The next morning Mistrial had a brief terror after throwing open the front door and finding a filthy woman curled up on the porch gripping a broom. She figured it to be a migrant from the valley. “Oh shit,” Victory butted in, “she dead?” Mistrial got down close and felt a bare flicker of shallow breath, “I don’t think so.” “Damn.” Victory snorted, “you let me know if she kicks it, I need her for something,” and stomped off into the house loudly announcing that she called dibs on the dead body, any dead body, if there were one now or in the future. “Can you walk?” Mistrial asked, and the woman spread out her thin black hands on the deck and lurched and swayed in confusion. “You sick?” She asked next, and the woman looked up at her with big thyroidal eyes set in delicate pink irritation and made an owl noise at her. A little hoo-hoo, then turned back inward to whatever nausea and exhaustion roiled within. Mistrial hurried down the porch steps and shouted up to Kate’s open window, “Kate! There’s a dyin’ woman on the porch. Can I bring her in?” Kate leaned over the windowsill, brushing her hair, “You know me, darling, whatever misdeeds befall me or my household I visit them back upon their causes - so knock yourself out!” And gave the official handwave of libertine permissiveness. Fuck, thought Mistrial, feeling certain she should have used someone else as a proxy for inviting this person into their home. She helped the stranger off the porch and even carried her up the stairs with only minimal incident, some light bonking, hardly worth the mentioning, then hoisted her into the clawfoot tub in the upstairs bathroom, falling in over her, where she was squooshed right up against that skeletal frame, looking into the stranger’s mouth, its curious ring of clean around the lips as if she had licked all around, and the confused set of snaggled teeth of a singular character. “I like your teeth.” Mistrial whispered. The stranger groaned, and she got up off her. “Breath stinks like a barnyard though.” She hovered over her a while, just fretting, not certain what to do, but with near religious conviction that this soul had been delivered into her hands just as she had been delivered into Kate’s. And a brilliant future unfolded in her mind’s eye where this person was her own personal priestess, administering her doctrine, in her covenstead. Incensed with imagined power, to hold this totally helpless individual at the mercy of her whim, but she shooed these fantastical thoughts away and went down to make some broth for her patient and nabbed a copy of Hair and Teeth by Elizar Thornbrook. “Don’t use that one,” said the Canary, looking up from her encyclopedia, “it’s bunk.” Mistrial looked at the cover. Elizar Thornbrook smirked back at her, his jet black hair split down the middle and cascading in wet-looking artificial curls. “I like this one,” Mistrial said, “I like the pictures.” “Elizar Thornbrook was not a real doctor, he was a barber. It can’t really be said he was a fraud because he believed in his own practice enough to die at the hands by his own fool methods.” “How old was he? When he died?” Mistrial asked. “Seventy-eight.” She rolled her eyes, “plenty old, Canary.” “We have actual medical texts,” the Canary hopped up and pulled a ragged leather tome from the stack and hefted it open on the table. Mistrial obligingly parsed the tiny script in the yellowed, moldy pages of that massive tome, maddening byzantine in its arrangements, its words and scent promising migraines, then looked again to Elizar Thornbrook’s smirk of pure confidence - the man had never known defeat. “This is a matter for adults, little Canary,” Mistrial swerved out the room. The girl followed behind, “May I watch?” “I think you are too innocent to witness such matters.” “I know where the extractors are,” she said. Extractors, thought Mistrial, that sounds like a real leg-up, “Very well,” she said, with a crisp gesture of authority. But in ten minutes time she regretted onboarding this child, as when she was knuckle deep in the stranger’s mouth wrenching at a stubborn molar with blood pouring down the front of it, the Canary’s hysteric pleas to stop and that she was doing it wrong, that everything was wrong, proved considerable distraction to the medical process. “The other three came out like soup bones,” Mistrial cursed, “Canary get a hold of yourself. This is real women’s work.” And with one final devil-may-care wrenching motion she snapped the molar into several pieces ensuring a long, tedious removal process of the shrapnel, made worse by the deep-seated sobbing and moaning of the patient and the hysterics of a child who had overstepped the natural boundaries between age-groups. The next day the woman’s head swelled up and was rubbery and pink like a big, sad squid. “I think you gave her encephalitis,” whispered the Canary. Mistrial rallied against this accusation, “do not doubt the miraculous healing powers of the human body,” though her voice sounded distant and waning even to herself. Her reward for this venture, the black and rotten molars and pieces of teeth she kept in a handkerchief and sometimes smelled them in bed, disgusted and fascinated. The little jewels of her care. The glistening gilt of a job well done and the power she helmed over this innocent.