Alec Evan March

Pulling Teeth

PUBLISHED IN FOLIO 2026: VOL. 41.

The taxi slouches forward for three seconds, and I’m forced to stop again. In the passenger seat, my mother clucks her tongue.

“Look, you’ll see how this will get them nowhere,” she says, referring to the farmers responsible for the blockades. She reaches for the radio and dials the volume down to twenty. “That’s what always happens. Regular people get inconvenienced, and everything stays the same.”

I won’t take the bait. I’ve been up since five, drove seven hours to Karditsa to pick her up in the taxi—propelled by that old story about her lower back not affording her the privilege of getting on an intercity bus—and we’ve spent an hour in this congestion, but I won’t grant her the pleasure of showing my own irritation with the protesters.

“At this rate,” she says, “we’ll be in Athens tomorrow.”

“I’m the one who’s been on the road since dawn. I told you, you should’ve taken a train.”

“And died in the next collision?”

“They’ve fixed the railways.”

“Supposedly, there was nothing wrong with them in the first place.” She dials the music down further.

“Well, that’s how long it takes to get there by car now, so stop complaining, as if that’ll make it any faster. At least they’re doing something,” I say, though whether they’ll be effective is anybody’s guess. My guesses tend towards pessimism.

Myself, I missed the window of opportunity to become politically active in university. Freshly out as a lesbian, young enough to retain a modicum of hope, I would’ve liked to have joined one of the many student organizations others in my Fine Arts degree had seemed so fond of, but I remained unconvinced by all. In truth, I would’ve made the placards, I would’ve handcuffed myself to the chain-link fences, I would’ve detonated myself in the middle of the town square, provided I had thought there was the slightest of chances the world would not keep spinning on that same selfish axis. My revolutionary fantasies always ended like that, with me going up in flames. It was a while before it dawned on me I wasn’t looking for something to believe in. I was looking for something worth dying for. I’ll be thirty-seven next week. I have still found neither.

“And your sister?” my mother huffs. “Wedding in December. Where’s that heard of?”

“Venues are cheaper in the off-season.”

“Given what a cheapskate her husband is, it must’ve been his idea.” Then, lilting her voice to imitate Maria’s, she mocks, “An intimate ceremony, only close friends and family.” She gestures vaguely in the air to banish the thought. “When I was married, the entire village was there, and we fed everyone, even without a fancy IT job. How your father led the dance,” she goes on, reminiscing. “Better that he’s dead, so as not to see Giorgo tripping over his feet this Saturday.”

We move another inch, and I turn the music back up. Immediately, she fumbles with the dial and lowers the volume to ten, so that Led Zeppelin’s “What Is and What Should Never Be” can hardly be heard through the radio.

“You need to focus on the road,” she says.

“Focus on what? We’re not even moving. We’ll reach Athens sooner if we get out and walk at this point.”

She shifts in her seat. “I need to go to the bathroom.”

“What do you want me to do? Hold it.”

She sighs.

The car covers some ground before coming to another halt.

My mother reaches for the dial and turns the music down to four. We sit in silence. Outside, tractors are lined up on the main road, while under the bridge ahead a man is selling souvlakia off a makeshift stall. Weary, the setting sun dips further down behind the moss-covered hills.

Litsa wraps the final strand of my mother’s hair once around a small pink Velcro roller and steps back to admire her handiwork. “Is the color all right?” she asks.

From the couch, I give her a warning glare over the issue of OK Magazine I’ve spent the past hour leafing through.

“I usually go for a lighter tone,” my mother begins, “because I feel like a brown this dark really roughens me up. But the grey’s all gone.” She turns in her swivel chair and asks me, “Are you sure you don’t wanna get yours done too?”

I pretend to be engrossed in an exposé concerning a B-list actor’s extramarital affair with an up-and-coming folk-pop singer. “I’ll use gel.”

“I do wish you had let it grow a bit for your sister’s wedding,” she says, and asks Litsa, “Then, you could’ve used extensions on her, couldn’t you?”

Litsa accompanies her to the hooded hair dryer and hands her another magazine from the pile on the round glass table. “Eleonora’s always had her hair short, even when we were in university together,” she says, unaware she’s naming the very cause of my mother’s grievance.

