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Tara
Tara deftly piloted the small car through the city streets. She thought only once of tan linoleum and red pain, and then back to her desperate task.
Jeff
Jeff awoke in a dental chair to the sting of fluoride in his nose.
“And, spit,” said the man who was unmistakably a dentist.
Jeff tried to spit, but reality was uncooperative. His mouth was full of cotton. His eyes were dry stones in the banks of a river. His tongue sat on the bottom of his mouth and would not budge.
Jeff croaked an unintelligible response.
“That’s true,” the dentist said. He glanced at his wristwatch and tapped a quick tattoo on his left knee. “Let’s try something else.”
The dentist took a deep breath. He opened his mouth and made a high-pitched languid sound like a baby crying just before it gives up and goes to sleep. Jeff’s left ear hurt, so he instinctively reached up and stuck a finger in. He wanted to simultaneously clear and block his ear canal. With his finger in his ear, he heard a voice behind him ask, “Rattlesnake?”
Jeff whipped his head around, pulling his finger out if his ear with the motion. The back of the room was empty. The dentist stopped making the whining noise.
Jeff’s jawbone seemed to constrict around his tooth. Jeff’s vision dimmed again and he felt the tooth pop out of the bone.
“And spit,” said the dentist.
A scream hitched in Jeff’s throat and he spit the tooth across the small room. It smacked the wall and left a round splatter on the eggshell white plaster.
The dentist handed Jeff a napkin. “You’d better clean that up,” he said.
Jeff lifted the napkin to his jaw.
“No, no,” said the dentist. “The wall. I can’t have people spitting blood around the office.”
The sun broke through the shades over the window to the outside. The shaft of light struck Jeff in his eye and made him wince. Then he realized, his jaw didn’t hurt. Jeff stood uneasily and hobbled over to the smear of red on the wall. Jeff rubbed the napkin against the plaster.
As he did, his eyes fell from what he was doing down to the tooth on the floor. It looked like an ordinary tooth, but it had a deep, black and green gash across one face. Still absently rubbing the napkin on the wall, Jeff leaned down to get a better look.
Inside the tooth, things wriggled. As Jeff’s face got closer, three or four thin, white appendages slid out of the hole in the tooth and pointed at him.
Pointed at his mouth, he realized. Pointed at the gash in his gum line where the tooth had been. Jeff felt a magnetic pull from his jaw toward the tooth. Something wriggled in his mouth against his tongue.
Jeff let the napkin fall to the floor and reached his right index finger and thumb into his mouth. He pinched something moving in his mouth and pulled, gently at first and then hard.
White, rubbery capillaries came with his hand. As he pulled, Jeff felt a tug in the back of his skull. He felt a tension around his brain and under his teeth.
“That’s it,” said the dentist. “One more hard yank, and it should be done.”
Jeff started, and looked at the dentist again. The encouraging look in the dentist’s eyes drove Jeff on. Jeff gave the thing from his mouth a yank and felt a distinct, sharp pop in the back of his head.
Jeff felt that he was floating in the air for a moment. The things wrapped around his hand and wrist. At the end of the white things dangled a tiny, pulsing green thing, like a green carrot but segmented like a finger. It had sparse white hairs and, where the taproot should end, a tiny mouthful of white teeth. The teeth snapped wetly and seemed to have a light, red foam around them.
The dentist grabbed a small mason jar and lid from his tray of tools and snapped the thing between the two. As soon as the lid snapped shut, its rubbery streamers went lax and fell off Jeff’s arm.
On the floor, the tooth appeared to sag as well, no longer holding its shape. The dentist picked up the napkin and used it to grab the tooth and toss it into a bin with a biohazard sticker on it. Jeff noticed for the first time the dentist was a strangely blocky man, seeming ill-defined or strangely put together. He was thicker than he seemed at first and more square.
Jeff’s head swam so he plopped down into the chair and stared blankly at the wall.
“Does it still hurt?” asked the dentist. Jeff could not fathom what a response to that might sound like. He managed a grunt, not miles away from “uh-uh.”
“Probably for the best if you don’t talk,” said the dentist. “You take a moment, and I’ll have Patty get your bill ready.”