The butcher's son, Clovis, had crooked fingers. Thick-knuckled and perpetually smeared with grease, they curled around cleavers like they'd been born that way. His left pinky was permanently bent from the time a side of beef slipped off its...

We keep them in bone-light jars, these grins of silt and vanished teeth— each curve a fossil of forgotten laughter, amber-stung with time’s slow syrup.Some are whispers etched in clay, crack-lipped and crow’s-footed, in the hollows of unmarked graves,...