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Jack smiles only as often as he is unaware that he smiles, as often as keen life-joy rises cleanly within him and there is not reflected reminder in glass or water or the eyes of some human creature. Jack has had all of the usual orthodontic work, but his
father has left him with only fourteen upper teeth. Genetic, it is as merciless an inheritance as if received from a fist. Jack has no lateral incisors; years of springs and steel wire have occluded the gaps left by the missing dentition. It is Jack’s greater misfortune that his canines, even for canines, are particularly fang-like, as
now they stab downward from his gums, cruel and predatory, one to the side of each front tooth. His lamprey mouth is framed by lips bright and corpulent; they lay one upon the other like coital leeches, gravid and purple with suck. Jack smiles rarely.
He looks at her now. Lucy. Jack likes nothing so much as a pair of well-turned clavicles, unless it is the vital delicacy of vein and windpipe they cradle. He is covetous of the life that beats through the pale skin in the great vein of her throat, as if
pumped there from the eternal, ephemeral heart of a hummingbird. It is the life that springs always from nothing, and presumes upon no other life to sustain itself. It is not the life that beats within Jack; he does not feel that vital thrum. When the life-joy does rise thrumming within him, it is because he has usurped, sucked, siphoned,
raptured it away from another. He looks now to Lucy and opens his hagfish mouth at her. The girl recoils visibly and pales, the life-pulse stilled for a heartbeat within her. Later, when she is gone, Jack smiles. |