The Teeth of the World
The sun came up the color of a bruise, violet bleeding into sick yellow over the broken teeth of the skyline. Star watched it from the mouth of an alley, back pressed against cold brick, waiting the way she always waited—counting her own heartbeat until it slowed to something useful.
Nothing moved. No birds. There hadn't been birds in a long while.
She stepped out when she was sure, boots silent on cracked asphalt gone soft with moss and weeds. Three years of this had taught her how to walk like smoke, how to read a street before it read her. The convenience store across the intersection had kept half its sign—CORN R MAR T, the rest shattered and swallowed by a vine that had turned the whole storefront into something like a mouth, green and patient.
She crossed low, fast, checking the sightlines the way her mother once taught her to check a chessboard. *Don't just see the piece in front of you, Star. See the piece that wants to be invisible.*
Her mother's voice came to her sometimes like that—unbidden, unwelcome, a ghost that refused to understand it was dead. Star didn't fight it anymore. She let it play out, let the words move through her like weather, and kept walking.
The…
