Polishing Hot Teeth

The first time Dora laid eyes on Sal, she fell disgustingly, embarrassingly in love. Between the lightning bolts shaved into the side of her head and the 350 pounds of swagger in a buxom 250-pound body, Sal was the hottest shit for light-years in any direction and she knew it. Sal’s crooked-toothed grin and arched eyebrow filled Dora’s head with images of late-night dancing and adrenalined-up orbital races and the things she’d like to do with those strong, scarred hands.

But that was four years ago. This time, when Sal slid into the Toad Anus Rest Stop and caught her eye across the room, Dora only had one thought:

Oh, fuck. Sal’s here to kill me.

That’s the opening to my story “Hot Teeth,” published last year in Space Wizard Science Fantasy’s rip-roaring anthology Lesbians in Space: Where No Man Has Gone Before. It’s not the first story I ever sold, nor even the first pro sale, but it’s probably the story I’m proudest of. And as far as I was aware, nobody else had read it.

I did enjoy a particularly self-indulgent reading of the story at my birthday party last year, plying my friends and acquaintances with whiskey and pulled pork before reading the whole dang thing aloud. The smiles and no-kidding laughter that were teased out by Dora and Sal’s hijinks warmed my heart like nothing else.

But as far as I knew, the only ones who’d read “Hot Teeth” were me, my writing group, and a small group of queer Kansans with nothing better to do on a Thursday night in April. I’m not much for social media (though I’d like to think I’m worth a follow on Bluesky), so if anyone in the wider world enjoyed “Hot Teeth,” I hadn’t heard about it.

That changed last weekend, when I saw that “Hot Teeth” was selected for Locus’ 2025 Recommended Reading List, meaning for the first time I have a story that’s up for the Locus Award. According to the list, my story was selected from over 1,000 eligible works by “Locus reviewers, editors, and columnists; outside reviewers; and other professionals and well-known critics of genre fiction and non-fiction.” While I’ve got some incredibly stiff competition in the short story category, mine is the only story in Lesbians in Space that made it to the list.

So what do people like about “Hot Teeth”? I might not be particularly qualified to answer that, but at least I can say why I like this story.

I like to think I’m a pretty funny person. (My friends and my students certainly seem to think so, at least.) Despite that, my writing tends toward the grim, melancholy, even bleak. Some of that is probably the vestiges of my aspirations toward Serious Literature, which can often be depressingly earnest. More of it is the fact that there’s a lot of depressing stuff happening in the world right now, and I end up working through all that through my fiction. There are days when I have a very hard time imagining a better world—quite a lot of them, in fact.

Like most everything I write, “Hot Teeth” started as a throwaway kernel of an idea in my Notes app, something about a heist featuring a couple of queer space cowboys. When I saw the call for Lesbians in Space, that idea seemed like a fertile place to start. The tone of the collection was one of fun and whimsy, so I gave myself permission to write the heist as wacky as I could make it, and the hell with Serious Literature.

The resulting draft turned out pretty damn wacky. Clowns, dentists, double-crosses, psychedelic mushroom aliens, a butch love triangle—essentially, I tried to cram everything I love in a fun story into “Hot Teeth.” More is more, after all. All told, it only took about two months to outline, draft, revise, and submit a complete, polished manuscript.

“Hot Teeth” is my lightest, silliest story yet—and also the one that’s gotten the most professional recognition, I guess! Maybe people like silly. Maybe the fact that I had so much fun writing it led to people having fun reading it.

Maybe I could do worse than lingering in the sunshine a little longer.

*

(If by some chance you enjoyed “Hot Teeth,” I’d be extremely appreciative if you voted for it in the 2025 Locus Poll, open to all.)