It Comes to Dinner

Every year on the coldest night of March, Mara sets the table for two.

She does not check the weather. She does not need to. The cold finds her.

It comes in small ways first—the windowpanes sweating from the inside, the houseplants bowing their heads, the dog refusing to cross the kitchen threshold. By dusk, frost has begun to lace the corners of the dining room ceiling, delicate as breath on a mirror.

Mara lays out the same things every year: the blue linen cloth, ironed flat; two white plates with a thin silver rim; her grandmother’s heavy cutlery; two glasses of red wine poured to the widest part of the bowl.

And in the center, between the candles, a small porcelain dish holding a single tooth.

It is not hers.

The first year, she thought the ritual was a joke.

They had been married six months when Elias told her about it, laughing in the way he did when he wasn’t sure if he should. “It’s old,” he said. “Older than my grandmother. On the coldest night of March, you invite love to sit down with you. If it comes, you’ll feel it. If it doesn’t… well.”

“Well?” she pressed.

“You’ll know.”

She assumed it meant something metaphorical. A meditation. A prayer.

But that first March, the house went cold in a way the thermostat could not explain. The candles guttered sideways. The wine in the second glass trembled, as if someone had tapped the stem.

Elias squeezed her hand under the table.

“Don’t look up right away,” he whispered.

“Why?”

“Because it doesn’t like to be stared at.”

Mara laughed then. She remembers that clearly—how her laughter echoed too loudly in the dining room. But she kept her eyes lowered. She counted the beats of her heart. She felt, unmistakably, the impression of someone sitting in the empty chair across from her.

The cushion compressed. The air shifted. A breath—not hers, not Elias’s—moved over the candle flame and made it bow.

They did not speak to it. That was one of the rules.

Instead, they spoke to each other.

They told the story of how they met. They thanked whatever it was for finding them. They promised to choose each other again.

When Mara finally dared to lift her gaze, the wine in the second glass had lowered by a careful inch.

Elias looked radiant. As if he had been forgiven for something.

That summer, they were incandescent with happiness.

—

The second year, they argued beforehand.

Elias had been distant. Gone longer hours. His phone face-down more often than not.

“You don’t actually believe in it,” Mara said, folding the blue linen with sharper movements than necessary. “It’s just tradition.”

“It’s not about belief,” Elias said. “It’s about keeping it.”

“Keeping what?”

He hesitated. “Us.”

That night, the cold came faster.

The dog scratched at the door until Mara let it outside, where it stayed, whining, until morning.

They sat. They poured. They placed the tooth in its porcelain dish.

The tooth had been Elias’s baby tooth, passed down through generations. Each firstborn in his family gave one to the ritual when they married. A piece of themselves, he’d explained. Something small but permanent.

“Why a tooth?” she’d asked once.

“Because it’s the only part of you that doesn’t feel when it’s taken.”

She hadn’t liked that answer.

The chair across from them creaked before they felt the cold breath.

This time, when they spoke their story, they stumbled. They corrected each other on details. They contradicted the memory of their first kiss.

The candle flames burned lower, thinner.

When Mara looked up—too soon, perhaps—the second glass was empty.

Not lowered.

Empty.

Elias’s hand trembled in hers. He did not look radiant. He looked claimed.

That spring, he left.

Not dramatically. Not cruelly. Just slowly, like a tide receding.

He said he needed something more. Something he couldn’t name.

Mara watched him pack. She did not ask him to stay.

On the night he walked out for good, she found the porcelain dish in the back of the cabinet. The tooth was gone.

—

The third year, she swore she wouldn’t set the table.

But the cold found her anyway, like a reminder.

It slipped under the door and through the vents. It froze the surface of her tea in its mug. It drew a pale rim around her reflection in the mirror.

She tried to ignore it.

At seven, the dining room light flickered.

At eight, one of the dining chairs scraped an inch backward on its own.

By nine, Mara had laid the blue linen down.

“I didn’t agree to this,” she muttered to the empty room.

The porcelain dish was still empty.

She considered placing something else in it. A strand of her hair. A drop of blood.

Instead, she walked to the bathroom and pressed her tongue against the back of her molar.

It hurt more than she expected.

Teeth do feel when they are taken, she realized. Or maybe it was only the anticipation of loss that hurt.

She gripped the sink. She thought of Elias’s face that first year—how bright he’d looked. She thought of the second year—the hollowed version of him.

“Is that what you do?” she whispered to the house. “You take what we offer and then you take more?”

The cold did not answer.

At ten, she sat alone at the table.

She poured one glass of wine.

The chair across from her shifted.

The candle flame bent, obedient.

She kept her eyes lowered.

“I loved him,” she said into the quiet. “I don’t know if that matters to you.”

The wood beneath her fingertips felt damp, as if something unseen rested its palms there too.

“I would like to keep loving,” she said. “But not like that.”

Silence pressed in.

The cold deepened.

Mara lifted her gaze slowly, deliberately, breaking the rule.

The chair across from her was no longer empty.

It was not Elias. Not anyone she knew.

It was a shape the size of a person, composed of absence. A distortion, like heat shimmer inverted. Within it, faintly, were impressions—faces overlapping, mouths speaking without sound, hands reaching through each other.

All the versions of love that had ever sat at this table.

The second glass—though she had not poured one—stood filled.

And in the porcelain dish lay a tooth.

Not Elias’s.

Not hers.

It was smaller. Sharper. Still wet at the root.

Mara felt, with a clarity that frightened her, that the ritual had never been about inviting love.

It was about feeding it.

Every year, it came to see if it had been starved.

Every year, someone offered a piece of themselves so it would not grow hungry enough to devour the rest.

The shape across from her leaned forward.

The candle flames extinguished in unison.

In the dark, she felt a gentle pressure against her jaw. A testing.

An invitation.

Mara reached for the porcelain dish.

Instead of pushing her tongue to her molars, she picked up the tooth already waiting there.

“You don’t get another,” she said, and placed it between her teeth.

The shape stilled.

Cold flooded her mouth. The taste was metallic, ancient.

She bit down.

There was no pain—only a crack like splitting ice.

When she opened her eyes, the dining room was warm.

The frost had receded. The chair across from her stood empty, upright, untouched.

The porcelain dish was gone.

In the weeks that followed, no one left her.

Not friends. Not lovers. Not even the dog, who returned to sleeping at the foot of her bed.

When she fell in love again—years later—it felt different. Quieter. Less ravenous.

On the coldest night of March, the house stayed warm.

But sometimes, when she laughs too brightly at the dinner table, she feels something small and hard shift behind her smile, as if waiting to be swallowed whole.