Squid Teeth – Reactor

A woman talented in the art of spinning–creating pottery by manipulating clay in her mouth–longs to become the best, but wonders if it is worth the sacrifices she must make…

Novelette | 9,170 words

The world is full of gatekeepers. Eventually, you have to kiss the ring, spit shine the boot. I came to Gyle for the access. What happened there changed me.

You know most of this. You lived it with me. But repeating a story is a lot like spinning a plate. It can act as an incantation.

Spinning Plates

Where I grew up, kids started spinning plates in preschool. We literally cut our teeth on the process. It was a skill, but it was also a talent. There was this kid in second grade who spit out still-wet lumps of clay, the ink designs so messy they stained his whole face. It looked like he’d been eating black mud from the bottom of an oil field. Some kids were good but hid their finished products. Their parents had taught them that spinning was shameful. My plates were always shaped just right: three-inch discs splattered in a messy rainbow of colors.

By high school, most people gave it up. Spinning wasn’t a practical career choice. In the way that small children forget imaginary friends, they forgot how to make plates with their mouths. Not me. Tenth grade was when I realized I loved spinning more than anything else.

In some towns, they dragged religion into it. But in Lincoln, Nebraska, we learned that humans didn’t evolve to spin. Like sentience, it was a happy accident. My biology teacher lectured about it in class. “Consider the discovery of bread,” he said. “People had first to smash the wheat, then water it, then abandon the paste in the sun, turning it to dough. It’s not an intuitive process. No cave dweller ever glanced upon a field of grain in 8,000 BC and said: I feel like pumpernickel today!”

The first step in the process is choosing the clay. The fancy stuff comes from Mesopotamia, but there are hundreds of varieties that fit practically any budget. I’ve always preferred sandy clay. It’s got a nice sheen to it once it cooks. Start with a cookie-dough-sized ball of the stuff. Warm it with your hands until the edges soften. Then roll it with your tongue until it’s moist. The content of salivary excretion depends on diet and genetics. Some peoples’ glands excrete almost no caffeine byproducts or nitrogenous wastes, the very chemicals that make plates interesting My glands have always been hyperproductive. Try this at home right now. Imagine chocolate or a steak or, for me, sandy clay. That salivary fluid just released from your glands isn’t water. It’s a complex chemical compound that gives spun plates their specific sheen.

Spinning the clay is a skill. Your tongue must manipulate the material along the roof of your mouth, rotating it slowly, without swallowing clay, until it becomes a disc. This takes an indefinite amount of time. Maybe twenty minutes, maybe two days. Depends on the clay and on you. Once it’s done, your material will feel perfectly round and flat. It should be soft to the touch, but not yielding.

The human ink sack is a tiny tissue balloon capped by a sphincter muscle in the back left cheek of most people’s mouths. Though ancient writing all the way back to Greece describes men who could spit winecolored fluids, human ink sacks weren’t medically recognized as ink-bearing organs until about two hundred years ago. Before that, people equated them with appendixes. Not everyone is born with them, and in their inevitable disuse, they atrophy, sometimes even shriveling up and falling off.

It’s a mystery, how they got there. Some people think our DNA had already fused with cephalopod DNA at the time our ancestors crawled out from the oceans. These sophisticated sea creatures with lobed brains and fingerlike tentacles were our long-lost evolutionary cousins. Some people think it’s newer than that—a mutation caused by environmental pollution—microplastics and the like. Some people, believing they’re an abomination, have their ink sacks removed at birth.

The quality of excretions is determined by mood and ability. Most people can only paint in dark maroon. It takes tongue muscle extensive hyphae and arduous practice to manipulate the sack’s excretions to an ultrafine spray while also spinning the plate. The colors are determined by separate salivary emulsions in the parotid gland way in the back of your throat. Dopamine makes blue. Serotonin makes red. Gaba’s yellow. Other colors, like indigo and the extremely rare pearlescent are generated by an unknown confluence of chemicals. In the entire history of spinning, only a handful of people have been able to spin true pearlescence.

There’s this thing called the zone. When at the height of their powers, spinners peak in a way that’s orgasmic. They’re startled when they pull plates from their mouths that are more beautiful than they’d ever dared hope to spin. But this is rare. Once or twice in a professional career, if ever.

Professional spinners are often born with wider, longer palates. The long hours they spend spinning plates coax accessory structures (muscles, ligaments, and even the bones to which they’re attached) into accommodating larger diameters. This in turn lengthens and widens spinners’ mouths, giving us what so many people call an equine, or horselike, appearance. A novice might produce a one-inch plate with jagged edges. A master spinner working thirty or more years might produce a plate with a seven-inch diameter. Their tongues have become so adept, their mouths so large, that their process—tongue, ink sack, and roof of mouth—appears like an upside-down record player.

After coloring and shaping a plate, a skilled spinner adds a design. This is especially difficult, as the ink sack must be encouraged, via use, to develop hair-thin filaments called hyphae. It takes years to grow these muscular, manipulable hyphae (sometimes as many as thirty). Most people never get to that point. It’s not just the growing of the hyphae that’s tough; it’s developing the corresponding neural network to move them independently that drives most greenhorns into giving up.

The spinners who do manage it use these hyphae to write words so small observers need a magnifying glass. Others draw pictures. Others make symbols that appear to be from a dead or as-yet-to-exist culture. Over painstaking college and graduate-school years, I learned this hardest aspect of my craft: how to inscribe readable designs using my small, nascent hyphae.

