I was sore of teeth, so when you tapped me on Bleecker, I tried not to look at your mouth. Please ask me for nothing but directions, I didn’t say. I couldn’t give you those either, but I had a machine that could. I was on my way to Penn Station, coming from a dog park, where I had witnessed a vicious fight—teeth in skin, water on fur, blood on cement, owners at war. Bystanders yelled obscene instructions, lacing the scene with tragicomedy. The playtime had been civil until two big dogs lunged, mauling the little dog with incomprehensible speed. All the humans considered it a geopolitical metaphor.

You were standing on the sidewalk, waiting for me to talk, like this was my idea. I had never met you before, but as you evaluated my body, I wanted to confess that I don’t have a dog; I just go to dog parks to relax. Joke’s on me, I could have said. I wanted to confess that in the summer, in this city, I feel like a suburban deer, fated either to be hunted or hit by a car before I can successfully reproduce. Too Midwestern to ignore you altogether, I couldn’t move. You could overpower me if you tried—that wasn’t irrelevant. It’s never irrelevant. My jaw was sore and you were a stranger.

You’ve got a nice smile, you said, although I wasn’t smiling. Then you described my shapes in positive terms and requested the usual coordinates. My number. Your teeth were perfect and this script might have worked for you before. Sorry, I fibbed. In a rush. Like punctuality was the thing. No reason to be scared of me, you said. It’s just that I’m late for something, I replied. July hurled itself through trash, mouths, and cotton. What’s wrong with you? you beamed. Can’t you take a compliment?

I missed my train. As usual, Penn Station answered the question: What if a panic attack were a place? People were screaming and nobody cared. People were starving and nobody cared. I pulled to the shoulder of the apocalyptic room of screens and cried. When I looked up, you were standing over me. A police officer. You were strong, I was a disaster; both of us consenting clichés. You asked, Why are you crying? You said, The ground is dirty. You offered me a hand and plucked me from the floor. Found me another train, procured me a seat in Business Class for free, and stood beside me until it arrived. I felt unstable, waterlogged with luck. The heat on the platform was otherworldly. You described suicides and terrorist plots, flexing as you spoke. My suitcase waited at my feet. Your gun waited on your belt.

After you led me into the compartment, you touched my hip and kissed the corner of my mouth. I froze like an opossum. Didn’t back away, slap you, or yell. I waited for the kiss to pass as though it were a wasp. Our interaction up until that point had had the narrative arc of porn, so I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was.

You handed me your card. Don’t be a stranger, you said.

I wanted to leave New York; it did not occur to me to determine what else I wanted. I had never been in Business Class before.

But as soon as the train starts to move, I exit the compartment and take a seat in the café car. My mother texts me a photo of a baby that shares some of our genes. The baby was born with teeth, and it looks so wrong, but his parents are proud, like it was their superlative pregnancy that sprouted the crowns. Natal teeth only occur in about one out of every two-thousand births, the internet explains. Perhaps this baby will learn to eat without hurting, but its mother will feed no matter what. It can be a shock if your baby is born with teeth, confirms a medical website, unhelpfully. Under the photo, my own mother texts: God bless you. Cherub emoji.

Across from me, a boy with wax fangs is trying to scare his father, who is on a call. Stop it, his father mouths, then leaves the booth. The boy turns to his little brother and scares him instead.

What a shock, I text my mother, about the natal teeth.

You were the man on the street, and you were the police officer in Penn Station, but you were not the astrophysicist I met at the party. Before my date with him, I dabbed rosewater in the crooks of my knees. He detects substellar companions that orbit nearby stars, paying little attention to the stars themselves, and maybe that’s why I tried to make my appeal peripheral. We split the mussels. Split the bill. Split the night. He traced our solar system on my back. His knowledge was expansive, and he could see well in the dark, but detection takes time and technology. Warm breeze through his window, cello on the street below, eucalyptus in the cocktails. I invited every piece of his knowledge to enter me, because I find education erotic. His anatomy was built to fight or row, neither of which he did. I don’t want to hurt you, he said in the sheets. He was choosing, over and over again, not to kill me, and this was the thought that escorted my pleasure to its summit.

