“Just open up a little wider for me, honey,” he said, yanking my back molars over towards my cheek. My father was British and didn’t believe in dentists, so this was my first appointment in years. The dentist packed up his tools and I reached down to re-cuddle my cup of coffee. I asked him if I could leave.
“Um, let’s see,” he said, his hands shaking as he placed my X-rays on a monitor. “It seems as if you have te—no, eleven cavities.” I stared through him. “And see these clumps of bacteria—here, here, here, and here—floating towards the nerve...” Worry and pain were in his eyes. I looked towards the door. “If you don’t get those ones filled, in the next…ten days… you’re going to need root canals. Here, here, here, and here.”
“Yeah… I’m not sure about the whole dental insurance thing. Let me call my dad.” My stepmother picked up the phone, and hung up after not understanding “father. fa-ther. can I speak to my father.”
But hey! What would you do? Do you:
Pick up an insurance brochure on the way out, and start gathering claims of negligent guardianship in terms of dental healthcare. Proceed to Mother #2.
Agree to stay on to receive immediate dental work. Proceed to Root Canal #1.
Mother #2
All the Colombians were over for Maria’s fiftieth birthday. Tequila bounced from one to the next, licking the men and women as high as she could on their faces. One of the women held a three year old whose lip never ended on one side, the opening stretching all the way up his face to his nostril. Maria owned an adoption agency, so there were always kids around her mansion in Potomac who looked straight out of the files. A serious Colombian pushed the weimaraner down, yelping as her head hit the floor, but she sprang back up and ran into the kitchen. Someone’s little blonde child kept grabbing my hand and leading me in a loop around the first floor. “Vamos,” she said, “vamos.” I was done vamosing; I was done before we started. My sixteen-year-old stepbrother Santiago was mixing drinks for the guests at a bar built into the side of the dining room. I hid behind him for awhile.
Santi’s favorite childhood stuffed animal, a two-foot Dino from The Land Before Time, sat, a relic, on top of the kitchen fridge. I reached in for a Coke, my seventh since nine that morning. Tequi waited for the refrigerator door to close, then jumped up and down, trying to clamp down on Dino’s tail. The only image I had of Santi as a kid in Bogota was his long black hair down his back, one hand clutching this dinosaur, smoking a cigarette, salivating over the local drug scene that lay a few years out of reach.
We sang happy birthday en Español as my father issued in a huge white cake from Giant with a Kodak imprint of Maria’s face on the icing. The supermarket could now copy over every part of the original photograph, from her lipstick-stained teeth to the red-eye camera glare. Santi snickered, my older brother Stephen following suit, as one of the nerdier Colombian men “ooh”ed at the cake. Maria, all business, ready to blow, waited for the last “feliz cumpleaños a ti.” As she finished off the candles, her face was pushed down into her sugary mirror, lipstick-stained tooth to lipstick-stained tooth. So that was his surprise.
Glasses were thrown against walls, so I slipped out, through Maria’s bedroom to get to the garage. Her television was on. Star Trek, always, on some channel that agreed to loop Star Trek all the time. In the garage, I made an obstacle course out of ping pong balls, a bike helmet, and old horseshoes for whoever would play. Noticing that someone had tested a can of gold spray paint over a tri-billed poster board, my science project from the year before, I spiraled into depression. What melts fastest on ice? the poster board asked in puff paint, testing the melting points of Milky Ways and M&Ms when placed on an ice cube. But now no one would know.
Santi stormed into the garage, holding a clump of wispy cotton in the air. Dinosaur intestines. “Where is that fack-eeng dog?”
“It’s just me!” I said, holding my hands in the air from my squat under the workbench.
“Oh. What are you doing in here.”
“I come out here… to think,” I said, tossing a ping pong ball and missing the inside of the bike helmet.
“Oh. Did you get a Coke?”
WWYD?
