by Matthew Haws
bacteria, bitterness, bronze, coincidence, company, tongue
My teeth are terrible, always have been, and old age hasn’t made them any more pleasant. Several have rotted clear through and the most healthy of their fellows are a sickly yellow shade. But you won’t catch me going to the dentist, not even if each and every one of them should fall out and leave me looking like the worst kind of cliche, the doddering old man with no teeth, smacking my gums together thoughtlessly as if remembering the crunch of apples from a boyhood long gone. I won’t get back in a dentist chair. Not ever.
I was six years old, and already terrified enough of the whole idea. My mother had led me by the hand into the strange office and introduced me to the town dentist, a large man with crimson cheeks and a round nose like Santa. They showed me all around, to prove there was no reason to be frightened, but their murmurred words of reassurance did little to calm my anxiety. The dentist’s chair looked even then like nothing so much as a torturers device, complete with a nearby tray of an assortment of pointy, curved, sharp objects whose functions my tiny brain could not comprehend. Then, too, there was the odor of the place, a slick sterile smell, all the comforting bacteria dead, that reminded me of the hospital were Nana had died; not a pleasant association.
I expressed my terror in the only way I have ever been able to, through perfect silence. Taking this for consent, I was placed in the chair while the dentist and my mother chatted about pleasantries.The dentist fiddled with each instrument in turn, preparing them for God knows what depravity upon my helpless and innocent body. My mother laughed at something he said, the heartless harpy. I tried to raise a hand in protest, but my limbs would not obey me. I tried to speak, but my tongue was numb.
At length, the dentist indicated that he was ready to begin. I squeaked. My mother patted me on the head and then excused herself to the ladies room. I recognized her abandonment for what it was. She could not bear to watch whatever the man in the white coat was going to do to me. Maybe she would never come back. I had been sold to the dentist for his insane experiments.
The dentist lifted a device, the pointy curved one that I feared the most. I gurgled. At this moment, the telephone rang distantly. It seemed to distract the dentist, who paused to listen. The phone rang again, and then again. I suppose now that there was normally an assistant, but he or she did not seem to be in their proper place. The dentist told me to wait patiently and he would soon return, and then he left the room.
Leaving me just one glimmer of a chance. My power over my body returned and I slipped down off the chair with little grace, collapsing into a little pile knees first. I slowly regained my feet and tottered out of the room into the hallway. I could hear the dentist speaking to someone on the phone in one direction, towards the front of the office where we had entered, so I went the other way where several more doors offered the hint of shelter. I had gone no further than a few steps, however, when the sound of a flushing toilet from one of the nearby doors presaged the return of my mother, who I now bitterly knew to be my enemy. I had no desire to encounter her and thus be returned to the custody of the mad dentist, so I opened the nearest door and entered. I had to jump just a little to grab hold of the door knob and twist it open.
Inside was another room much like the one I had just escaped, complete with a torture chair and, to my horror, another victim. He was a very old man, not only with wrinkles but with tough leathery skin like that on my elbows, only all over. He wheezed when he breathed. He had gone nearly bald, only a few wisps of hair at his temples remaining. His eyes, as they turned to me in surprise, were unnaturally large and turned up in alarm. His nose was enormous, as many old people’s are, dwarfing the dentist’s Santa-nose by a fair margin.
He smiled at me, showing teeth. I say smiled, for that seems now to be the most likely explanation, but it did not seem like a smile then. His teeth were horrid and unfathomable. The top had been worn down to little more than nubs, but unnaturally all in a perfect line together (I wonder now if they were dentures, but if so only the upper teeth were false). The bottom row were jagged, with some teeth pointed like a fencepost, or like little daggers, and some were not even real at all but some kind of implant the color of bronze. This was no little old man waiting for the dentist, not to me. Not to my little fear-fueled brain. This was nothing less than the long-expected monster, whose presence I had often sensed out of the corner of my eye, or on the back of neck, just out of sight, under the bed, or in the closet, the unexplained danger that had set my heart into gallops since as long as I could remember.
I ran back into the hallway. I think I was screaming. My mother certainly screamed as I barreled past her, shoving aside her hands when she tried to embrace me. I heard her stumble back against the wall as I ran. The dentist dropped the phone as I passed and scurried after me. I made it as far as the front door, all made of glass, before they caught up to me. Outside by some strange coincidence there was a man walking hand in hand with a little girl, perhaps about my age. She saw me, pounding against the glass and then lifted and pulled away by two adults, and her lips formed a little round O of surprise and horror. Save yourself! Never enter this horrid place! I tried to mentally signal to her.
I remember little after that. But I would not consent to return to the dentist, even as I grew older, even as the truth of what had happened became clear to me, even after I had learned that monsters cannot be real, not in this era of science and logic. But I will not go back. And now I am old, and my teeth have become a nightmare, and I have gone bald and my hair has all deserted me, except for the little wisps at my temples, and sometimes I stare in the mirror and wonder about monsters, and how they define us, and how we can never escape them.
