Extraction

No matter how tightly I squeezed my eyes shut, the fluorescent glare penetrated my eyelids—a relentless reminder of the situation I was in. Frozen with terror, I could feel the drying trails of tears tightening the stretched skin on either cheek. I imagined the metacarpals in my girlfriend’s hands grinding against one another like drunks on a dance floor. I hoped I wasn’t hurting them, my own too numb to be sure. I felt a familiar pinch, hardly worse than grabbing a thumbtack from the wrong end.

“There, the worst part is over!” the nurse offered in consolation; these words, I would resent for years to come.

I was told that I wouldn’t feel anything but learned the hard way this phrasing was inaccurate at best. While it was true that it didn’t hurt, pain was the only aspect spared. The steel clamps embraced my tooth like a cold hug, trembling in the hands of the inexperienced resident. I wondered which procedure number I would be checking off for the man with his entire first inside my mouth. I felt the power struggle of pressure pushing and pulling deep within my jaw, like some gruesome game of tug-of-war. I felt frozen in a perpetual state of fear, and couldn’t begin to fathom why I hadn’t been adequately prepared for the waking nightmare I had stepped into. 

Time hitched, skipping backward for a moment before thrusting forward full-throttle. I felt tiny strands of my flesh being snapped from their entanglement until, like a tree uprooted from the soil, one part of my body was divorced from another. Slipping from its metal captors and corralled by the semi-circle fence of gnashers, my dismembered part came into contact with my flesh one last time before being removed by Someone’s fingers. The taste of rubber gloves was immediately replaced by the dull sensation of suction, as the loose bone fragments I held balanced on the tip of my tongue were meticulously vacuumed away like crumbs from a carpet. I vaguely heard the murmuring of voices, but couldn’t make out what they were saying over the whirring mask which was, allegedly, feeding nitrous oxide into my nasal cavities. At last, all was still, and I mimicked the repose until it finally felt safe to reopen my eyes.

I stepped outside into the fresh daylight empty-handed with a mouthful of gauze. Before the procedure, I had asked to keep my tooth, but my request was denied. This puzzled me, as I couldn’t understand how taking something from somebody else’s body met the qualifications of “finder’s keepers” instead of straight-up theft.

“You wouldn’t have wanted it anyway,” my girlfriend consoled me, “even the nurse said it looked bummed out.” Even so, never seeing my tooth post-removal created a crater much deeper than the newly acquired gash in my gums.

The days went by, and I took care of my wound as suggested—following a strict regimen of analgesics, along with resentfully swishing with saltwater after smoking, eating, and being on the giving end of oral sex. At first, I was far too afraid to come into contact with the area; but after a few days, my tongue started to explore the crater with the hesitation of toe-testing a chilled body of water. First, I practiced gliding my tongue along the last molar on the right—the one whose neighbor was recently evicted. I felt the slick smooth of the hardened surface, carefully making my way over to the pit of despair just millimeters away. When I finally made contact, it felt awful; gummy, slimy, and way too soft. I hated the way it played suction cup when I lodged my tongue deep enough into the hole, but still found myself doing so again and again.

My nights were plagued by the most vivid nightmares, in which I had to sit awake, very still, as chunks of bone were ripped from my skull until my face was all flesh and loose organs. I would wake up in a swamp of sweat and frantically feel my face for structure before nodding back to sleep, unintentionally inviting the cycle to continue. One night, between routinely searching for my skull and reluctantly dozing back off, I slipped my hand below my pillow to find something small and hard with two long, sharp edges. The nightmare I had woken from just moments prior gave context to my findings, but I reached for the light anyway just to be sure. 

In a flash, the silhouetted object in my hand was illuminated by the bulb’s soft glow, offering confirmation of my assumption. Between my thumb and pointer finger balanced a white chunk of bone, dulled and darkened at the top, with bright white crab claw prongs protruding from the bottom. Still intoxicated with sleepiness, I tossed the tooth onto my bedside table and scrambled over to my full-length mirror, crouching forward and opening my mouth as wide as possible for self-inspection. 

Everything seemed to be in order—all twenty-eight off-white soldiers dutifully stood upright in their designated positions, guarding one small ditch nestled into the bottom right of my jaw. Processing this information carried with it waves of coexisting emotions; relief, worry, suspicion, and confusion all complimented by complete and utter disbelief which only worsened as I returned to the scene. I scanned the flat 2x2 surface of my nightstand and saw nothing. Dropping to my hands and knees, I skimmed the floor, poking around in the nooks and crannies between the belongings under my bed, but the tooth was nowhere to be found.