A. Take what I need and proceed to “Mother” #3.
B. Nod and smile. Submit, submit, and ask for more. Proceed to Mother #4.
“Mother” #3
The one written in pencil. Mischio tapped her pen against her desk and stared me down as I paused to take some notes. “Um, what exactly do you need me for? What does my citizenship have to do with anything?”
“Please, I came all the way here. One last question.”
“No offense, but this was like ten years ago.” She had given me the pearl earrings when I didn’t have pierced ears. And she bought them in Tokyo, where everything is ten times more expensive. Prancing around her and waving my oil pastels, I accepted the gift and confessed to her that I wanted to be an AA, an actress and an artist. She told me to speak to my father about AA. “He’s not…dying? Or something?”
“No, no. Well, he did have a kidney stone last year. Okay, so. Why didn’t you go through with the wedding?”
She shifted in her chair and gave me a challenging look. “It was like ten years ago, and I’m thirty now.” Her business profile had read thirty-five. And I needed a clean dental insurance application. My comment section was getting long anyway, so I felt confident enough crossing out this sugar imposer.
WWYD?
A. Leave her office, grabbing a butterscotch candy on the way out, and head on over to Root Canal #2.
B. Disciplined and set on making the insurance claim, journey to Mother #4.
Mother #4
A year after my dad and Maria were divorced, he believed in something beautiful again, and asked for another’s hand in marriage, an Emma. Stifled in the smell of something between boiling cabbage and burning oil, my brother and I sat on Emma’s basement couch. We watched Sub Zero ice Scorpio to death as Levan K.O.’ed his brother Irakli. A napkin that one of them scribbled “To Steve and Caroline: Please do not leave the Playstation on for over eight hours” still lay on top of the console, unmoved since they had written it the weekend before when they were out of town. A lacrosse ball bounced over my head and landed back into Stephen’s net. The thoughtfulness of my new brothers was very welcome after all of Stephen’s personal failings. “Care-line? Want to?” Levan asked, stretching out a controller. “Goldeneye?”
Irakli’s English remained non-existent, so he opted to never speak. He was either playing video games or working at Giant, where he learned to laser photographs onto birthday cakes. Levan was either playing video games or arguing with his mother in Georgian. Emma came halfway down to the basement. She pressed her thick cream jacket and matching skirt against the stair handle. Her suits always looked like they were made out of curtains, stately curtains. She already knew the scene, and squinted, focused only on her youngest. “Le-van.” Levan’s hands kept clicking away and he grunted, his eyes never leaving the screen. “Levan. (Loud, incomprehensible Georgian.)” Irakli didn’t look up from the screen either, but his mouth and eyes twisted into violent disappointment at whatever she had said. Levan da-ed her away.
She squinted in my direction. “And your father needs to know if there is still Coke down here.”
Sunk between two couch cushions, I couldn’t muster getting anywhere near up. “Da. I mean—yes, there’s another case left.” Stephen’s lacrosse ball stopped thumping and rolled under the sofa. He tried balancing his stick on the palm of his hand.
“Okay,” she said, reaching down to pick up a bowl and two glasses from the bottom stair, and nodded to herself. “Okay.”
“She said we can’t go upstairs. Her student is here,” Levan said. Irakli clicked and clicked to send a barrage of paintballs against a factory wall, writing his name in PS2 paint while a patient Xenia, a poised machine gun in hand, waited for him to finish.
“That is so punk rock,” I said, staring at the vanishing “Irakli.” The lacrosse stick slipped and Stephen decided to slam it down on my already bruised arm. We heard some clinking from a piano above our heads. Suddenly the soda settled and I really had to use the house’s bathroom. Blast.
WWYD?
A. Hold it. Wax nostalgic and proceed to Mother #1.
B. Reach for a nearby letter opener and stab the blade into Stephen’s thigh. Suffer the consequences, placate injuries with a Coke, and proceed to Root Canal #1.
Mother #1
They were quieter, from more introverted to not even speaking the language, as they ranked in number. But my mom had always been the quietest. Until she lost all that weight.
