by Andrea Lisowski
“Stone Teeth” placed fourth in Southern New Hampshire University’s 2025 Fall Fiction Contest.
Half a mile behind the Cathedral of St. Casimir, there’s a sad excuse for a waterfall. It’s three feet high and twenty feet long of stratified shale, iron gray, stream bed pitted like a tooth soaked in sugar. It doesn’t rain much in eastern Kansas, but it rains enough for the bluntnose minnows to hatch in spring. They live their whole lives in the stream behind the church, a supernova of life and death, and life, again.
Caroline spends many Sunday afternoons there once church lets out and while her parents are occupied by their friends in the congregation. The internet told her that bluntnose minnows can live up to five years; she doubts most of these fish make it to two. The summer crush of heat turns the stream into a cluster of disconnected micro-lakes, each with their own school of bluntnose Loch Ness monsters soon to go extinct when the water dries up. But every year, it starts all over again, with soft, little, see-through eggs.
Caroline is fourteen years old, and everyone likes to tell her she is a girl by telling she is not being girly enough.
Fix your hair, Caroline.
Try your make up like this, Caroline.
Wear this dress, Carol.
Carol—what her father calls her—is the only girl she doesn’t want to be, so she tries not to be any of them. She prefers green to pink, she won’t paint her nails unless the polish is black, and she would truly, deeply, rather cut her hair off than ever straighten it again. She has all the angst of her age, and at least twice the loneliness.
This Sunday afternoon, Caroline sits next to the plunge pool in an alcove sheltered by trees. The waterfall is only a trickle, and a breeze stirs the floating leaf litter of a disquiet autumn. She’s watching the minnows swim. Their fragile silver bodies tuck in and out of the rocks, around a sunken branch, and sometimes they touch the surface with their lips. She doesn’t know why they show themselves like that, but she knows why they hide.
The internet says they have predators: the crackles—a kind of bird—and painted turtles. And Caroline knows because she understands, because she has a predator, too.
This is our special secret, Carol. You promised not to tell anyone, remember?
All animals hide, even the dangerous ones, especially the dangerous ones. Sometimes, Caroline comes along tufts of fur attached to bloody, gooey skin next to dog-like impressions in the mud. She wants to be one of them, a coyote, a beast with teeth enough to bite, with no one to answer to but Mother Moon.
Caroline takes a smooth white rock from the pool, pretends it’s a piece of Mother Moon… wonders what the priest would say to that… chucks the stone back into the water and doesn’t care what the priest would say. She doesn’t listen to him anyway. He talks about fathers too much; he says that God sees everything, but God can’t even see the heavy paw on her leg in His own house during prayers she doesn’t say, during songs she won’t sing.
Her mother believes it’s a phase, that she’s moody for the sake of her age and not her situation.
What’s with the attitude? Honestly, I swear. You don’t have it half as bad as I did.
Caroline grabs another rock and throws it, hears it plunk and imagines the ripples are a tidal wave to swallow her whole. She looks for more rocks, uses them to build a wall, discovers that the rocks that work best are flat and about the same size. She builds until she has a fortress big enough for her toes, and then her fingers grab around a rock with teeth. She gasps and pulls her hand away. A perfect red bubble grows from her thumb, and she wipes it on her jeans before picking up the rock again, gently this time.
It’s salmon pink and milky ash with black specks. The internet says that pink means potassium, but it isn’t the color that makes this rock unique. It’s the shape, a pointed oval, and the edges, like chipped glass all the way around. Caroline knows immediately what it is. She’s seen pictures of them in her American history textbooks, in giftshops for a few dollars, but she’s never found one, never held it in her hand and remembered that there was a time before metal, people before the pioneers.
They were… the Osage? The Kaw? She can’t remember, but it’s the first thing she’ll ask the internet about when she gets to the computer at home.
She traces the hard fringe, studies every arch and pit, and realizes the arrowhead is broken. It was the tip, newly fractured, that made its mark on her skin. The pain is a sweet howl, a sacrifice to Mother Moon because Caroline is fourteen, and rebellious, and her parents’ religion has nothing on the religion of animals. The waterfall is her church. The dirt, her altar. The pain her prayer that other pain, deeper pain, will stop.
She tests the stone again—she can’t help testing it again—and tries not to squirm as she draws another red line the over raspberry scars on her arm.
“Caroline, time to go!”
Caroline holds the arrowhead tight to her chest as her mother calls for her. She has many gifts from the waterfall, pieces of quartz, a deer bone, a snail shell as big as a quarter, but there is nothing she treasures as much as this. It feels as though the artifact came directly from Mother Moon—a claw of her own, to cut and shred her enemies.
“Carol! Let’s go!”
Again, she rubs her thumb over the fracture, softly this time, and wonders how many beasts her arrowhead has slain, if it was ever used to kill a predator—if it can kill hers.
Category: Competition, Featured, Short Story, SNHU Student