X-rays of my little nibbles hung up like laundry. The dentist says this dark line here is the root, creeping toward the bone and you know what the bones are hollow. I think how many hundred million meals, not even all whole ones, went over that transom. A waterfall of vanished sensation, ghosts I sat across from, chewing their fat. He says do you want to see where the pulp has made a diseased core? Standing there pointing, hands in gloves—I feel the loneliness of the dentists. We are so glad to leave them. At the party they hold the cup and think, spit. Even kisses are carriers. Hovering over my tilted self with the mosquito drill, little screams for mercy buzz my face. He cannot stop himself explaining how the long roots march to protect themselves. Here we see the density on display, there the void that has no form. Still, you don’t want to hurt his feelings. His whole day hurts. We’re two thirds of the way the dentist says. Through my life? I feel what has rode hard and put back wet settle in me. Even some unmentionables by the way. I know my own tongue even when it tries to act like a depressor. I have driven off mine enemy with my fangs. The jackhammer sends me sloshing. My fingers have gone numb from clenching and all down the canals and pathways the connections throb with cells, opening and slammed shut. What my brain perceives as pain. What my pain thinks it’s doing for me. Such a system I present, complex and confused, the logical product of chaos. I bite down. Last time I was here the chubby cleaner said he was leaving with his wife, another hygienist, for the wilds of Montana. I say is it easier when you both have the same day. He says we lay in bed, eating ice cream, comparing notes on people just slathering denticles with paste and imagining it will work out. They aren’t really swingers but they did host a floss party. At least I think that’s what he said. I could not hear over my broken crowns that wept.
MERRIDAWN DUCKLER is a writer and visual artist from Oregon and author of Interstate from dancing girl press, Idiom from Harbor Review, Misspent Youth from rinky dink press, and the flash fiction collection Arrangement from Southernmost Books. Her essays have been published in At Length and Buckman Journal. She won the Invisible City flash creative nonfiction contest judged by Heather Christle.
The art that appears alongside this piece is “Can You Hear Me?” by JONATHAN KENT ADAMS.