“Are you still consuming?” she asked as I twisted open a Diet Coke.
She had just taken me out for a birthday lunch, and I turned on the television as she checked the phone messages. A hazy enactment of my parents meeting clouded Friday’s Passions cliffhanger. Their eyes met and a sparkle hit the roof as my mother handed him, the last British import, a tee-shirt with a close-up of a haloed Sun Yung Moon. My father, grabbing her hand and leading her out of the basement door of the Moonie cult premises, stole a long kiss in the freeing sunlight. Then came the scuba diving. The divorce was less vivid: my dad had decapitated my brother’s Paddington Bear at some point, and I was constantly being bribed with Cheerios.
“This one’s for you,” my mom said with a haughty smile, and put the phone receiver on speaker.
“Appy birfday tooyoo, appy birfday tooyoo, appy birfday dear carorine, appy birfday tooyoo,” my new stepmother sang into the message machine, and I could see my father give her a nod and hang up the phone for her. The first five entries in my father’s speed dial read #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, mostly used as intermediary numbers between credit card companies. Today he must have pressed #1 and handed the phone to #5.
WWYD?
A. Return the call and proceed to Mother #5. Naturally.
B. Say “I am sick of your sticky maternal love” to #1, kick over the phone table, and sulk over to Root Canal #1.
Mother #5
My crew team scheduled a race on Easter Sunday, and the regatta’s meeting on a family holiday provided a mixing of worlds that helped up my lactic acid. My dad wore his straw Easter boater hat and bowtie in celebration, and Ding stood looking out the window of the boathouse to the Potomac River. Behind us a team pulled at the ergs in unison.
“So this is what you kids do,” my dad said, giving me a proud look, as one of the girls collapsed off her rowing machine. He handed me a bag spilling over with Cadbury’s chocolate that he had ordered online. I tugged at my spandex unisuit, looking around the erg room for the rest of my team and queasy at the thought of my upcoming race, but my dad was beaming at his Easter gift. I fumbled through the different candy bars and thanked him over the collapsed girl’s dry heaving and piercing screams.
Ding look excited and pointed out the window of Thompson’s Boat Center. A crew eight turned all their oars square to stop their boat as a yacht, insensitive enough to mess up the team’s practice starts during the Georgetown Regionals, charged through their projected path. Ding had been a doctor in China, but legal issues, such as her entering the country, kept her from doing anything un-black market. She sold snow globes and candy in a small shop in DC’s Union Station. She never really dealt with the customers, because she can’t speak English.
“Ding Dong, c’mere,” my father said, giving her butt a little shove towards his stomach’s bulk. All smiles, she giggled as he placed his boater on her head and it fell over her eyes. I felt uncomfortable. Turning, I saw my coach running towards me. She looked annoyed and pointed towards the rest of my boat just as they sprinted around a corner, beginning a warm up loop around the Watergate. “But…but He is risen!” I said. She shook her head and looked back down at her race day notebook. I placed the bag of candy in front of a red-faced erger and ran, bow-legged, after my peers.
WWYD?
A. Skip ahead, past the race and into the future—today is that day! Proceed to Root Canal #1.
B. No way out, suckah. Proceed to Root Canal #2.
Root Canal #1
“I can do two of them for you today,” the dentist said, slipping in a needle to pump three rounds of anesthesia into the far corners of my mouth. I mean, it was a Wednesday. My tongue dried and was squirted down and re-dried over the next three hours, and the dentist prodded me whenever my sleepy head gave up and threatened his instruments. He charged me and thanked me and released me, and I grumbled at the number of zeros on the bill, insurance abandoned before the surgery. My bag vibrated and my father’s name, Dad, popped up on my phone. “I saw that you called,” he said, cars honking in the background.
“I can’t really talk, Dad. I just had a root canal, I feel like the elephant man.”