All this done, a spinner carefully removes the plate from their mouth, making sure not to smear the design, and allows it to dry. The discrete chemicals of the human mouth act as both sealant and dehydrator. The clay should take less than an hour to dry and set, though its adorning ink may take longer.

Eras are cyclical. Ten years ago, plate spinners were celebrated in popular culture. Now, people call us horse-faced heretics. Spinning is banned in half the public schools. Our work frightens them. They think it’s satanic, or else just extremely weird.

Nobody wants a weird kid.

For most of history, spinners worked independently. Then along came the Global Consortium of Professional Spinners, which began certifying especially worthy artists, thereby assuring their careers. It became every spinner’s dream to receive certification.

Plenty of spinners who didn’t get certified complained. They claimed that the Consortium favored mainstream work, sidelining what was actually unique; sentencing the real artists to obscurity. It never occurred to me to worry about that kind of thing. I figured their rules were like a haiku. Even following their guidelines on thickness and material, I still had plenty of room to mess around and make it mine.

The Artist

I was almost thirty and hadn’t given up. My apartment was above a bus driver’s garage. I worked at Trader Joe’s to pay my rent. My high school friends were married and had careers and babies. They posted the evidence on social media: This is my awesome job. This is my baby. I reproduced! Look at me, I reproduced! When we all went out to the fancy restaurants they picked, I ordered the burger, put twenty dollars on my plate, and left before the bill came.

They felt sorry for me, my friends. They tried to fix me up with dates. They suggested night classes in bartending or nursing or . . . a shrink? I was a project. Something to be fixed. Someone to be cared for, as I clearly did not know how to care for myself.

I had this recurring nightmare that was almost funny. I dreamed I was back in high school. Everyone was taking a test I hadn’t studied for. I tried to explain that my path wasn’t the same, that their test was irrelevant, but my mouth was too full of clay to talk. I got an F, my page blank except for the first letter of my first name: G. Everyone else, cheerful and happy, moved on to the next thing and I stayed in the empty classroom, pulling a dull green plate with angry, nonsense scribble from my mouth and setting it in front of me, only no one was there to see it. No one was there to know I’d made something, after all.

My apartment served as my studio. I kept the clay in plastic buckets, displayed the plates on shelves, some outward, some filed like library books. I showed them at the Broadway Street Farmers’ Market and wrote often to galleries in New York and Los Angeles, hoping to be discovered. At night I listened to Iggy Pop and spun, the result always new and unexpected. One plate was jagged, another smooth. Upon one, the writing was placid, upon the other, it appeared carved. I sold some pieces, not enough.

I cried. I went to a shrink who confessed that she, too, was a spinner, but she’d given it up. She told me that I should give it up, too. I’d be happier once I made the choice. Sitting on a shitty beige couch in a rented room on Fletcher Avenue, she said: “We’re all artists on the inside. Your problem is that you need external validation. I’m cured of that and I can cure you, too. I only spin plates for myself. I don’t corrupt that with commerce. That’s the secret to real fulfillment.” She said this with her jaw locked, her face an unwitting rictus of rage, her shelves riddled with crappy, amateur plates.

I stopped seeing her. I considered bartending school.

My mom got sick. It happened fast, and then slow. She inhabited a sickbed for almost a year. When I visited, my father would open the door, then make himself scarce, using the time as a welcome break from her sickbed.

“When are you coming back?” she typically asked as soon as I arrived, and before I ever got the chance to sit on her soft, messy bed.

“Soon,” I said. Then she nervously made small talk while high on painkillers, as if we had not known each other for thirty years. As if I were someone who needed to be entertained.

Over the months, she got mad at me. I didn’t visit enough. She was lonely; she needed me. Why couldn’t I move back home? What was keeping me? Certainly not that sad apartment with the cot bed. Every time, she’d show me some new bruise the medicine had given her, or the unhealed gape in her spine from a particularly rough surgery, that periodically needed to be debrided. I felt sick with guilt. Soaked and heavy with it. I visited less. I stopped spinning. I sat alone in my garage apartment, letting the phone ring. If it was her, I didn’t want to talk. If it was a friend, I didn’t deserve to go out or have fun.

She died without me.

Months later, my father came to me. He announced that it was time I grew up. I needed to move on, get a real job, leave the literal garage. He’d help out if I did that. I could move back home. My mom’s old ground floor sickroom could be converted to a guest room.

“Listen,” he said. “Dreams don’t come true. Part of growing up is learning that. This is for your own good. If you don’t give up spinning, we’re through. No more help.”

Did I mention he paid half my rent? Or was that too humiliating to admit until just now?

I brokered a deal. I got down on my knees and literally begged: “Please. Let me have one more year.”

I didn’t go to bartending school. Instead, I worked harder, stayed up later, pushing myself until my mouth bled and my teeth wiggled, loose. I cried while I worked. I grieved. I thought about my mother. Worried at our former conversations and interactions like a math problem. Now in the loneliness of my garage, where my bus driver landlord referred to me as the kook, I knew why she’d acted the way she had.

I thought about her life, quiet and without reward. I thought about how she’d raised me, mostly alone because back then it had been women’s work. I thought about how smart she’d been, so different from other people. She’d possessed a quiet, barbed humor. I thought about the way we’d shared blankets in front of the television at night when I’d lived there, our feet touching. I thought of her smell and her warmth. When she got sick, my dad had been a dad about it. He’d done the necessary parts and shied from the emotional aspect, the sitting and caretaking. I’d done the same.

