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4 Vulgar Remedies: Tooth and Salt After extraction, a tooth is smothered in salt and burned to stop a wild animal from finding it. Because if a fox gnawed it you’d grow a grey fang and if a bear chewed it you’d wear its yellow snaggletooth. You’ve taken me to the exhibit called Vulgar Remedies: Belief, Knowledge and Hypersymbolic Cognition in L.A.’s Museum of Jurassic Technology. We’d married three weeks earlier on a seaside cliff. If a person doesn’t burn her childhood teeth, I read on the exhibit’s glass case, she’s cursed to search for them after death in a pail of blood. Suddenly, I knew what I should’ve written in my wedding vow: how forever feels too vague a word, that I’ll stay beside you until we rise in the shine of our fangs, our silver pails filled with blood. We’ll recover all we’ve lost: our bodies, the blue-slate roof of our home, each frail and traitorous, old, unsalted bone. ...

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