“At a dentist’s? Huh. Listen. Your mother wants to bring the boyfriend to your graduation. I don’t really think that’s a great idea, to rub shoulders for the first time at your event?”
“Oh. I don’t know.”
“But Ding can come, right? I mean, she’s family, right?”
“Oh, of course. Mmhmm.”
Avoiding my apartment, I found a spot of grass around the back of the dentist’s office building and plopped down against a metal fence with my fresh cup of coffee. A mini tricycle, locked to the side of the fence next to me, was missing its seat and back wheel. How cruel. I pulled at the little bike’s stub, trying to yank the whole thing free of its padlock, but it slid down lower on the fence and fell down, hopeless. I laughed and played with my still-anesthetized bottom lip, letting hot drips of coffee roll off without feeling the burn I should. A new tooth started throbbing on the other side of my mouth, as the dentist had predicted, but sooner than expected. Clutching the side of my face, I rested my head into the pillow of my skirt until the throbbing stopped.
Root Canal #2
I glared at the woman waiting across from me as she sucked on a Pepsi, but grew more curious as I made out the side of her bottle, which read “no refills.” Someone called my name and I headed for my chair.
Out of the corner of my eye I watched the dental student prepare a long needle of anesthesia. I pleaded to be put under, but the girl laughed in my face, telling me that they were not allowed to at this clinic, and that, well, she didn’t know how.
“Oh hey, Cynth. Forgot to say congratulations,” a younger student called from one chair over as the needle entered my mouth. My dentist stood up to give him a cheery thanks. She looked to sit back down, a little too hastily, and stumbled over the cup of coffee I had rested below my chair. The needle plunged through my cheek and hit my jaw bone. Bone marrow surged through my blood vein, but I only understood that this was the moment I should be cursing someone. Damn you, Maria! as my dentist’s tray of instruments clattered to the ground and she let out nervous cries for help. Damn you, Emma! as the lights became spotty and atmospheric. Damn you, Ding Dong! as the numbness of the anesthesia spread, too late, making my cheek heavy. My head rolled to one side, and Mr. Squirtee, still balanced on my lip, cleaned out my bloody mouth with a steady stream of water until death did us part.
“Um, let’s see,” he said, his hands shaking as he placed my X-rays on a monitor. “It seems as if you have te—no, eleven cavities.” I stared through him. “And see these clumps of bacteria—here, here, here, and here—floating towards the nerve...” Worry and pain were in his eyes. I looked towards the door. “If you don’t get those ones filled, in the next…ten days… you’re going to need root canals. Here, here, here, and here.”
“Yeah… I’m not sure about the whole dental insurance thing. Let me call my dad.” My stepmother picked up the phone, and hung up after not understanding “father. fa-ther. can I speak to my father.”
But hey! What would you do? Do you:
Pick up an insurance brochure on the way out, and start gathering claims of negligent guardianship in terms of dental healthcare. Proceed to Mother #2.
Agree to stay on to receive immediate dental work. Proceed to Root Canal #1.
Mother #2
All the Colombians were over for Maria’s fiftieth birthday. Tequila bounced from one to the next, licking the men and women as high as she could on their faces. One of the women held a three year old whose lip never ended on one side, the opening stretching all the way up his face to his nostril. Maria owned an adoption agency, so there were always kids around her mansion in Potomac who looked straight out of the files. A serious Colombian pushed the weimaraner down, yelping as her head hit the floor, but she sprang back up and ran into the kitchen. Someone’s little blonde child kept grabbing my hand and leading me in a loop around the first floor. “Vamos,” she said, “vamos.” I was done vamosing; I was done before we started. My sixteen-year-old stepbrother Santiago was mixing drinks for the guests at a bar built into the side of the dining room. I hid behind him for awhile.
Santi’s favorite childhood stuffed animal, a two-foot Dino from The Land Before Time, sat, a relic, on top of the kitchen fridge. I reached in for a Coke, my seventh since nine that morning. Tequi waited for the refrigerator door to close, then jumped up and down, trying to clamp down on Dino’s tail. The only image I had of Santi as a kid in Bogota was his long black hair down his back, one hand clutching this dinosaur, smoking a cigarette, salivating over the local drug scene that lay a few years out of reach.