Why? I asked him afterward, loopy and euphoric. There was joy all over the night, like perfume shattered open in a suitcase. How? I asked him. He made good jokes about astrology. He explained a complex phenomenon in quantum mechanics without visual aid. I woke with a sore jaw. I had a dream all my teeth fell out, he said. Does that happen to you? He fed me avocado, coffee, and peaches. Foods we could eat without chewing.

You should get one, my friend texted two weeks later, when I told her I was worried. Worst pain of your life for thirty seconds and a day. Like a jaw to your uterus. But then you belong to yourself.

Tonight I’m too young to travel alone. I sip Chardonnay from a plastic Amtrak cup, blessing the WiFi for its shittiness, which frees me to watch men in suits order tonic, gin, and tiny pizzas. Tonight I am the last woman alive. The businessmen clutch briefcases of math and joke like husbands, like fathers—good ones, with static in their hair. I want the shock, want to pull a husband by the ear—his lobe between my teeth—and whisper: I can tell when I’m ovulating because credit card insertions strike me as sexual. But tonight I am too old to break something for fun.

When I snapped at the dinner party—someone used the phrase infestation of homeless people—my friend said: Excuse her, she’s teething.

It’s true that the dentist wants my wisdom teeth, that I won’t let him have them.

In the waiting room, the yellow toys had bite marks like pores in their plastic. I was called twice before I heard my name. The doctor was called White. The pill was called Mifepristone. The astrophysicist was never called. In Catholic school, they make you watch a video, replay it flinching from the surgical tool. It’s so rare to shed an accident. I searched for proof of it in the blood and the cramp—binderclamp to the abdomen—and I could feel myself lose an afternoon, but I couldn’t feel myself lose that question mark of cells, substellar and pitted in the dark.

I was not singular to you, and so you don’t get to be singular, either. We had met years before you tapped my shoulder on Bleecker. In a small French town, after midnight, you herded me into an alley with two friends. On our first date, you pinned me to the mattress when I said I’d like to leave. You were my boss, reaching for my collarbone as the computers powered down. A family friend, thirty years my senior, refusing to shift from park once I gained weight in the right places. In college, you said I owed you a blow job because you paid for my carfare. You followed me for six blocks in Boston, spitting from the throne of your bicycle. You are a judge, your face melting off on television, anger like a wad of gum in your mouth. You are invoking daughters.

What’s wrong with me is that when I see you, I see every dead girl from every house, lake, and screen, and they have no teeth, nothing to help them eat.

In the café car, I read yesterday’s newspaper, which someone left on my seat. They finally found that Alabama toddler who went missing in the eighties. She turned up in Florida as a woman with blue hair and coffee teeth and a Yankee accent in a men’s shirt, but her father recognized her at once. Data shows that in nearly all cases, if the kidnapper is going to kill the child, he or she does so within the first twenty-four hours. What occurs in the twenty-fifth hour—is the murderous impulse simply impatient, or does getting to know the child dissolve it? On the paper, in gray ink, a photo of the missing toddler is printed beside a photo of the found woman. She appears more found in the first, her eyes squinted with so much laughter you can barely see the pupils. Her smile full of baby teeth.

The next time we meet, I will not shake your hand. I will not show my teeth. I am too tired to share a turn around the sun with you, even if our twenty-fifth hour would vivify us to each other. I have been jackhammering politeness out of myself to protect strangers like you for as long as I can remember, and I am spent. Please don’t ask me for directions, I’ll say. Don’t ask me for anything at all. And when I speak to you, I’ll address your bleached, omnivorous teeth.

I turn the page of the newspaper because this article is making my left wisdom tooth crown. From my booth, I can do the crossword, count my organs, pretend to navigate. Sketch a fanged monster and taste metal in the wine. Close my eyes. I remember Michigan, age five, jelly shoes. My body perched on a parlor stool, my eyes staring at a dome of white soft serve, my entire self shamed by the red punctuation in the cream of a tooth I hadn’t felt myself lose. My first.