She’d wanted me to tell her that I loved her. That she’d done good. That she was good. She’d wanted to be seen and understood by the person best positioned to see and understand her. My heart, already broken, had felt as if it were leaking out: had she imagined, in her last breath, that I didn’t love her?

I was thinking about this one night, six months after she died. Her life had passed her by, and now my life would pass me by, and neither of us would ever be seen for the people we were, for what we had inside of us. I was thinking this, and in my mind’s eye, I imagined the woman I would one day become. Successful, important: a professional spinner who looked like me, but also like my mother. I could see this woman like she was real. She was serious. Maybe too serious. Her ink sack was so thick with muscle that it wriggled.

Suddenly, a new color emerged. My plate was pearlescent.

I Wasn’t Bona Fide

Three years later, my work had made it into a handful of local Midwest galleries. I’d moved to Omaha. My dad, begrudgingly, backed off. He’d remarried. I liked the wife. Still, it wasn’t home anymore. It was a place I visited.

My work had been positively received. I had a small but passionate set of fans. But even with the pearlescence (which, as far as I knew, only a dozen or so other spinners in the world could render), I wasn’t breaking through to the big time like I’d hoped, and like my agent assumed I would. Colleagues of lesser ability got invited to residencies in Florence; they sold their art to serious collectors for five and six figures.

My agent pointed out that many of these colleagues lived in big cities and rubbed elbows with the Professional Consortium of Spinners. They’d received certification, their work displayed with the Consortium’s imprimatur—a cute squid-like creature with cheerful doe eyes. “Stop taking this so personally,” my agent told me. “It’s not like these buyers are art experts. All they want is a piece they can brag about that outpaces inflation. They see that certification and they know their wallets are safe.”

I was feeling stuck, unsure how to break out to the next level, get shown in a fancy gallery or teach at a residency. My agent suggested that I apply to Gyle. “They have all the Consortium connections,” she told me. “Your work’s fantastic, but you need their validation. That’s the secret of art. It’s the emperor’s new clothes, only sometimes the emperor is genuinely well-dressed.”

“Which am I?” I asked.

“You’re the one with the invisible clothes that are real clothes that only discerning people can see,” she said.

“I’m having a hard time picturing it.”

“Ha-ha. Look, apply. Maybe you’ll luck out get certified. They might even give you tooth redaction surgery. I know Gyle’s an approved center for that.”

I’d never heard of the procedure and thought she was joking. “Ha-ha,” I said.

Gyle

Gyle, a corporate retreat and wellness center in Northern California, was established by a tech billionaire named Dan Prentice. One weekend of every year, he and his wife invited the Consortium of Professional Spinners to convene with a group of hand-selected emerging spinners for talks, meals, and readings. From this gathering, careers were made.

In interviews, Prentice explained his retreat: “I noticed the art I was seeing was spun mostly by wealthy white men. It’s excellent, don’t get me wrong. Classic, obviously. But spinning should not be limited to a gender, nor should it be the sole provenance of the children of privilege. This retreat is a fast-track scholarship for those spinners who’d otherwise live in obscurity.”

The weekend wasn’t a wholly altruistic endeavor. Artists who signed with Prentice’s company agreed to cut Gyle a 25 percent commission.

The application required three recommendations, two essays, and several three-dimensional photos of my best work. I chose two pearlescents and another that was dark brown swirls with jagged edges and hieroglyphs—a kind of language I’d invented to describe my relationship with my mother: girls in dresses, wounds, knotted hair, steaming pots, a sickbed, a plate within a plate within a mouth.

I’d heard that the retreat was hierarchical. Emerging artists served dinner to the established ones. Though a series of exercises, these eager spinners were weeded out until only five winners were chosen. A week later, Gyle threw a ball for these five. Gowns and tuxes and champagne. Guests included the top galley owners and art collectors in the world. They often bought works on the spot, sometimes for as much as seven figures.

I knew my work was good. But I was still surprised when I received an invitation. I hadn’t been sure until right then that the fancy, important people knew it was good.

The road to Gyle wound through thick redwood forest. I drove slowly through heavy rain in my rental car, headlights shining though it was still daytime. As I approached the house, I remembered a story I’d heard about Ceauşescu’s castle in Romania. It’s so big that it forges its own perspective from the surrounding landscape. Observers reach a vantage locus where the castle stops getting larger as they approach, and appears to get smaller instead. I encountered this with Gyle. It was big, and then got smaller, and then large again. Too big to comprehend.

The entrance was a good quarter mile from the parking lot. I hadn’t brought an umbrella, so I ran with my luggage, leaving my plate samples in the car, stepping carefully along a waterlogged path. Wriggling earthworms had risen, along with strange, pale creatures that swam like jellyfish, contracting their bodies into bell shapes and squeezing. It was curious, but with the rain, I was running too fast to look closely.

Once I was inside, an attendant handed me a plush, green towel. It was then that I noticed the luminaries in the crowd. By the grand staircase was Lewiston Ford, a trailblazer in plate writing, chatting with Manny Ortega and Frida Shulz. Under the chandelier were the Consortium board members, laughing with Dan Prentice. Everywhere I looked, I recognized the face of someone chosen and beloved for their work. This was not necessarily work that I loved. Indeed, some of it was work I didn’t like. But that didn’t matter. What mattered, what brought tears to my eyes, was that I was in the room. At last, I was in the room.

An attendant took my towel and exchanged it for a full champagne flute. Dan Prentice’s wife appeared at the top of the stairs. I’d read an article about her, on why she’d become so obsessed with spinning and had directed her husband toward investing in that art: when she was young, her parents had her ink sack surgically removed. I could see, even from a distance, that her underjaw lacked the tell-tale, froggish lump.

