Sometimes the news feeds me an idea I can't ignore. The discovery of teeth in a wall in an old dental office was too good to pass up. Enjoy The Cavity.
The wall was fresh from the plaster and paint, smooth to the
touch, and he patted it over the invisible patchwork. Was there energy inside
the wood and drywall? He could sense something in there. Behind closed eyes,
between his last appointments ever, he recalled the strange day so many years
prior. That day had led to here, and would lead to tomorrow, too.
He was still young then, blond hair just beginning to
lighten to gray at the temples. Courting Anna, who found his manner and
appearance dignified and his secret touch electric, Walter had no plans for the
week following or the one after that. He cleaned teeth, saw Anna, and little
else, for there was little else to do in a place like this. James, the farmer
from the valley across the top of the ridge had just stood from the chair and
walked out the door to see Virginia at the front desk to settle up his affairs,
leaving the door ajar behind him.
Walter stood at the counter, sanitizing his tools, the smell
of isopropyl alcohol hanging in the air, his mind vacantly jumping from one thing
to another. Outside, summer breathed its last breath of flame into the trees
and the leaves were just catching. The date was September 30th, and
that was the day he learned how not to die.
The gentle clicking of the hallway clock filled the room. Walter
brought it with him from Delaware, and the southern climate had taken its toll
on the timepiece. Humidity stretched and warped the proportions of the wood,
but the inner workings still turned and clicked away their reliable rhythm.
Walter could never be sure how long the silence persisted before he noticed the
clock had stopped its familiar clicking of the long hand’s advance, carrying
with it the short hand, but as he cleared the counter, there it was. Quiet.
Walter, unsurprised the clock had given up finally, turned
toward the door, still half open as if waiting to share a secret. Through the openings
between the hinges, where the door met the door facing, Walter saw her. She shifted
into the room slowly, feet unmoving, but rustling, and he dropped the tiny
dental mirror to the floor where it clattered then stopped, and the silence was
heavy, pushing Walter to the edge of the counter for fear of suffocating under
its weight.
Still half covered by the door, she sought to build a
connection with Walter, and caught his eyes in her own. She pushed hard on the
door without raising her hand. The door slammed into the wall, rattling
everything inside the renovated shed he called his place of practice. This was
not Willie, the small boy from the next town over who was scheduled for a
checkup. Her gray lips pressed firmly together, until she spoke. Walter saw
into the gaping hole as she spoke, and the darkness beckoned behind the shiny
gray gums. The smell of sweet rotting meat and leaves left to decay filled the
room. Her voice shook the room as she said, “You, Walter Windrow Sutton, will
die.”
Her jaw did not move to enunciate the words. The sounds escaped
her gut, booming out from the darkness she held inside, tempered with the
sounds of grinding and jostling of the secrets within. “Unless,” and the stones
and gravel inside rolled, “you fill me.”
She held out a tooth in her grimy right hand, nails broken
and blackened and wrinkles and folds filled with decay, a bright and perfect
molar. The roots were clean and the tooth shone out against the grime of her
pawing palm. The mouth yawned wide again, further this time so that her jaw
hung down onto her clavicle, and she shoved her right hand, folded into a fist,
deep into her mouth. Walter watched as the wrist and forearm followed and could
see her throat bulge beneath the dangling jaw until her elbow was all that was
left. She withdrew her hand and closed her jaw.
Once more her jaw opened and the sounds of rustling emitted
from inside her, before she loudly rasped out, “5,000.” Walter realized the
jumbling noises within were not stones or sticks, but teeth, rolling and
jostling below the surface. He gripped the metal edge of the counter until his
fingers might bleed, breath coming fast and shallow, his mouth a dry hollow. His
head back and forth, tracing a line up and down with his nose, eyes locked on
the darkness just inside those gray and desiccated lips. She was hunger. He
would fill her.
The clock started up again in the hallway. There was Walter,
still hanging onto the counter top, fearful of drowning in the smell of death. He
was already there, though, and the smell had filled him, deep into the crevaces
of his lungs and floating into his bloodstream as it flowed throughout his
earthly form, so the eternal and the temporal could mix and be one forever.
When the boy settled into the chair, Walter felt it was important to extract a
molar. He was certain this baby tooth needed to go to clear the way for the
tooth bud below to grow, and smiled as he held the tooth up in the golden late
afternoon light shining and pink with blood.
Now this wall held the full 5,000 teeth, and Walter was old and
tired but immune to death’s final blow. The teeth here, he had broken the best
things in his life to fill this hole, and he thought of Annie’s jaws emptied of
bite. He wished for rest, something to fill the emptiness yawning inside him, a
cavity to be charged, and Walter Windrow Sutton understood the levy placed on
his life. He rustled out the door and the stones jostled within as he laughed
at the sky.
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