With Teeth
a short story idea
The World
Three girls have been kidnapped to a private island run by a sex trafficking abuse network. While there, they were drugged with a substance that fragmented their memories, leaving them with shards of memories, half-faces, and scattered images rather than clean recollections. One memory cuts through the haze for all three. A dentist, an older man leaning over them, and a nameplate that read Cormac.
Cormac was tasked on the island with removing their teeth so that they couldn’t bite and fight back against their traffickers.
The Girls
Sela (Boo) is an orphan. When she escaped the island — disappearing in a group during a chaotic attempt to flee — she vanished so completely that she earned the nickname Boo. She reappeared when caught, like a ghost who couldn’t quite leave. With no family to return to, she reintegrated into nothing. She lives on the margins, wounded and solitary. She refuses to replace her teeth. They are her badge, her evidence, her refusal to make anyone comfortable. She is obsessed with an animated short by René Laloux called The Monkey’s Teeth, which explores the psychological connection between tooth loss and family.
For Sela, who has no family, the film is a mirror she can’t stop looking into. She dreams of her teeth being pulled out almost every night.
Juno (Gap) was born with a dent du bonheur — a gap in her teeth, a luck tooth. On the island the girls called her Gap, an act of tenderness that became an identity. She is the protector, the one who holds the others together, the emotional center of the three. She has family and has attempted to rebuild a life, but her entire psychology is organized around preventing harm — to others if not to herself. She is the one who keeps the plan together when it begins to form.
Lena (Twig) returned from the island and found the Catholic Church waiting with open arms. Her faith is genuine — trauma drove her toward it and it gave her structure, community, and meaning. She has bowed like a tree toward the light the Church offered her. But the institution that sheltered her also shelters Fletcher Cormac. She doesn’t know this yet.
The Antagonists
Fletcher Cormac is a respected dentist, a pillar of his Catholic diocese, a man whose name appears on a plaque in a clean waiting room. He is protected by the Church and by his own respectability. He was on the island.
President William Fruck rose to power partly on promises to expose and prosecute the island network. He performs outrage. He holds press conferences. He is believed by many, including Lena, to be an ally.
The Story
Years after the island, the three women find each other. The reunion is not warm exactly.
One of them — Sela — who has organized the reunion, has spotted a man she believes she recognizes.
They begin to watch him. They follow him. Slowly, painstakingly, they reconstruct his identity from the fragment they always had — Cormac — and build outward until they have a full name: Fletcher Cormac.
Throughout this investigation, flashbacks surface without warning. The dental chair. A face above them. The drug pulling everything soft and distant. A nameplate glimpsed through fear. The faces of men — fragmented, half-remembered — and the knowledge of what they did. Among those half-faces, though none of them can yet name him, is President William Fruck.
They go to the police. The police dismiss them.
So they make a plan to kill Fletcher Cormac.
Meanwhile, President Fruck’s network has become aware of the women. Through channels that connect his office to the Church, the diocese becomes aware of what Boo, Gap, and Twig are planning. Fruck and the Church identify Lena as the lever. They approach her through people she trusts — her priest, her community — and frame the situation in the language of her faith. They tell her that justice belongs to God. That taking a life is a sin. That she can save her sisters from damnation by stopping them. They do not tell her that they are protecting Cormac.
Lena, torn and sincere, believing she is doing the righteous thing, turns them in to the diocese.
The Church moves to protect Cormac. The women are handed to the authorities. All three are imprisoned.
In the final scene, Sela sits in her cell. A flashback comes — not fragmented this time. Clear. The drug has worn away over years and something has shaken loose. She sees a face above her on the island, complete and unmistakable. It is William Fruck. She has no way to tell anyone. She sits with it alone, in the dark, with her unrepaired teeth.