Jane Wageman
She met him collecting shark teeth on the South Carolina shore and he was not a beach bum but looked like one and she was not looking for love, she was looking for teeth. She collected them and kept them in a dish and then a jar and then a slender vase like a clear neck, high on the shelf in the small room she rented, four of them in a house outside Charleston. No, she was not looking for love, except wasn’t she always and wasn’t he asking her for directions like any kind of line.
He asked her what she was doing and she told him and he asked her about the teeth and she said sharks lose tens of thousands of teeth in their life, did you know, and they can grow them back in a day. She said, look, and showed him one in her palm, a slender needle tooth meant to pierce. She said there are other types, there are saws and grinds and hooks.
At what point was she hooked—she didn’t know. She would tell it different depending on the day and the week and the year.
It’s a word she only ever comes to after—after she is leaving him, after he is gone again, after it is (definitely, this time) done. She sweeps up the glass from a thrown bottle, packs up her things, calls a friend on the phone, and has the same conversation she has each time, the same set of realizations. She is always having hindsight, always really recognizing that he will never change, always regretting the misspent years (three and then four and then five) for the first time.
I still love him, she says at the end; it comes back so quick, that love. It won’t let her go.
Jane Wageman holds an MFA from Bowling Green State University and is currently a resident scholar at the Collegeville Institute in Minnesota. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in trampset, Lake Effect, and others. She writes at the Substack Quick Bright Things.
Photo: “Shark Teeth” by GorissM, CC BY-SA 2.0