that is a kind of revival.
In the bathroom later, she looks at her reflection again. Dirt in her hair. A smear across her cheek. A missing tooth she can’t hide.
No one had said a word about any of it.
No one had noticed.
She turns off the light and walks back into the noise, carrying the scent of soil with her like a prayer.
Azia Archer
She is rinsing her mouth when the first tooth slips loose.
There isn’t pain at first, just that soft, traitorous shift, the sensation of something giving up. She presses her tongue against the back molar and feels its wobble, a door on a hinge that shouldn’t exist. Her stomach drops.
She spits and watches a ribbon of pink thread into the basin. The sink is full of half-used toothpaste, remnants of glitter.
“Mom!” someone yells, already offended by her absence.
She grips the counter and breathes through her nose. The tooth is still attached. It’s only threatening. It’s always something. She has been warned and prophesied at all hours of the day for years now.
Pregnancy did this, they said. Hormones. Minerals leached. Calcium borrowed without asking. Your body makes a baby and then keeps making demands long after the baby is out of you. Motherhood is a loan you can never repay, and the interest is your own soft tissue, your own enamel, your own bones.
She leans closer to the mirror. The mirror is filmed with mist and fingerprints, a whole family’s evidence. In the harsh bathroom light, her face looks thin and damp, like someone inhaling cold air. No edges. No finish. Her eyes are there, technically. Everything else feels temporary. Water vapor pretending to be a person. She turns on the faucet and uses her hands to rub and rinse the mess down the drain.
“Mom!” again, closer now. “He’s touching my stuff!”
She closes her mouth around the loose tooth as if she can hold it in place by sheer will. She wipes her hands on a towel that smells like mildew and bubblegum toothpaste, opens the door, and steps back into the day.
The house is its own habitat, with noise moving through halls like wind. A cereal bowl clatters in the sink. A child runs past without looking at her, the blur of a body in pajamas, sticky-footed, carrying a toy too big for his hands. The youngest is in the living room, crying because crying is sometimes the only language that gets immediate translation.
In the kitchen, another child–her oldest, or at least the one who speaks the most like a person–sits at the table with his workbook open and pencil gripped too hard, jaw clenched, as if the math is personally disrespectful.
“I can’t do it,” he says, not looking up. “It’s stupid.”
“It’s not stupid,” she says, hearing her own voice come out wrong–thin, too breathy. “It’s just . . . hard. Show me.”
“Mom,” another voice sings from the hallway, a long, bored, needing sound. “I’m hungry.”
“You’re always hungry,” she says, and it’s supposed to be a joke, but it lands sharp. The child’s face pinches. Her own chest flinches with guilt so immediately it’s almost physical.
She reaches for the banana bunch and half of them are gone, replaced by the brown stubs of stems. Later, she’ll reach for the bread and it’ll be the heel. She’ll reach for the peanut butter and it’ll be empty. The pantry holds its own kind of cruelty.
As she turns back toward the table, the loose tooth gives another small shift, a cold tremor. She tastes metal and her stomach tightens.
Not now, she thinks at her body, as if it’s a disobedient child too. Not now. She closes her eyes, willing it to oblige.
The baby cries harder. The oldest pushes the workbook toward her, demanding evidence that she has a brain and can solve things.
She leans over the paper. The numbers swim. Her own head feels full of cotton. The air in the house presses in on her, warm and stale. She thinks of how she used to read whole novels in a day, how she used to know the names of trees, the constellations. How she used to have teeth that did not threaten to abandon her.
She hears herself say, “Okay,” and then, “Just a second,” and then, “Please stop,” and then, “Let me finish this,” but the day keeps splitting into smaller pieces, and every piece is being handed to her, and none of them fit.
The baby is pulled against her hip now, weight and warmth, small hands grabbing at her shirt collar. The baby’s cheek is damp. Her shoulder begins to ache from the constant tilt of her posture, the way her body has reshaped itself into a rack of offerings.
“Mom, where’s my–”
“Mom, he–”
“Mom, look–”
“Mom, can I–”
She is the door everyone walks through.
In the bathroom again, she locks the door out of reflex, as if the thin latch could keep the world from her. She stares at herself. The mirror shows a woman with hair pulled into a knot that has given up. The skin under her eyes is bruised with fatigue. Her mouth looks too soft, too worn. She opens it.
The loose tooth is more than loose now. It’s a confession. It wants to run.
She touches it with a fingertip, very gently.
It moves.
A sound escapes her–small, animal, not quite a sob. She grips the sink, leans forward. The breath comes shallow. She thinks about calling the dentist and then thinks about the appointment, the paperwork, the cost, the babysitter, the drive, the shame of explaining this to a stranger with gloves.
She thinks of the way pregnancy is spoken of like magic, as if bodies are enchanted, as if it’s all glowing skin and holy softness. No one talks about the way motherhood is an extraction, a constant mining. They don’t mention the cavities blooming under the gumline, the teeth loosening as though they’ve grown tired of holding.
She spits again. This time the tooth falls out.
It drops into the sink with a hard little click, white and wet. A pebble. A small bone. The thing that once helped her chew and speak and smile.
She stares at it, stunned.
For a moment she expects her body to apologize. To reverse. To take it back.
Instead, she feels the empty socket pulse, a tender cavern. She tastes blood, bright and familiar. When she smiles, the gap smiles back at her. She lifts her hand to cover her mouth, embarrassed, as if the children will see the absence through the hallway.