We sang happy birthday en Español as my father issued in a huge white cake from Giant with a Kodak imprint of Maria’s face on the icing. The supermarket could now copy over every part of the original photograph, from her lipstick-stained teeth to the red-eye camera glare. Santi snickered, my older brother Stephen following suit, as one of the nerdier Colombian men “ooh”ed at the cake. Maria, all business, ready to blow, waited for the last “feliz cumpleaños a ti.” As she finished off the candles, her face was pushed down into her sugary mirror, lipstick-stained tooth to lipstick-stained tooth. So that was his surprise.
Glasses were thrown against walls, so I slipped out, through Maria’s bedroom to get to the garage. Her television was on. Star Trek, always, on some channel that agreed to loop Star Trek all the time. In the garage, I made an obstacle course out of ping pong balls, a bike helmet, and old horseshoes for whoever would play. Noticing that someone had tested a can of gold spray paint over a tri-billed poster board, my science project from the year before, I spiraled into depression. What melts fastest on ice? the poster board asked in puff paint, testing the melting points of Milky Ways and M&Ms when placed on an ice cube. But now no one would know.
Santi stormed into the garage, holding a clump of wispy cotton in the air. Dinosaur intestines. “Where is that fack-eeng dog?”
“It’s just me!” I said, holding my hands in the air from my squat under the workbench.
“Oh. What are you doing in here.”
“I come out here… to think,” I said, tossing a ping pong ball and missing the inside of the bike helmet.
“Oh. Did you get a Coke?”
WWYD?
A. Take what I need and proceed to “Mother” #3.
B. Nod and smile. Submit, submit, and ask for more. Proceed to Mother #4.
“Mother” #3
The one written in pencil. Mischio tapped her pen against her desk and stared me down as I paused to take some notes. “Um, what exactly do you need me for? What does my citizenship have to do with anything?”
“Please, I came all the way here. One last question.”
“No offense, but this was like ten years ago.” She had given me the pearl earrings when I didn’t have pierced ears. And she bought them in Tokyo, where everything is ten times more expensive. Prancing around her and waving my oil pastels, I accepted the gift and confessed to her that I wanted to be an AA, an actress and an artist. She told me to speak to my father about AA. “He’s not…dying? Or something?”
“No, no. Well, he did have a kidney stone last year. Okay, so. Why didn’t you go through with the wedding?”
She shifted in her chair and gave me a challenging look. “It was like ten years ago, and I’m thirty now.” Her business profile had read thirty-five. And I needed a clean dental insurance application. My comment section was getting long anyway, so I felt confident enough crossing out this sugar imposer.
WWYD?
A. Leave her office, grabbing a butterscotch candy on the way out, and head on over to Root Canal #2.
B. Disciplined and set on making the insurance claim, journey to Mother #4.
Mother #4
A year after my dad and Maria were divorced, he believed in something beautiful again, and asked for another’s hand in marriage, an Emma. Stifled in the smell of something between boiling cabbage and burning oil, my brother and I sat on Emma’s basement couch. We watched Sub Zero ice Scorpio to death as Levan K.O.’ed his brother Irakli. A napkin that one of them scribbled “To Steve and Caroline: Please do not leave the Playstation on for over eight hours” still lay on top of the console, unmoved since they had written it the weekend before when they were out of town. A lacrosse ball bounced over my head and landed back into Stephen’s net. The thoughtfulness of my new brothers was very welcome after all of Stephen’s personal failings. “Care-line? Want to?” Levan asked, stretching out a controller. “Goldeneye?”