Presently, my and my mother’s hairstyles are of a similar length, a length which she feels she must resign to as a sign of elegance in her advanced age and which she nevertheless believes I must’ve never come close to because it accentuates the boyishness of my bare face and low voice.

“It would soften you,” my mother tells me, “longer hair. Those spikes you’ve got bring out your crow’s feet.”

“Looks cool.” Litsa speaks through the hairband in her teeth as she pulls her own scarlet-streaked hair up into a ponytail. “Your own hair’s also great as is, Ms. Koula. I wouldn’t grow it any longer.”

“You know better,” my mother concedes, and it strikes me again how well they seem to be getting along, especially when she never bestowed an ounce of grace on Anna in the thirteen years we were together. In our decade of cohabitation, she would go as far as to request Anna’s absence from our one-bedroom apartment whenever she stayed over, even as her visits dwindled with time. Perhaps if she had been informed of the nights Litsa and I had passed tangled up in each other on that same bed, or the mornings we’d enjoyed talking over coffee on the balcony, a view of Mount Lycabettus on one end, Strefi Hill on the other, she would be less inclined now to make conversation, eat biscuits off the tray, or consider Litsa’s cosmetic advice.

Litsa picks up her cup of coffee and leans against the neon green wall by the mirror to take a sip. Japanese-style tattoos glide out of each rolled-up sleeve. When we were studying together, she told me she planned on opening a tattoo parlor. I’ve been meaning to ask her, now that we’ve reconnected after all these years, if she ever did run that dream business of hers, or if the switch to hairdressing had come about before she’d had a chance. But I keep forgetting. I was fairly confident back then I’d make art for a living. When I lost my passion for painting, which had driven me to my degree, I’d even taken up writing as a last, unsuccessful resort. What I admire in others’ works, I failed to reproduce in mine. The confident brushstroke. The precise sentence. My oils on canvas cowered, bogged down by revisionary coats. My cluttered prose at times concealed the point under heaps of convoluted verbiage, while at others, was there to obfuscate the fact there was none in the first place. Litsa has been kind enough not to ask when I decided to buy the taxi.

“Wanna go for a cigarette?” she asks me now.

“I thought you’d given up smoking,” my mother tells me, her eyes on the magazine.

“Turn of phrase,” says Litsa. “I’ll get my cigarettes, she’s got her vape.”

“I doubt that’s much better.”

“I’m coming,” I say. I toss my own issue back on the pile and follow Litsa out of the basement where she runs her illicit salon and up the concrete steps to the garden. The winter has stripped the cherry trees bare, and the manicured lawn glistens, saturated under the cloudy skies.

We sit on the steps leading to the brick house where she lives with her parents, and she sets the tobacco and rolling papers between us. “How’re you holding up?” she asks me as she rolls.

“I can’t stand her.”

“She can’t seem to get enough of me.”

“I think she had enough of me the moment she held me after birthing me.” I take a puff of my vape, hold in the watermelon smoke for a second, and exhale. “Before coming today, we had a screaming match over what I’m wearing at the wedding.”

“What are you wearing?” Litsa smiles, in her floral blouse and flared, high-waisted skirt.

“A tux.”

“Elli…”

“She wants me to wear a skirt, if not a dress.”

“What does your sister say?”

“My sister does not care, that’s the thing. My mom’s the only one throwing tantrums.”

She takes a drag of her cigarette. “How long is she staying?”

“Until Sunday. But you’d think she’d been forcibly moved here, the way she won’t stop complaining. The metro’s crowded. The streets are dirty. She feels unsafe in Exarcheia. You hardly see any Greeks around anymore. The apartment’s asphyxiating. The bathroom door won’t lock. She’s got no space to turn around in the kitchen. It’s all too loud for her. She can’t see why I keep living here, or what I see in all this chaos.” I pull on my vape again. “When I told her, this summer, that Anna had left me, you know what the worst part was?”

Litsa looks away, ashes her cigarette.

“She sounded vindicated,” I say. “When I came out to her, after the shock had worn off, she had warned me, in feigned sympathy, that I would regret it. That I would wind up alone. For thirteen years, I proved her wrong. She had the last laugh. You know what she keeps telling me now?”

