Ivory Orchard

In Starkweather, the roots don't stop at the jawbone. Dr. Julian Harrow is a man running from a ruined career. Seeking anonymity after a malpractice scandal in Chicago, he accepts a locum position in Starkweather, North Dakota—a town buried under six feet of snow and silence. The clinic, a repurposed slaughterhouse that still smells faintly of iron and bleach, is his purgatory. But Starkweather has a peculiar blessing. The locals, stoic and isolated, all possess blindingly white, perfect teeth. Too perfect. Routine extractions quickly turn into a nightmare when Julian looks at the X-rays. The roots of his patients' teeth are not anchoring them to the jaw; they are growing upward, wrapping around the sinus cavities and hooking into the base of the skull like calcified vines. These are not teeth; they are parasites. And the locals aren't suffering from them—they are cultivating them. As the snowstorms seal the town off from the world, Julian discovers that the "Orchard" growing inside the townspeople is nearing its harvest. The water is laced with bone dust, the pain is a sacrament, and the new doctor isn't there to cure the infection. He is there to be pruned. Trapped in a frozen landscape where the only thing sharper than the cold is the bone growing inside his own head, Julian must decide: cut out the rot and die, or let the Orchard bloom.