Thirty-Three Teeth by Colin Cotterill Page A

tell me where I might find Comrade Houey.”
    She looked up at the clock on the wall.
    “I don’t think you can. He’s preparing for…for the…” she didn’t know what to call it “…the thing.”
    “The thing?”
    Miss Latsamy looked across at the lady at the desk opposite, who raised a well-crayoned eyebrow. She said nothing.
    “It doesn’t really have a name, I don’t think, Uncle. Comrade Houey called all the shamans to a meeting in the Town Hall. Anyone who refuses will be arrested. They all have to bring their paraphernalia with them, because there’s going to be a…”
    “A thing.”
    “Right.”
    “What time’s the meeting?”
    “Seven. But it’s only for shamans.”
    “I wouldn’t miss it for the world, Miss Latsamy. Don’t you know I’m the embodiment of a thousand-and-fifty-year-old holy man from Khamuan?”
    She eyed him up and down. “You don’t look it.”
    “It’s very kind of you to say so.”

The Daughter That Lived
    Teacher Chanmee arrived at the morgue early in the afternoon. She was there on the bed of a pickup truck when Dtui got back from lunch.
    “Hot, isn’t it?”
    “Damned hot.”
    “This is for you, Mrs.”
    The hospital driver was keen to get a signature on his chit and offload the body.
    “If you called me ‘Miss,’ I might think about it.”
    Mr. Geung arrived just as she was signing. He wheeled out the morgue trolley and took the new guest to the examination room. As he was preparing to slot her into the freezer, Dtui came up behind him and looked at the body.
    “See that, Mr. Geung? Those marks are almost identical to the ones on Auntie See.”
    He continued to prepare the teacher for storage.
    “Let…let’s w…wait for the Comrade Doctor.”
    “Wouldn’t you trust me to cut her up, pal?”
    “Dr. Siri is a…a doctor.”
    “And what am I?”
    “A girl.”
    “What about when I come back from four years’ study in the Soviet Union with a coroner’s certificate? Will I still be just a girl then?”
    “No.”
    “Good.”
    “Then you…you…you’ll be an old girl.”
    He kept his face straight for as long as was humanly possible, then snorted his laugh. She picked up the bone cleaver and chased him around the dissection table.
    Dtui was the unbreakable one. She was the survivor of a litter of children who all left life before puberty. Had they lived, she would now have five brothers and five sisters. But they hadn’t been as lucky or as hardy or wily as she proved to be. She went beyond the point that had taken most of her siblings: the crossroads where childbirth and death meet. Without the assistance of immunization, her body had fought off all the usual childhood diseases, and the curse of accidents had passed over her roof to give grief to the next household.
    Her mother, Manoluk, had invested eleven lives of love into her surviving daughter. When her soldier husband was lost in one more meaningless battle, she brought her to Vientiane. Here she cooked and cleaned and washed for strangers and pushed Dtui through school. It wasn’t until her daughter stood on the platform receiving her nursing diploma from the wife of the viceroy that she allowed herself to relax.
    Cirrhosis took her almost immediately. It was as if the bacteria itself had waited for Dtui to graduate. Years of bad diet and poor living conditions took their toll on her tired body, and by her daughter’s third paycheck, Manoluk was already too weak to work.
    The morgue position paid only a dollar a month more than the wards, but for Dtui every dollar counted. She didn’t particularly like the idea at first. She’d entered nursing to keep people alive, not put them in jars. But the morgue dollar and another from overtime paperwork helped pay for the drugs that kept her ma alive.
    The previous coroner had been a kind man, a pencil-thin bachelor trained in France. He helped Dtui out whenever he could, but he was helping many others on his modest salary and she didn’t like