“Mom?” a voice comes from the other side of the door, soft now. The oldest. “Are you okay?”
She swallows. Her throat aches. Her voice is not hers when she says, “Yes. Just–yes.”
A pause and then, "Can you help me with the math?"
The world does not stop for tooth loss. The world does not stop for grief. The world . . . it just . . . does not stop.
She opens the door and walks back into herself the best she can.
All day, interruptions keep landing on her like small stones. A spilled cup. A scraped knee. A missing shoe. A disagreement that becomes a war. A child who needs a signature, a snack, a hug, a witness. She keeps nodding, keeps answering, keeps touching, keeps being available.
Her mouth feels wrong. Her tongue keeps drifting toward the gap, unable to accept the new geography. The empty space is a kind of silence she can’t stop listening to.
By late afternoon, the light slants through the windows and makes dust visible. The house looks both lived-in and abandoned, like someone left in a hurry and never returned. She stands at the sink rinsing sippy cups and thinks I am evaporating. I am becoming steam.
Her oldest is arguing about screen time. Her second is crying because her favorite shirt is dirty. The third is dragging toys into the hallway like offerings to the God of Chaos. The baby is on the floor chewing on something she can’t identify.
“Spit it out,” she says automatically dropping to all fours.
The baby grins, all gums and delight. She kneels, fishes out a rubbery piece of something, wipes it on her own jeans. Her knees ache. She rises too fast and the room tilts.
Somewhere inside her, a thin string snaps, not like a scream but a gentle internal unhooking. The final thread that was holding her upright.
She walks to the back door without thinking. She turns the knob and steps outside.
The air is colder than the house, and it meets her face with relief. The yard is a patchwork of late-season exhaustion: brittle grass, bare branches, a few stubborn weeds clinging to the edges of the garden beds. The garden is the only place that doesn’t ask her to perform. It is the only place where the work has a visible outcome that isn’t immediately undone, asking to be done again.
She stands there, breathing. The sky is pale and wide. For a moment she can hear her own pulse. For a moment she can feel the weight of her body in her bones.
Everything hurts.
A child calls her name from inside. The sound muffles through the glass.
She doesn’t answer.
She walks to the raised bed along the fence, the one she built with her own hands one spring when she still believed she could become someone. The soil is dark. Damp. Full of last year’s roots. She kneels at the edge of it and presses her palm into the earth. It’s cool, alive. It doesn’t care about her missing tooth. It doesn’t care about her unkempt hair or her undone dishes, all the chores she never seems to finish. It only knows the language of returning.
Something in her loosens at the feel of it.
She slides one knee into the bed, then the other, careful not to crush the sleeping stems. The soil softens under her weight, forgiving. She sits back on her heels. Her hands dig in as if she’s searching for something she buried.
The air around her shifts. Not in a supernatural, lightning way. In a way so subtle she almost misses the world getting quieter, the garden holding its breath.
She leans forward and lowers herself down, chest against the soil. The smell of minerals, rot, old sweetness rises. She presses her cheek into it, filling her face and her hair with dirt. She does not care.
She closes her eyes.
And because the earth is the only thing that has held her without taking, her body begins to remember how to be held.
She can’t explain it better than that. The garden doesn’t fix her. It doesn’t magically replace what’s gone. But it does something to the part of her that keeps trying to leave.
It calls her back.
She feels the weight of her bones, anchored. She feels the ache in her jaw, the raw socket, and instead of panicking, she lets it be a truth. Or a cost. A place where something was taken. She lets grief have its own shape. She understands that grief is a hole that was once whole.
Above her, the light changes as the wind moves through the branches. Somewhere, a crow calls once, then goes quiet.
In the house, someone cries her name. The sound is farther now. Less urgent. As if the children have sensed that she is temporarily unreachable, that she has crawled into the only place where she is not a door. She stays there long enough for her thoughts to stop skittering. Long enough for her breath to slow. Long enough for the damp cool to seep into her skin and make her feel faintly solid again.
She opens her mouth and tastes soil on her lips, a little blood still lingering. She thinks of the tooth sitting in the sink like a tiny white casualty. She thinks of the way her body gave itself away, piece by piece, without asking permission.
“Okay,” she whispers into the dirt, not to anyone but herself. “Okay.”
When she finally pushes herself up, her palms are dark. Her knees are stained. The front of her shirt is smeared with earth. She looks feral and undone, like someone who has crawled out of a flood.
But her eyes feel clearer. Her skin feels less thin.
She stands and brushes off her clothes, though the dirt clings. Good. Let it cling. Let there be evidence that she touched something real.
She walks back to the door.
Inside, the house is still loud. Still hungry. Still full of need. But when the youngest runs to her and grabs her leg, she doesn’t feel herself evaporate. When the oldest asks her to check the homework again, she doesn’t feel the ceiling closing in. When the baby reaches up, arms out, she lifts him without resentment.
Her mouth aches. The gap is still there. The day hasn’t gotten easier.
But she is here.
And for now, that is a kind of revival.
In the bathroom later, she looks at her reflection again. Dirt in her hair. A smear across her cheek. A missing tooth she can’t hide.
No one had said a word about any of it.
No one had noticed.
She turns off the light and walks back into the noise, carrying the scent of soil with her like a prayer.