She was in her sixties, with white hair and a flowing silk dress. She held her arms open like a priestess. “Welcome to Gyle,” she said. “Established artists, thank you! The check’s in the mail!” They laughed. The rest of us tittered, tense and bewildered.

Then, affecting the semblance of utter exhaustion—someone’s who’s just gone through an incredible trial on behalf of humanity and would like everyone to know and congratulate her—she addressed the rest of us. “Emerging artists, from an applicant pool of eighteen thousand, you fifty have been chosen!”

She waited. I realized she expected us to clap. So I did. I started it. Everybody else chimed in. She noticed me and smiled. That smile felt like sunshine. “I’ve been doing this for years now, and you’re the best class of emerging artists we’ve ever had.”

She looked at us all then, we potential professional artists: young and old and fat and thin and white and Black and everything in between.

“I’ve read your essays. I’ve judged your work. You’re dreamers, every one of you.”

I felt something in my chest. A pain or a joy— I can’t say.

“Few people in life have a calling. You have that. You’re here to make your dreams come true,” she said.

Please, God, I thought. Please let me have this.

Tour

Once the rain thinned, staff handed out umbrellas and gave us a tour of the grounds. Cottages dotted the landscape. These, we were told, were for the very best spinners, who were offered residencies. Possibly, one of us would receive a spot.

Then we came to a high boardwalk overlooking crashing waves. More of those same creatures wriggled, pale against the stained, wet wood. I could see their lidless black eyes. “Rough waters,” our guide told us. “We get a lot of rogue waves and this is the season that these little guys get stranded. You’ll notice some of them are the nautilus indigenous to the northern Pacific.”

 Sea creatures! They were mollusks, clams, mussels, and small cephalopods, the majority of which had slurked out from their shells. Long tentacles searched for purchase or shelter, blind and exposed. Those in the deeper puddles cupped their bodies into bells, or else blasted water through muscular little tubes, and swam.

By accident, the woman ahead of me stepped on an especially large nautilus. Without its spiral house it appeared fetal, a mess of tissue and tentacle, its loose broken eye unblinking. Red blood trickled from its body, staining the surrounding rainwater puddle a soft pink.

“Why are they out of their shells?” I asked.

“We think pollution,” he said. “The chemicals change their instincts. No one knows for sure. Our folklorist at Gyle tells a story every once in a while. She says they’re looking for their human cousins that left the oceans millions of years ago. They want their ink sacks back.”

Everybody chuckled.

“They get lost and try to live in the weirdest places,” he added.

At the mansion, we received another tour. There was so much to take in, so many rooms and conveniences, that I got overloaded and stopped paying attention. I worried my ink sack with my tongue. During the flight to San Francisco and then the drive here, I’d been thinking about my pearlescence, wondering if the breakthrough that I needed wasn’t certification, but a new perspective. There’d always been a sadness inside me, and after my professional disappointments and then my mom’s death, that sadness had borrowed deeper and become a kind of walking pain. Bad feelings can be good for art, but unchecked, they’re destructive. For the sake of my art, I needed to let in the joy.

This wasn’t a new thought. I didn’t have epiphanies about spinning. I thought about my work too often, was too desperate for success, to have surprising insights.

The professional spinners and Consortium board members were assigned suites along the second floor. We emerging artists got the entire third floor, both wings. Twenty-five rooms, two newbies per room. My roommate was an older woman with a round belly and skin ripe with eczema. Caroline. She babbled the whole time we unpacked: “Do you like rain? I love rain! Do you like spinning plates? Me, too!”

Though her face was especially wide and long, I dismissed her, thinking anyone this eager to please had to be mediocre. But then she unpacked a pearlescent plate that was like mine, only bright. Stunning. I examined her more closely. Under her jaw toward the back, she had the biggest ink sack I’d ever seen.

“You’re good,” I said, a frustrated admission.

She stopped nervously babbling and examined her plate, too. “Yes. I am.” Then she scanned the room for my work, to appraise and respond to it, but I hadn’t yet brought it in from my rental. She was about to ask for a picture, I could tell, and I was almost relieved when we were startled—

—Glass tinkled to the floor like hail. A gull had smashed through the big window, its head stuck through a hole in the glass. It struggled, flapping its wings, which were outside, wriggling its neck inside the room.

Caroline and I came to its either side, trying in a panic to rescue it. Were we supposed to push it back out? It might fall to its death. Were we to pull the shards from its neck? That seemed dangerous, too.

It bleated, wrenching its neck back, then slicing its own throat with such decisiveness that the act almost seemed intentional.

It died.

“That happens. They get lost in the fog,” the woman at the front desk told us when we called down. “We’ll send someone to clean it up right away.”

Afterward, we stood over the body, taking it in as only ghouls and artists can do, and I noticed something pale and wriggling. The bird’s eye burst open. A nautilus crawled out.

Missing Tooth

First course and second course, we emerging artists walked counterclockwise around the table, lifting the pasta and then the fish dishes from the busser’s tray and serving the professionals. I was so nervous I could hardly look at them.

Before the third course, we were told to stand in a line, holding our best plates. Everyone else was carrying theirs in a pocket or a miniature case. It seemed obvious that I should have been carrying mine, too. But I’d put it off. I hadn’t wanted to seem as desperate as the rest of them, or I’d been afraid I wasn’t as good. Now, I ran out to my car to retrieve it. In the dark, I face-planted in the wet mud. Stunned, I stayed on the ground, feeling strange and unmoored. Did I want to be here? Did I want to fight for the honor to sit beside people who felt it was my job to serve them?

