Teeth

Dave cooed to his son as he paced back and forth with the boy in his arms. Back and forth through the narrow strip of fluorescent light cast through the curtain gap. The boy was inconsolable.

‘Probably because of that tooth’, David thought. He held the boy to the window and examined the tooth. He wasn’t sure what he hoped to find and sighed as he brought the boy close. He resumed pacing and muttered comforting babble to the crying boy.

Dave understood why the boy was upset. ‘Toothache’, he thought, ‘is no small thing.’ David had suffered from that pain for the last few weeks, but had neither time nor money to spend on a surprise dental visit. However, his procrastination had paid off as he had awoken that morning with an unexpected lack of pain and a sense of void in his mouth. A pit in his gum revealed the absence of the tooth and, despite searching with his tongue, he never found it. David concluded to himself that he must have swallowed the tooth in his sleep. He absent-mindedly probed at the hole in his gum again–until he felt a nub of firm resistance in the fleshy pit.

A small hard point—‘A piece of tooth?’ He probed at it again and felt a sudden rush of disgust fill his mouth as the sensation of something within his jaw writhed beneath his tongue. The hard point seemed to rise and fall like a heartbeat, a pulse that he did not feel in his gums, but only beneath his tongue and nor could he feel his tongue against his gums—They were numb and completely without feeling.

David returned his crying son to the crib and entered the bathroom with horror rising in his throat. He pulled his lips back and bared his teeth at the mirror. He stared at his gums, mute and horrified. His gums visibly squirmed with worm-like tendrils that slipped across one another in a frenzy of activity. Vomit rose from his gut and he lurched over the sink to fill the bowl with sticky yellow sludge. Amongst the vomit was the missing white tooth with a thin black worm-like tail affixed at the root that spun around the porcelain.

David stared at it, horrified—terrified. Then felt the trilling of something in his jaw, the sound reverberated in his ears and he felt the sudden urge to lurch over the sink again. Another wave of vomit filled his throat and nostrils, and more of his teeth fell into the bowl. Their whipping tails slipped between his lips as he spat in disgust and revulsion.

The teeth seemed to sense the darkness of the drain hole and slipped toward it in a mess of bile and blood then vanished into the blackness. David stayed there for a time, poised over the sink and drain, waiting for another surge of vomit to throw more horrors into the bowl. David looked up at the mirror to see that a single white tooth remained at the front of his bottom jaw. He couldn’t look away from it and waited for it to move, to push through his gums. He waited until he couldn’t wait another second and then with a horrified cry–he gripped it between finger and thumb and forced it forward with a gut surging crack and lifted it free. David half spit the broken enamel into the sink, accompanied by a pile of bloody red spittle.

He slumped onto the floor in the bathroom and listened to the hum of the fluorescent light outside. He stared at the crib from where he sat, stared at his son’s face between the slats. Stared at the boy’s gum where that single white tooth stared back.