Inside Voices by Sarah Perrin

I wake up in the walls. I am watching them serve dinner, this family of four, from behind pine-scented wood paneling. A worm nudges past my cheek and something crawls over my toes as they spoon peas and tong shredded romaine onto plates, each of them sitting on one side of a mahogany square. The mother coaxes her littlest one, a girl, into trying a leaf of lettuce. The daughter is red-faced, lips holding onto a line that the mother tries to break with a fork, three silver prongs pressing into porcelain flesh.

The son watches: the daughter’s firm jaw, the mother’s knitted brows, the father’s eyes that alight with the hot glow of a phone screen, blooming with directives, artificial pleasantries. Amid their fixations, the son stuffs bread rolls from a woven basket into his right pocket. Two. Three. Four. Until it is bursting. He keeps one loaf cupped in his hands, peels back its skin to get at the soft inside. He calls this the pillowy part and stretches it like taffy, extracting pieces that he rolls into pounded pebbles and sets on his tongue, as an oyster traps a pearl. No one else can see.

Behind the wall, I shift between two support beams; the sawdust makes me sneeze. I crane my neck around a family portrait, landscape style, taken on the beach at dusk, so that the dying sun rests on my chest as I squint through the slats and witness the son’s realization his family still isn’t paying attention. He begins to swipe the loaves with laziness, squeezing each like a stress ball before slipping it into his other, left pocket, allowing a few to fall to the floor in hopes the muted collision will thunder. He says, “They were frozen first,” as his father scoops up the now ringing phone and steps into another room, as his mother selects a stalk of broccoli to aim at the daughter.

The son picks at his half-eaten roll, scratching its crusted top with a nail, and I wonder how the mother cannot hear this sound, like rubbing sandpaper, but she is busy: prying open the daughter’s mouth with her acrylics, mashing the stalk against her teeth again and again. “They are cold,” the boy says, scraping at the flour, chalk-white falling from the bread like dandruff, until a cuticle splits and red flows from his skin into the yeast. At this exact moment, the mother succeeds in nudging apart the daughter’s thin lips and shoving the steamed vegetable inside. The girl yelps and then swallows, reaching two fingers under her tongue to fish out the gleaming white tooth her mother has just felled. She examines the tooth beneath thick recessed lighting, her awe like an archeologist’s, while the mother sneaks a green bean through the gap where her canine should be. One after another, the long stems slip past the girl’s gums, piling up in her stomach like twigs.

“They are very, very cold,” the son says, still scratching at the bread, but at this point he has no fingernails left, only fingers. Stubby lines attached to palms. The father returns, and the mother holds up an empty plate, and the daughter holds up a tooth. He whistles and kisses them both, placing the child on his hip, the mother’s hand in his. Together, they bring the girl upstairs. They will teach her how to put the tooth under her pillow, how to profit off this corner of herself.

Meanwhile, the son pushes his chair back and stands, his pockets bulging with soft lumps. He is about to pursue the family but stops at their photo. He comes closer, collapsing the space between us, until his nose is tickling the glass and his shadow purples the wall. His disfigured hand presses hard on the frame, his mouth hovering inches from mine, so that my exhale is eaten by his inhale, so that he’s chewing on my expelled CO₂.

Then, looking into me as if I am a mirror, the son takes hold of his canine — the adult version of that one the daughter has lost — and pulls. He grips and yanks until it comes loose, breaking free from the bone, tendrils of the root hanging in curtains. Like a communion wafer, he beholds it, its slightly yellowed enamel, black streaks of plaque congealing in a kind of morse code: dash, dot, dash, dash, dash. Retrieving one of the rolls, he digs a thumb into the pillowy part and buries the tooth as far as it will go, then squeezes the opening of the depression so that nothing can be found again, only bread. The hole closes.

Like this, he continues, until he is patting pants filled with more than just rolls, licking a mouth empty of everything except blood. He uses that mouth to smile — head swiveled behind his shoulder as he mounts the stairs, pinning the banister — and it’s like facing a dead fish cut up: pale pink and leaking. His gums are swollen but smooth as bought stone, shiny like greased linoleum.

When he finally leaves, following his family to bed, all his teeth are inside all the rolls. But I am still here, caught in the frame. I am still inside the walls, listening to those teeth chatter.

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SARAH PERRIN — Sarah received an MFA in creative writing from New York University. She is the fiction editor of Washington Square Review. Previously, she was an assistant editor at Alfred A. Knopf. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Granta, Passages North, and Pithead Chapel. Her short story “Just Girls” won the 2025 DISQUIET Literary Prize for Fiction. She has been supported by Community of Writers. 

Art by crawwlspace — Chicago native crawwlspace is a self-taught interdisciplinary artist, creating stunning pieces that are equal parts spooky, unusual, and beautiful. After graduating in 2016 from Emerson College, crawwlspace quickly discovered her passion in various art styles such as acrylic painting, and collage art, as well as pen, charcoal, and watercolor pieces. To this day, crawwlspace continues to find beauty in the macabre and expand her talents within her art. Many of her notable pieces have been shown at galleries across Chicago since 2022.