And then, something pale touched my lip. A tentacle. I took it between my fingers. The creature wasn’t slimy like I’d expected. Its skin was firm as sharkskin. It wriggled its myriad tentacles, each distinct and fine, in my direction.

When I returned to the dining room with my plate, I took my place in the line with the other forty-nine emerging artists. In one hand, cupped outward, I displayed the brown plate that reminded me most of my mother.

It was hard to compare my own work to the rest. But I could see that Caroline’s was spectacular. The best in the whole group. To be honest, maybe the best in the whole room.

The artists picked us one by one. I got chosen fourth, a good sign. Caroline got chosen second to last. The unchosen twenty-five were told not to worry. These things happened. Then they were escorted from the dining room.

The rest of us joined the professionals. High from our early win, we got boisterous. I sat between Manny and Frida. Manny was a hero to me. I loved his debut work, though everything after it was tame. “But you have to do it,” he told me. We’d been talking about muscle pain, the best jaw ointments.

“Oh, yes, you must!” Frida added.

“What?”

“The procedure! They take out your back molar and wisdom tooth to make more room in your mouth. Gyle’s an approved center. You could have it done this weekend,” Frida said.

“People have been doing it for decades. You didn’t know?” Manny asked.

“I might have read something,” I said.

“Don’t your teeth hurt all the time?” Frida asked, shuddering. “Must be awful.”

“I guess,” I said. “I’m used to it.”

“And they add a tool,” Manny said. Then he opened his mouth.

“Go on, look!” Frida said.

I can’t explain how I knew what I’d find. But I did. As if my own future self had whispered it to me, a squeamish, shuddering warning, I knew. Along the front of his tongue were food bits he should have swallowed, and resin fillings. The back looked wrong—too narrow and strangely jagged, like it had been cut years before and never properly healed. No, not like that. Like it had been gnawed on. He had no hyphae. Instead, in the back left, where his teeth should have been, several pale tentacles reached out around his ample ink sack and in my direction, as if drawn to the light.

“What exactly am I looking at?” I asked. “Is that bio-machinery? Some kind of advanced technology?”

“A cephalopod,” Frida said.

Manny shut his mouth and smiled with great pride. “A tiny one,” he added. “The nautilus is a perfect instrument. Do you know it’s got ninety tentacles, every one of them sharper and finer than human hyphae?”

I looked out over the table, so many people. Studied the mouths of the most famous of them. Imagined something inside them that wriggled. Then I drank my wine. And another glass. And did my best to forget about it because I was here. I was finally here.

After dessert, the losers returned to serve us all cognac. Please, their expressions seemed to beg as they looked from one professional to the next: Change your mind.

This didn’t happen. No one talked to them. It was like they’d turned invisible.

After cognac, I was dizzy. Attendants handed each of us a lump of hard clay. “Spin,” Danny Prentice ordered, and I thought of Rumpelstiltskin’s prisoner, spinning her gold. “This is trial number two. Spin your best.”

Manny and Frida made sounds of encouragement with their strange, too-wriggling mouths.

I spun. I got lost in it, spinning my hardest and best. I didn’t notice anything around me. Had no idea I’d taken more than two hours, and that everyone else was waiting. I opened my eyes, feeling good. Feeling satisfied. And I saw, for the briefest of moments, two masks fall away. Manny and Frida were watching me. They weren’t excited. They weren’t encouraging. They weren’t even contemptuous. No. It was more alarming that that. They looked at me with greed. Like I was something to be consumed.

Caroline

My roommate was crying that night. We’d turned out the lights, our Bert and Ernie beds pointing at the ocean view. Since we’d been at dinner, the staff had replaced the window and removed the gull.

I had no idea why she was so upset. Of the twenty-five plates we’d all just made and shown, the Consortium had chosen twelve favorites. Ours had made the cut. Everyone else was going home.

Caroline was a messy person. Her clothes had exploded out of her luggage, which happened to be a garbage bag. In the dark, I could hear her sniffling.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“I was stupid to come here. This isn’t a practical place for me,” she said.

“It’s not a practical place in general,” I said. “But if they can help us, who cares?”

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “I have three kids under five years old. My husband can keep them for the weekend, but what if I win? I’ll have to go to whatever residency they send me. I can’t turn that down. Who’ll raise my kids?”

“You can’t take them?” I asked.

“No. They never do childcare. The men don’t need it and the women are happy to have an excuse to thin the competition.”

This hit home, because I’d been feeling an ugly thrill, realizing that the most talented person in all of Gyle might not be my competition, after all.

“All I ever wanted was to spin. To really spin, with resources and time . . . I’ve applied for this every year since it started, since before kids. This is the first time I ever got accepted.”

“Cheer up,” I said. And then I added something mean. Something beneath me. “Maybe you won’t win.”

She didn’t answer. I felt like a villain, probably because in that moment, I was a villain. So I sat up and turned on the light. When I looked over, I saw that she’d scratched her eczema bloody. Her arms, her legs, her hands, even her neck—bloody.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “That was mean. I’m mean. I’m sorry.”

She rolled so she wasn’t facing me. Her shoulders bled through the thin cotton of her nightgown, a grotesque Rorschach.

Dream

Soon, Caroline was snoring. I felt too sick with guilt to do the same.

Restless, I crept down the mansion steps past the second floor and to the main one. A few of the professionals were still drinking brandy and coffee in the solarium. “Manny showed his squid. She was horrified!” Frida said.

