“The Angel of Teeth”
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Fiction. Published in Surely Magazine, 2022.
Image: from the notebook

November 2021: I was in Kyiv at the ballet in a dark mood. Sitting in a stiff velvet seat. L has suggested the seat was the cause of my dark mood. Couldn’t concentrate on Swan Lake, anyway. The phrase, “the angel of teeth,” got in my head somehow. I worked it over like a piece of gum. Around the second act I started feeling lucky to have received this string of words from wherever strings of words come from. It had served to occupy my thoughts, kept me from bolting out of the theatre. I had come around to the idea that it might make a good title for something. So I put it in a document I have that’s called “titles in search of a story.” A couple months later, my friend A, a musician, asked me if I might string together some words for some cowboy music he wanted to make. So I started thinking about the Angel of Teeth as a character. The story that Surely Magazine was kind enough to publish is the result.