Irakli’s English remained non-existent, so he opted to never speak. He was either playing video games or working at Giant, where he learned to laser photographs onto birthday cakes. Levan was either playing video games or arguing with his mother in Georgian. Emma came halfway down to the basement. She pressed her thick cream jacket and matching skirt against the stair handle. Her suits always looked like they were made out of curtains, stately curtains. She already knew the scene, and squinted, focused only on her youngest. “Le-van.” Levan’s hands kept clicking away and he grunted, his eyes never leaving the screen. “Levan. (Loud, incomprehensible Georgian.)” Irakli didn’t look up from the screen either, but his mouth and eyes twisted into violent disappointment at whatever she had said. Levan da-ed her away.
She squinted in my direction. “And your father needs to know if there is still Coke down here.”
Sunk between two couch cushions, I couldn’t muster getting anywhere near up. “Da. I mean—yes, there’s another case left.” Stephen’s lacrosse ball stopped thumping and rolled under the sofa. He tried balancing his stick on the palm of his hand.
“Okay,” she said, reaching down to pick up a bowl and two glasses from the bottom stair, and nodded to herself. “Okay.”
“She said we can’t go upstairs. Her student is here,” Levan said. Irakli clicked and clicked to send a barrage of paintballs against a factory wall, writing his name in PS2 paint while a patient Xenia, a poised machine gun in hand, waited for him to finish.
“That is so punk rock,” I said, staring at the vanishing “Irakli.” The lacrosse stick slipped and Stephen decided to slam it down on my already bruised arm. We heard some clinking from a piano above our heads. Suddenly the soda settled and I really had to use the house’s bathroom. Blast.
WWYD?
A. Hold it. Wax nostalgic and proceed to Mother #1.
B. Reach for a nearby letter opener and stab the blade into Stephen’s thigh. Suffer the consequences, placate injuries with a Coke, and proceed to Root Canal #1.
Mother #1
They were quieter, from more introverted to not even speaking the language, as they ranked in number. But my mom had always been the quietest. Until she lost all that weight.
“Are you still consuming?” she asked as I twisted open a Diet Coke.
She had just taken me out for a birthday lunch, and I turned on the television as she checked the phone messages. A hazy enactment of my parents meeting clouded Friday’s Passions cliffhanger. Their eyes met and a sparkle hit the roof as my mother handed him, the last British import, a tee-shirt with a close-up of a haloed Sun Yung Moon. My father, grabbing her hand and leading her out of the basement door of the Moonie cult premises, stole a long kiss in the freeing sunlight. Then came the scuba diving. The divorce was less vivid: my dad had decapitated my brother’s Paddington Bear at some point, and I was constantly being bribed with Cheerios.
“This one’s for you,” my mom said with a haughty smile, and put the phone receiver on speaker.
“Appy birfday tooyoo, appy birfday tooyoo, appy birfday dear carorine, appy birfday tooyoo,” my new stepmother sang into the message machine, and I could see my father give her a nod and hang up the phone for her. The first five entries in my father’s speed dial read #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, mostly used as intermediary numbers between credit card companies. Today he must have pressed #1 and handed the phone to #5.
WWYD?
A. Return the call and proceed to Mother #5. Naturally.
B. Say “I am sick of your sticky maternal love” to #1, kick over the phone table, and sulk over to Root Canal #1.
Mother #5
My crew team scheduled a race on Easter Sunday, and the regatta’s meeting on a family holiday provided a mixing of worlds that helped up my lactic acid. My dad wore his straw Easter boater hat and bowtie in celebration, and Ding stood looking out the window of the boathouse to the Potomac River. Behind us a team pulled at the ergs in unison.
“So this is what you kids do,” my dad said, giving me a proud look, as one of the girls collapsed off her rowing machine. He handed me a bag spilling over with Cadbury’s chocolate that he had ordered online. I tugged at my spandex unisuit, looking around the erg room for the rest of my team and queasy at the thought of my upcoming race, but my dad was beaming at his Easter gift. I fumbled through the different candy bars and thanked him over the collapsed girl’s dry heaving and piercing screams.