“They don’t know any better. It’s just ignorance,” Mrs. Prentice said. “She’ll love it, if she’s lucky enough to get it.”

“Betty, she turned green!” Frida cried.

They all burst out laughing. Though they were very different people, their laughter all sounded the same. Their cadences matched, their pitches rising and falling in unison. They even moved in synchronicity, as if they had a hive mind.

Quiet, I went out the main door and around to the boardwalk overlooking the sea. In the calm of the after-rain, the unshelled sea creatures had grown in number and seemed on a great migration, their dark eyes and pale skin glowing in the moonlight as they pulled themselves across the wood. It was rhythmic. Transfixing. I held on to the sight, the feeling, hoping to translate it to a plate.

And then I woke up, and I was standing in my bedroom, Caroline staring at me. No, it wasn’t Caroline. She was sleeping. It was me, a woman with my exact face, sitting up in my bed. She was the woman who’d come to me years ago, when I’d first made pearlescence. She was successful, future me.

She opened her mouth. Pale, parasite tentacles reached out, climbing both sides of her lips. “I can’t get it out,” she screamed. “Get it out!”

Physical

There were just twelve of us left. After breakfast, we attended a lecture by Shandra Indira, the famous healer, about how the body was the gateway to the spirit. In his healing center, a cottage outside the mansion, he showed us his crystals and jade, then taught us how to bark out our feelings in order to literally cleanse our palates. “For your art, you must be open to all things!”he told us. “You must be conduits.”

Then we had physicals with Prentice’s personal physician. I lay down on the examining table, wearing a linen robe that opened in front. She felt my chakras, said my throat was swollen with energy, checked my vitals, diagnosed a very faint heart murmur. “I’m not concerned. But definitely keep it strong with regular exercise,” she advised.  Last, she drew my blood and took a saliva sample, too. “I’ll be looking for the regular stuff—your platelet counts and hormone levels—but also the micro—magnesium, nitrogenous wastes. A good diet really can improve the consistency of your plates.”

After that, she felt my mouth, which was sore from overwork, dabbing the cracked parts of my gums and lips with a mentholated green ointment that numbed my muscles, and made everything light and floating. From under my chin, she tugged my ink sack. “Holy crackers, that’s muscular. You must be the one who can do bright pearlescent?”

“Yeah,” I said, though I suspected she was talking about Caroline.

“Great shape. Really terrific. But it’s blocked, too. You’re grieving someone or something.”

“You read my file?”

“No. But I can feel the block. You lost someone?”

I looked at her for longer than a beat. She was thin and in her sixties, but extremely well preserved, with deep blue eyes. No, she wasn’t magic. She’d definitely read my file. But she wanted me to think she was magic. “I did. I lost someone.”

She nodded sagely. “It’s a mechanical answer to an emotional problem, but I think you should get your wisdom tooth and molar removed. They’re holding on to bad energy from your past. They’re trapping your ink sack.”

I liked my teeth. Their permanence and solidity countered the tenderness of my ink sack and tongue. I liked the messiness of my spinning process, its carnality.

“You don’t have to replace them with a live cephalopod,” she said. “It’s just that those kinds of creatures are great tools. Spinners who use them have an advantage.”

I nodded, thinking that I wasn’t like most spinners. I didn’t need extra help. I was the emperor with real invisible clothing. Then again, what did it matter whether they were real or not, if no one could see them?

“Can I adjust you?”

I nodded. Gently, she held the weight of my head in her hands. Weird, East Asian meditation music played, bells tinkling. “You’re so tense. Relax,” she said.

I had a hard time following this instruction. The muscles in my face were knotted from overuse, and I wasn’t comfortable having foreign hands so close to my most important instrument.

“Trust me,” she said. “I’m a real doctor. I went to Harvard Medical School. My practice is based solely on evidence and results. Close your eyes.”

I closed my eyes. She was gentle, pulling this way and that. It lulled me.

And then—crack!—she yanked my head up and away from my shoulders. I heard the pops in my neck and jaw before I felt the searing pain. Hot and wild. Dizzy sparks flew. For a moment, all I saw was black.

Half blind, I sat up. Pink jelly spilled out from my nose. She handed me a tissue. More tissues. Was this brain fluid? Was I ruined?

“Blow,” she said.

I blew. Fleshy pink chunks of jelly filled half a box worth of tissues. When I was done blowing, my head was totally clear. My sinuses, my ears and eyes and ink sack, were open and unclogged. I felt great.

“That’s one of the worst cases I’ve ever seen,” she told me. “You need the surgery, honey. You can’t go on like this. You’ll wear out your joints and have to quit spinning.”

I Need My Teeth

Before dinner, I went back to my room and pinched some sand clay I’d brought from home. Just to make sure the doc hadn’t ruined my mouth, I spun a tiny, two-inch plate. Its colors were more vibrant than ever.

Caroline headed in while I was on my way out for dinner. The inside of her left jaw was jammed with gauze and when she opened her mouth I saw that it was bloody. “I’m leaving,” she said.

“Yeah? What happened?”

She stink-eyed me, probably remembering my cruel words the night before. “I said they could do the procedure. The tooth extraction. I mean, it’s crazy. They’re quacks. But I need the certification. But then I got scared. Novocaine’s never worked that well on me. I flipped out and made them stop. They were so mad. Now it’s all messed up. They don’t like me. And if I win and turn it down they’ll hate me. I’ll never get invited back. I’ll never get the chance again.”

“You backed out?”