Litsa drags on what’s left of her cigarette and extinguishes it on the step.

“She says I should move back in with her.”

“Will you?”

“No,” I say. “I’d sooner sleep on a sidewalk in Omonoia. But she says now that Dad’s gone, and Anna’s gone, and my landlord wants to raise the rent ‘cause of the metro station they’re building, it makes no sense for us to live on our own so far apart. She’s growing older, she says. It wouldn’t hurt her to have someone around.” I blink and shake my head. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to unload this all on you. She’s just been driving me crazy since yesterday.” I look over my shoulder. “Are your parents home?”

“No,” she says.

I lean over and kiss her, placing a hand on her leg. “When am I seeing you?”

“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” she says. “Listen, it’s been great catching up with you these past few weeks. I never would’ve thought I’d run into you on Tinder of all places, but I’ve enjoyed—” She inhales sharply and looks up, as if she’s got a cheat sheet on the underside of the canopy. “I’ve enjoyed reconnecting with you. It’s just that this,” she says, moving her hands back and forth in the space between us, “I don’t think this is serving me anymore.”

I let go of her leg.

“We can stay friends. In fact, I’d love it if we did. And I know I said I didn’t mind taking it slow…” She pauses again, brings her knees up to her chest, and rests her chin on top of them, staring out into the garden. “I can’t expect you to get over a relationship of thirteen years in the span of a month. But you can also not expect that it will take me as long to get attached. If we keep at it, I’m afraid I’ll end up neck-deep into something you still view as a distant possibility.”

I shrug. “Whatever you think is best for you.”

She turns to face me. I focus on the trees.

“Friends?” she asks me.

My lip quivers. I shake my head no.

“Fair,” she says. She claps her hands on her knees and pushes herself up. “Let’s go make sure your mother’s hair hasn’t been fried off.”

My mother holds herself up against the doorframe to remove her black leather pumps. Her stockings stretch thin over the thickened, discolored nails of her big toes, ruined the night of her own wedding by shoes too tight. “And in any case,” she says, continuing our conversation from the taxi, “your uncle’s been through a lot.”

“You can’t keep using the fact that he had cancer to justify him being a religious zealot.” I deposit my jacket on the rack and kick off my sneakers. “Would it kill you to defend me for once?”

She goes into the kitchen, leaves the bonbonnière of Jordan almonds on the counter, and grabs a glass from the cupboard. “He wasn’t talking about you,” she says for the umpteenth time, filling the glass up with water from the tap.

I switch the light on in the bathroom to wash off the make-up she insisted that I wear and talk to her through the common wall. “All these alternative lifestyles,” I repeat her brother’s words, “these people treating dogs like children, these men marrying men and plants and animals—that’s why God’s setting the country on fire every summer. That’s why he unleashed a pandemic upon the world.”

“You don’t even have a dog.”

I splash water on my face and reach for my cleanser. “He was trying to get a reaction out of me all night.”

“And you had to give him one?” she asks through a mouthful of Jordan almonds. “I only hope your sister didn’t notice. Or worse. Her in-laws. Already, God knows what impression we gave off. You looked more like a groom than Giorgos did. Imagine if they also saw you yelling at a man twice your age all night at the reception.”

My hands scrub my face red. Water drips from every pore and strand of hair when I look up at myself in the mirror. Under my bloodshot eyes, the skin sags darkened like a bruise.

“Though, they’d be ones to talk,” she says, chewing on another Jordan almond. “Did you see how—Ah!” she groans, a curt, cut-breath sound, which she follows with a torrent of expletives and kicks to the cabinet in front of her, until I rush out of the bathroom to find her standing in the pale streetlight filtered through the balcony door and looking down at her palm.

“What happened?”

Before I can have a look, she pulls open the cabinet door under the sink and releases whatever she was holding into the trashcan. Behind it, she empties the bonbonnière of its contents and slams the door shut.

“Is everything okay?”

“My fucking luck.” She pushes past. “I chipped my fucking tooth.”

“Why’d you throw it away?” I ask. “Don’t you need to show it to the dentist?”

“For what?” she asks. “All my teeth are rotten. You think this is the first one to fall off? I’d rather he give me new ones. It’s just a hassle making an appointment now with the holidays coming up.”