The series of oddities felt too surreal to have happened, so I deemed myself still half-asleep, crawling back into bed and attempting to put the matter out of my mind. While I could drive myself crazy trying to make sense of the nonsensical occurrences I had just endured, my recurring nightmares felt like a safer state of mind. At least with the dreams, I figured, I knew what to expect.

I awoke the next morning and slinked out of bed, rubbing the exhaustion from my eyes. As I watched the tiny stars emanate and dissipate atop my irises, memories came flooding back of the distressing night prior, and I resisted the urge to resume my search. Instead, I moseyed downstairs and started a pot of coffee. As my life source brewed, I sloppily split a biscuit in two and smeared butter on top of each slice. The dripping liquid replicated a metronome, and I felt my heart rate exceed its tempo with steadily increasing speed. 

I stared into the steaming liquid, watching it gradually grow taller within its glass confines and wondering why doing so was sending me into such a panicked state. Eyes fixated on the pot, I reached for one-half of the prepared pastries and took a bite. I was so invested in the rising meniscus and the feeling it brought with it that I barely tasted my breakfast. Chewing and watching, I stood perfectly still, as if one step forward would plunge me straight into a full-blown anxiety attack. 

I finished the first half and felt around for the other, raising it to my mouth and biting down, expecting the same greasy softness that the first half had provided. To my dismay, my rhythmically clenching jaws were met with something foreign—something hard. In an instant I spit the bite out into my hand, breaking my gaze from the coffeemaker for the first time to advert to the chewed-up nastiness in my palm. I poked through the mess with my pointer finger, feeling nothing out of the ordinary; but the sensation was so tangible that my mouth still ached from the impact, making it exponentially more challenging to convince myself it was all in my head.

As I reluctantly tried to move on from the mishap, the mysterious angst I felt while staring at the coffee pot lingered, naggingly kicking me under the table, as if to say, “Come on, pay attention!” I tried to ignore the sensation at first, but it gradually mutated from a dull uncertainty in my chest to a blanket of excessive weight, making it difficult to breathe. In desperation, I meandered over to the coffee machine, as it was the only correlation I was able to identify.

I planted my hands on the counter and leaned forward, squinting at the staling matter. The seal brown liquid was so concentrated that its darkness almost read black, and my eyes widened as they madly searched its contents for an explanation. To my frustration, I found nothing. I grabbed the handle and held the pot at a slight angle before placing it back on the burner, allowing the vessel’s contents to slosh around in hopes of clearing a better line of view. 

My investigation was in vain; like gazing up at the sky during a midnight drive, my line of sight was drenched in umbra. The value seemed to consume me, swelling my focus until my eyes were all whites and pupils while pure, unfiltered rage washed over me. The feeling possessed me to destroy my opponent, and I once again grabbed the pot’s handle, this time swinging it back before smashing the wicked object into hundreds of pieces. Shards of glass mingled with coffee droplets midair before falling back down, I raised my forearm to my eyes in protection. 

Peering into the sink in which the energizer had met its demise, I saw liquids and solids sparkling with reflection as they quickly made their way down the drain. Among the glittering mess was a small white mass, its path tracing circles as it rolled on its side like a body down a grassy incline. I plunged forward with an outstretched hand but missed by half of an inch, simultaneously grabbing a weaponized shard of glass while knocking the tooth into the basin’s mouth where it was swallowed whole. I cursed and screamed, sucking on my bleeding skin before slumping to the floor and proceeding to bawl.

My freshly injured fingertips and plagued psyche proved to complicate most activities, so I called out of work and conceded to spending the rest of the day in bed. All efforts toward distraction fell short, and by noon I was so desperate for solace that I decided to take melatonin in hopes that I could get some sleep. I crashed just moments later, too grateful for an escape to access my fear of the nightmares I knew to expect.