She nodded. “I mean. They’re my teeth. I need my teeth.” Her eyes got big and scared and vulnerable. “Don’t I need my teeth? Was it crazy to make them stop? Am I crazy?”

I could have been mean right then. We were all on a precipice, about to be pushed off at the whim of the drunken rich. What was left to do but fight for our place? But that wasn’t me. I didn’t want it to be me.

“You’re better than any of us,” I said.

She stopped right then, and heaved her breath in a quick, hard sob. I understood that feeling: when you know you’re good, but for reasons opaque, no one else will admit it, and you begin to think that either you’re crazy or the world is awful. “Really?”

“See it through,” I said. “If you have to turn it down, you can still use the certification to open doors. I hate that you’re better than me. But you are. So don’t stop. Show these losers who you are.”

“You don’t have to say that. That I’m better than you,” she said. She was holding her sore jaw, blood soaking the gauze. It would probably take weeks before she healed. I was annoyed at her for being needy, for asking me to repeat myself. It was bad enough I’d had to say it once. But more than that, I was mad that Gyle had messed with a spinner who was so pure.

“Yeah, I do,” I said. “Sometimes you know when you have to say something. And I know it. You’re better than me. If I can’t admit that, I’ll become small.”

She lunged. I wasn’t clear whether it was an attack or an outburst of love until she hugged me, her chin buried in my shoulder (which would leave a bloodstain). It’s futile to try to resolve the past with present actions. But I thought then of my mom, and how I’d never told her the things I’d felt. That she was special. That she was funny. That she was put-upon and buried by the needs of others and would one day be replaced.

Caroline didn’t let go for a long while. When she finally did release me, she wasn’t the only one crying.

It’s Not Fair

We served again that night. The table was smaller, with only ten seated professionals—all Consortium board members.

 Eleven emerging artists remained at Gyle. In the night, the twelfth had scribbled an angry note about how we were all phonies and nailed it to the front door like he thought he was Martin Luther.

After the second course, we eleven lined up to display our best plate. Everyone else displayed the one they’d made the night before, which they’d been given extra time over the day to further decorate. I displayed my fresh, tiny one and was chosen first. Caroline was chosen sixth, but then Danny and Betty Prentice stopped that decision and rounded up the board members in a circle, where they whispered. I remembered my dream, then, because their bodies seemed to undulate in alien synchronicity. For a wild instant, my future self shouted at me with urgent, spitting fury.

When they returned, selections resumed. Caroline was not chosen. At the end, only Caroline was left out. She stayed frozen with wide eyes and mouth agape, like she thought she might be having a nightmare, the blood from her failed surgery still fresh and bright like a painted bird.

We winning ten sat with the remaining professionals for our last meal together. The Prentices told Caroline that she could stay the night or simply go home. She smiled strangely, then turned and ran. A little later, sitting again between Manny and Frida, who were already drunk, I excused myself and followed Caroline to our room. She was tossing all her loose crap into her Hefty bag. The plates rattled and smashed, a terrible sound.

“Why do you think Prentice intervened?” I asked.

“Because I’m a bad bet. They know I’ll have to turn it down. And I didn’t get the surgery. I did it all wrong. I always do everything wrong.”

I lowered my voice. “He’s an asshole. They’re all assholes. Don’t you see? She’s just jealous that she can’t spin and he’s greedy. They don’t care about our plates. They’ve got the whole board in their pockets. It’s vanity. For all we know the surgery makes it worse. None of these spinners on the board are great. They’re mediocre. You were right not to do it.”

This, too, felt like everything that needed to be said. Not for her sake. She knew already. For my own sake. I was warning myself.

“I give up,” she said.

I didn’t try to stop her. From our room, I watched her leave Gyle, a solitary figure taking out garbage, dwarfed by the monstrous enormity of this place.

I returned to the dinner. The red-faced, boozy professionals talked about their moments of inspiration, their silliest screw-ups, their biggest sales. They talked about famous dead spinners they’d known, the carousing, the hijinks. Their voices blended, a choppy, jarring staccato. Their faces seemed to blend, too. An anger came to me, perhaps on Caroline’s behalf. Perhaps on my own behalf. They appeared to me like the sea creatures that inhabited them: instinctive and parasitic.

Another Dream

Alone in my room that night, I couldn’t sleep again. I climbed to the main floor, where the professionals and Prentices were drinking brandy. I spied on them as their chatter stopped and they got quiet, like stillness in time. As if possessed, they looked to the ceiling and opened their witless mouths. Tentacles reached out.

And then the dream rippled, and I was alone on the boardwalk. I climbed out to the water, teeming with soft, pale creatures. I dreamed they crawled inside me.

It was a dream. Wasn’t it?

Certification

The final competition was after breakfast that morning. We were to spin one plate, on the spot. Thinking about Caroline, about tentacled creatures and how places are homes, but bodies can also be homes, I spun something new and better than I’d ever made before: pearlescent and jaded and hieroglyphed, it was like nothing anyone had ever seen. They chose it. I was one of five. I won.

At lunch, Betty Prentice came to our winner’s table to tell us that our celebratory ball was in five days. Everyone in the art world would be invited. “I’ve consulted with our resident physician. She’s examined you all. Every one of you needs the surgery. Your joints won’t have longevity otherwise. You’ll get ink rot. Anyone who gets the procedure today will have immediate certification. Those who do not will be disqualified, their spots offered to someone more committed.”

Have you ever done something that you knew was wrong, you knew would change and hurt you irrevocably? But you’re scared to say no? You worry the alternative is worse? I know the answer. You have.