She’s in the bedroom, changing into her nightgown. Her trembling fingers keep missing the buttons of her shirt. I help her out of it. In the dark room, the glow from the hallway projects elongated, slanted shadows on the white closet behind her, and etches the lines of her face deeper into the skin. She won’t meet my eyes.

Later, when her low, consistent snoring guarantees she’s deep in sleep, I steal away from the bed and tiptoe to the kitchen. For fear it will wake her, I leave all lights off and trace the walls to find my way, squinting to make out what I can in the half-light pouring in through the balcony doors and the bathroom window.

I drop to my knees and open the cabinet to reveal the pullout trashcan. Holding onto the top with both hands, I lift the plastic bag off the can and slide backwards so that I’m closer to the balcony, where I can see better.

My legs spread, I position the bag of trash between them and survey its insides, which must’ve been shaken around in the move, because there’s no sign of the almonds or the chipped tooth. Browned banana peels hang off the rim of an empty tub of zero-fat yoghurt. Discarded beside them, the first pair of tights she tried to put on, ripped along the left thigh. On top, the jar of foundation she ran out of. I hold my breath and dig in, pushing things aside with my fingers, feeling for the tooth. I brush against something wet and wince.

Something round and tiny finds itself wedged between my forefinger and thumb. I hold onto it, victorious for a mere second, but its smoothness tells me even before I bring it up to the light that it’s simply one of the Jordan almonds she collectively punished for the other’s misdemeanor.

I walk over to the door and close it. I turn the overhead light on.

On my knees again, I take trash out of the bag and drop it on the floor to clear the path. The banana peel plops on its underside with a slushy sound. Used tissues and paper towels simmer down like autumn leaves. The tub of yoghurt thuds and rolls towards the sill.

The glass pane of the balcony door hurls my image back at me. My nightgown sacks over my body. My face droops. My hair sticks up, electrified. I am surrounded by trash. Last time I was on my knees, in the kitchen, I was with Anna, a month before she left me. I kneeled down while she was cooking and kissed up her calves and thighs, pleading with her to let me make her feel good. Those orphaned private rituals. She’d never let me eat her out until I’d begged sufficiently, until the whispered tingle between my legs had transformed into a dull ache and my want, my need for her had shown through my panties in wet patches. I looked quite different then, caught up in desire. When I’m lost in it, desire becomes the great connector, not to the woman in my mouth, but to some Platonic, ideal woman, some Platonic, ideal human form which I both worship and form part of, a perfect body which all eight billion of us possess. It tranquilizes me. Though when I come to, sober and faced with myself, I always feel oddly apologetic for what I’ve done to it, the universal human body. My reflection sneers at me. I get back to work.

I drape the tights over my shoulders, and there, there among the clear white of the Jordan almonds, a yellowed, bloodied molar, not chipped as she said, but intact. It had come clean off. I hold it close to my face and turn it around in my fingers to examine the filling, the black spot near one of the roots, the roots themselves curving and crusted with blood.

The glass pane shows me another image. My mother, in that same position, bargaining with my father, begging him to stay after he’d given her a black eye.

I open the door and walk out to the balcony, the molar safe in my breast pocket. My gown clings to my body in the chilly winter night. The street four floors below is silent, the pockmarked asphalt crawling with plastic wrappers and cigarette butts. Cars have climbed up the sidewalk here and there to claim parking space where there was none. Exhaust permeates the air. In the sky, a single star. What has this city offered me? Better yet, what has it offered that it has not promptly snatched away?

I sit in one of the straw chairs.

Anna has a tattoo on her left breast I used to be unable to look at. The word Dad, written in calligraphy letters. Her father used to work construction until an elevator they were installing crushed him when she was only twelve. I understood the sentiment behind the tattoo, but I couldn’t bear the sight of it in sex. I always wished she’d chosen a different part of the body. At the very least, a different font. I wish I could see it now. It is the only part of hers I haven’t kissed.

❧❧❧

Alec Evan March is a queer writer from Greece, who holds a BA in English from the University of Athens. His short fiction has appeared in Foglifter, Revolute, and Chaotic Merge, where it was a Best of the Net 2024 finalist. He is currently at work on his first novel. He can be found on Instagram @alecevanmarch.