In the sweltering heat of Santa Rosa de Lima, where the air hung thick with the scent of rotting mangoes and incense, Magdalena found her grandmother’s ancient tweezers buried in a dusty jewelry box. The rusted metal felt unnaturally warm against her palm, almost alive, pulsing with memories of countless extractions.

“Abuela used these to pull teeth,” her mother had once told her, voice dropping to a whisper. “Not just teeth from the living.”

The tweezers had belonged to her grandmother, Isabel, a woman who spoke to the dead through their discarded parts. In life, she had been the town’s dentist; in death, she became its ghost story.

“You shouldn’t touch those,” Carmen, her elderly neighbor, warned through the iron bars of her window. Her eyes were clouded with cataracts, but they fixed on Magdalena with unsettling precision. “Some tools remember too much.”

But Magdalena couldn’t resist. That night, under the glow of candles that cast dancing shadows on water-stained walls, she held the tweezers up to the light. The metal caught the flame’s reflection and seemed to wink.

“I know you’re there, Abuela,” she whispered, her words carried away by the warm breeze that perpetually swept through the town’s narrow streets.

The tweezers twitched in her hand.

“Your grandmother,” Carmen told her over coffee the next morning, “she pulled secrets from the dead’s teeth. Each extraction revealed their final thoughts, their unfulfilled promises.” She crossed herself. “But the dead don’t like giving up their secrets.”

That evening, Magdalena found bloody fingerprints on her mirror, though she lived alone. The tweezers grew warmer with each passing hour, and she could hear whispers emanating from them when the night was at its darkest.

“I just want to know you,” Magdalena told the empty room. “I never had the chance.”

The tweezers began to move on their own, scratching messages into her wooden table: “Knowledge has teeth.”

Days blurred together. Magdalena stopped leaving her house, fascinated by the growing collection of mysterious scratches and whispers. Carmen’s warnings became more urgent, but they fell on deaf ears.

“Your grandmother didn’t die naturally,” Carmen finally confessed through the window. “The dead came for what was theirs.”

But by then, Magdalena had already begun to understand. The tweezers had shown her visions: her grandmother extracting not just teeth, but memories, secrets, lies. Each extraction a violation, each secret a debt to be paid.

On the seventh night, as moths beat their wings against her windows and the air grew thick with the scent of decay, Magdalena felt the tweezers grow cold for the first time. The whispers ceased. The scratching stopped.

She waited for something more - a revelation, a visit, a sign. But like so many things in Santa Rosa de Lima, where reality blurred with fantasy and the living danced with the dead, nothing more came. The tweezers became just tweezers again, their mysteries retreating like morning mist before the sun.

Carmen found her the next day, sitting at her table, surrounded by incomprehensible scratches and cold coffee. The tweezers lay innocently beside her, just another inheritance in a town where the past never truly dies, but simply waits for the next generation to disturb its rest.

“Some questions,” Carmen said softly, “are better left unasked.” She gathered the tweezers and dropped them into the sea, where they disappeared without a splash, leaving only ripples that seemed to whisper ancient secrets to the waves.