Deep in my bones, I knew it was wrong. But I was surrounded by people saying the opposite, that the procedure would save me. That I’d have everything. I wanted to please these important people, none of whom I liked personally, but whose reputations I coveted.

If I disagreed, I’d meet Caroline’s fate and fall into obscurity. And besides, I’d learned something at Gyle. In my dead center, the core of me, I’d always believed I was the best. But I wasn’t. Caroline was the best. So what did it matter, if I got the procedure? My voice wasn’t special like I’d thought. Gyle could help me if I let it. So I played a trick on my mind. I pretended that what they told me was true. I pretended so hard that it became a desperate, nervous hope: This surgery would save me. This surgery was everything.

In the waiting area, I signed a contract giving Gyle 25 percent of any profits I might make, in perpetuity. The doctor whose name I can’t remember—I’ll call her Harvard, leaned over me. Harvard, the gatekeeper. “Harvard the Gozerian,” I said, as I began to fall asleep. And then I dreamed of my future self, successful me, who told me to run. Who told me that this happened, this had always happened, and I must break the cycle and get out.

“No!” I shouted in terror. But my mouth was already bloody and empty. The absence, a raw and desolate vacancy, was a sin I’d committed against my own body.

Squid Teeth

The ball was coming but I couldn’t spin. With the change in the structure of my mouth, I’d lost a rhythm. What was worse, it turned out those back teeth had been useful. Everything I spun was terrible.

The four others from my group had gotten their nautiluses inserted right away. They were already spinning tons of plates to display. Very starkly since the procedure, their work had improved. It was technically spectacular, though not particularly creative.

I told Dr. Harvard my dilemma, that I could no longer spin. But I needed to display my work for the ball. My career depended on it.

“Oh,” she said, showily glum. “That does happen. It can be a risk.”

“Will it get better?” I asked.

“Sometimes,” she said. “You’ll want a nautilus. That’s what helps the most. But remember, they chew the tongue and eat the hyphae, so you’ll need them to spin forever after.”

I agreed. Harvard pushed me back on the examining table and administered ether. Immediately, I saw myself, screaming at me. And then, on a set of tongs, came a tiny, tentacled creature with black eyes.

The Ball

The art world sorted through our displays. In our gowns and tuxes, we charmed our prospective buyers as best we could. I’d made several plates since receiving my nautilus and all were stamped with the Consortium’s sea creature imprimatur. The work was fine, the clay smooth, and the sheen from all that nitrogenous nautilus waste spectacular.

But I’d lost the ability to render pearlescence. I’d also lost the ability to work spontaneously: the creatures needed to be prodded in specific, directed ways. This necessity for preconception drained all the inspiration from me, and so for these plates, I recalled the memory of the first pearlescent plate I’d ever rendered and copied it. In every instance, the work was better than the original, the writing clearer. A second and third and fourth and fifth draft. You ever watch the figure-skating events at the Olympics? It was like, in every category, my work was suddenly hitting every mark, had become a perfect ten.

I won the most coveted award: the Gyle residency. I sold plate number four for a million dollars. I ate a meal I couldn’t quite taste. I laughed at jokes I didn’t care for. I danced to music that felt muted. Still, I was happy. We were all so happy, we spinners. All, at last, after so much heartache, we’d become the stars of the ball.

My career took me across every continent. I got an apartment in New York like I’d always wanted. I discovered a taste for scotch. Because of the pale, slippery thing that lived inside me and chewed me hollow, I was never able to reproduce pearlescence, but my reviews stayed strong and my plates were widely celebrated.

I visited Lincoln every few years and felt increasingly removed from it. I looked up Caroline, who lived in Van Nuys, California, and even visited her once. She didn’t quit after all, but continued to spin and sell her work in small galleries all over the country. She also taught elementary school spinning. Having lost the taste for competition and rigor, most of her work had fallen in quality. But some rare pieces were stunning and her hyphae were the most complex I’d ever seen. Though I suspected she’d die in obscurity, it was possible that her work would one day be discovered by some future generation, and valued.

I was invited to the Consortium’s board of directors, and back to Gyle to judge emerging artists, but I turned these invitations down, always with some new excuse. I didn’t want to go back to that place where I’d been carved hollow. Didn’t want to have to watch the new crop spin pearlescence, and covet it.

Openly, I’ve never regretted my decision. I got what I wanted. Quietly, when I’m alone, I remember that moment on the table, and my future, successful self. I think that life is circular. Just as we separated from the sea creatures, they returned to us. Just as I was once the frightened artist, I was now the woman on the other side.

And that’s why I write to you, G. The person I used to be. The substantial echo to the hollowed-out cavity I’ve become. Think about the times in your life that you experienced déjà vu. That was me, reaching out to you. That was you, listening, I hope. Because life is circular. And in my mind, I keep going back to you. I keep finding you and warning you. I see you in your garage and I see you at Gyle. I see you from the first time you made pearlescence, and I see you like our mother once saw you: a person on a long road with many forks. I come to you in your sleep and on the operating table. I scream to you to stop, and I keep hoping that if I scream hard enough, you’ll listen.

Here’s the thing about parasites that Dr. Harvard never mentioned, G. It’s the reason, after twenty or so years, that certified spinners retire from the public. It’s why their work, never truly great, gets worse and worse. It’s why I drink so much now. When my creature tore apart my hyphae, it followed their path into my neural network. A nautilus is always hungry. It makes more progress every day. Someone ought to have told us: They never stop with the tongue.

“Squid Teeth” copyright © 2025 by Sarah Langan
Art copyright © 2025 by Chloé Biocca

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