Ding look excited and pointed out the window of Thompson’s Boat Center. A crew eight turned all their oars square to stop their boat as a yacht, insensitive enough to mess up the team’s practice starts during the Georgetown Regionals, charged through their projected path. Ding had been a doctor in China, but legal issues, such as her entering the country, kept her from doing anything un-black market. She sold snow globes and candy in a small shop in DC’s Union Station. She never really dealt with the customers, because she can’t speak English.
“Ding Dong, c’mere,” my father said, giving her butt a little shove towards his stomach’s bulk. All smiles, she giggled as he placed his boater on her head and it fell over her eyes. I felt uncomfortable. Turning, I saw my coach running towards me. She looked annoyed and pointed towards the rest of my boat just as they sprinted around a corner, beginning a warm up loop around the Watergate. “But…but He is risen!” I said. She shook her head and looked back down at her race day notebook. I placed the bag of candy in front of a red-faced erger and ran, bow-legged, after my peers.
WWYD?
A. Skip ahead, past the race and into the future—today is that day! Proceed to Root Canal #1.
B. No way out, suckah. Proceed to Root Canal #2.
Root Canal #1
“I can do two of them for you today,” the dentist said, slipping in a needle to pump three rounds of anesthesia into the far corners of my mouth. I mean, it was a Wednesday. My tongue dried and was squirted down and re-dried over the next three hours, and the dentist prodded me whenever my sleepy head gave up and threatened his instruments. He charged me and thanked me and released me, and I grumbled at the number of zeros on the bill, insurance abandoned before the surgery. My bag vibrated and my father’s name, Dad, popped up on my phone. “I saw that you called,” he said, cars honking in the background.
“I can’t really talk, Dad. I just had a root canal, I feel like the elephant man.”
“At a dentist’s? Huh. Listen. Your mother wants to bring the boyfriend to your graduation. I don’t really think that’s a great idea, to rub shoulders for the first time at your event?”
“Oh. I don’t know.”
“But Ding can come, right? I mean, she’s family, right?”
“Oh, of course. Mmhmm.”
Avoiding my apartment, I found a spot of grass around the back of the dentist’s office building and plopped down against a metal fence with my fresh cup of coffee. A mini tricycle, locked to the side of the fence next to me, was missing its seat and back wheel. How cruel. I pulled at the little bike’s stub, trying to yank the whole thing free of its padlock, but it slid down lower on the fence and fell down, hopeless. I laughed and played with my still-anesthetized bottom lip, letting hot drips of coffee roll off without feeling the burn I should. A new tooth started throbbing on the other side of my mouth, as the dentist had predicted, but sooner than expected. Clutching the side of my face, I rested my head into the pillow of my skirt until the throbbing stopped.
Root Canal #2
I glared at the woman waiting across from me as she sucked on a Pepsi, but grew more curious as I made out the side of her bottle, which read “no refills.” Someone called my name and I headed for my chair.
Out of the corner of my eye I watched the dental student prepare a long needle of anesthesia. I pleaded to be put under, but the girl laughed in my face, telling me that they were not allowed to at this clinic, and that, well, she didn’t know how.
“Oh hey, Cynth. Forgot to say congratulations,” a younger student called from one chair over as the needle entered my mouth. My dentist stood up to give him a cheery thanks. She looked to sit back down, a little too hastily, and stumbled over the cup of coffee I had rested below my chair. The needle plunged through my cheek and hit my jaw bone. Bone marrow surged through my blood vein, but I only understood that this was the moment I should be cursing someone. Damn you, Maria! as my dentist’s tray of instruments clattered to the ground and she let out nervous cries for help. Damn you, Emma! as the lights became spotty and atmospheric. Damn you, Ding Dong! as the numbness of the anesthesia spread, too late, making my cheek heavy. My head rolled to one side, and Mr. Squirtee, still balanced on my lip, cleaned out my bloody mouth with a steady stream of water until death did us part.
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