I woke up hours later and proceeded with my brief ritual, this time additionally checking under my pillow for intruders but found nothing. As I clicked on my lamp, a needle-sharp lightning bolt of pain shot straight through my eye, seemingly splitting my brain in half. My eyes fell into focus, illuminating the blurred spots in my vision. An uncommon but familiar feeling, I immediately identified the source of my distress to be caffeine withdrawal. I blinked hard a few times, recalling the dismembered coffee pot that was still inhabiting my kitchen sink. As I stood to get dressed, I found myself swarmed with nausea and knew I had to treat my symptoms as soon as possible. I carefully slipped on my socks and shoes, taking longer than usual to tie the laces to accommodate the fresh scabs on my right hand.

I stood in line at the coffee shop, fiercely willing myself not to get sick on the woman in line ahead of me. It felt odd to wear sunglasses indoors, but I was too miserable to be self-conscious. My physical state fueled my one-track mind so furiously that the cashier couldn’t finish saying hello before I practically pleaded for my beverage. The man looked taken aback, and I became aware of how inadvertently abrasive I had been to this poor minimum-wage worker. My face flushed red as I choked out a half-apology and began rifling through my wallet for donations toward the tip jar. 

Between the tint of my glasses and hazy migraine vision, I couldn’t see very well, primarily navigating the wallet’s contents by my good hand’s sense of touch. My fingers grazed an unexpected shape, and I wondered if I had found a piece of forgotten jewelry among the coins. As I removed the item, its identity occurred to me at the same moment my eyes adjusted to analyze it. I shrieked, dropping the tooth onto the counter and jumping backward as we both watched it bounce and roll against the linoleum. The cashier looked just as horrified as I, though I wasn’t sure if his expression was in response to the bizarreness of the object, or the extremity of my response to its presence. In a frenzy, I apologized again, plucking it up and bolting out of the coffee shop with a mangled hunk of bone in lieu of my order. 

The whole drive home, I clenched the tooth tightly in my hand, terrified it would somehow escape me as it had managed to do following all of its prior appearances. By the time I got home, the combination of adrenaline and caffeine restriction triggered my gag reflex, and my breathing became shallow as I tried to suppress my upcoming stomach acid. I just barely made it to the bathroom, kneeling over and emptying the contents of my stomach without even lifting the seat. I squeezed the tooth in my hand tighter, its sharp ends digging into my flesh as every muscle in my body contracted. After what felt like endless heaving and coughing, my body felt empty and depleted. I placed the tooth on the floor in front of me and grabbed a wad of toilet paper to wipe my mouth and nose.

Vision still hazy with tears and floating orbs of light, I reached forward and pressed down on the toilet’s handle to whisk away my stomach contents. I watched the soggy, partially disintegrated biscuit swirl counterclockwise around the bowl, funneling down as the bile steadily got sucked away. I began to look away when, out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a chunk of a different shade pirouetting within the vortex. Before I could take action it was sucked away, and when I looked down at the tile laid out beneath my knees, the tooth was nowhere to be found.

Feeling certain that I must be going crazy, I glanced at my right hand to see two small indentations where the tooth had imprinted its mark. Discouraged and disheartened, I contemplated seeking out psychiatric support and forming a search party for my sanity. I wearily stood and stumbled to the sink, squeezing an excessive amount of paste onto my toothbrush with shaky hands. I vigorously scrubbed each tooth, careful as always to avoid the extraction site. I spit into the sink, watching the pink and frothy white foam lazily succumb to the will of gravity. Despite my vivacious technique, the aftertaste of acid still lingered, so I grabbed a fresh bottle of mouthwash, cracking it open and filling its cap to the brim.

I gargled and swished, counting out the thirty seconds recommended for an adequate clean. My tongue swayed to and fro with the pulsing motion of my inflated cheeks as the biting minty flavor brought tears to my eyes and made my nose run. With only five seconds remaining, I suddenly froze. My tongue had found something—something more familiar than not; something which had only been missing for a few short days, now entrenched in its place of origin. 

Cheeks still overladen with mouthwash, I took a deep breath in through my nose, mustering my courage, and ran my tongue back over the area. Again, I felt it; of that I was certain. My whole world spun around me as I dizzily spat the blue liquid into the sink, carefully scanning the discards for my perpetrator. When it failed to appear, my tongue reluctantly made its way backward in my mouth, affirming that which lacked logic entirely. I hooked my index fingers around either corner of my mouth until I looked like a fish on a line, stretching my cheeks as wide as I could. Staring intensely into the damp and dripping cave that lived between my nose and chin, I saw it. Packed tightly in line with the others, looking as if it had yet to be touched by a stranger, was my tooth—exactly where it came from.