Yesterday, Microsoft Word started to identify the word “tomorrow” as a spelling error. I keep adding it to the digital dictionary, and it keeps forgetting. I think my computer has dementia. Soon it won’t even remember my name: “Hello, User!” That’s how my year is going.

Every morning I sit down with my laptop and a stack of books and don’t touch either. Instead, I watch things wither through the window: the neighbors, the day, the crocuses on the sill. The sky looks virtual, like everything in the Bay Area. The blurred glass pixelates the clouds, and the smoke too, when there’s a wildfire. We’ve already had three this year.

I push on the old wooden frames to let in some fresh air. The windows in the graduate housing won’t open more than six inches because the school doesn’t like it when we kill ourselves. To add some cheer to the bedroom, one white rectangle among thousands, I’ve lined the windows with rubber ducks. They stare at me ruthlessly. The paint is peeling off their beaks and each has a profession — doctor duck, sailor duck, artist duck, and so on.

Like any good scholar, I spend a lot of time looking things up. Nothing I need to know, or am being paid to know, but anything else. I stare at the screen and run my tongue over my chipping front tooth, sharpening a familiar ache. I look up maritime disasters and rap lyrics and the biology of lightning bugs. Clicking, scrolling, clicking again. This morning I read three articles about sea pigs and one on gender determinatives in hieroglyphics. 

What I should be doing is writing a doctoral dissertation in order to graduate. The subject is dentistry in American literature, which is to say men and their teeth.

Women and their teeth, that’s another story. 

To make ends meet while writing, I work at a dentist’s office. That’s where I got the whole idea. Some people can keep their lives separate, in different compartments, but I need everything to have a coherent theme. The office is cramped and blue, and there’s an old aquarium tank in the waiting room that gives the entire lobby a dull marine glow. We’ve started a betting pool for which of the geriatric fish will go belly-up next. I think it will be Kilgor the Catfish.

The small staff includes a dentist, a technician, an orthodontist, me, and another woman who works at the front desk. She leaves before the lunch break, and I come in after it. I’ve never met this other receptionist, but I hate her. This is partly because by performing the same job, the same mindless tasks, we’re engaged in a fruitless competition. She’s also always leaving little traces of herself around, like a strand of black hair or a framed picture of her children. In the photograph, two eellike boys are laughing, their thin arms holding small bright pumpkins aloft. The one on the left will need braces.

I mostly interact with the dentist, Martin. He’s a bland man, skinny and balding, and he tells me I could be a great dental technician one day. Right now he’s going through a divorce, and he talks about it in roundabout ways between clients. Today, Martin is feeling philosophical.

“Life surprises you,” he tells me, leaning against the check-in counter. He bites into a bruised banana and speaks allegorically about his ex-wife between chews. “Remember this, nothing is as it seems. For example, my new landlord. He seemed like a solid guy, all the way through until I’d signed the lease. But I called him about fixing a leak yesterday — a reasonable request, don’t you think — and it turns out he’s a cheating, ball-busting bastard. Excuse my language.”

When the three o’clock comes in, I’m trapped in a long discussion with Martin about squatters’ rights in the state of California. The subject is clearly supposed to be analogous to some marital dispute, though I can’t quite tell how. The little boy is only here for an annual cleaning, but he starts bawling the minute he walks into the office. He’s no older than five. Most of the staff have more sympathy for the young patients than I do. I feel much worse for the older patients, the ones who know they shouldn’t be scared and still are, who know they shouldn’t cry but still do.

Sometimes, when a child is especially afraid, Martin straps on a pig nose over his surgical mask. Usually this works, not because it calms the children but because it terrifies them into complacent silence. “Open big,” Martin says, and they do. They open so wide their mouths become tiny, toothy black holes that swallow their faces. You can tell it freaks out a lot of the parents, too, a giant barnyard animal rooting around in their kids’ mouths. I think of my father, who was raised on a livestock farm outside of Fresno. He could imitate every animal perfectly: the baa, the oink, the moo. He could even do a convincing cock-a-doodle-doo. 

The exam room is right across from my desk. I can see straight in because Martin never closes the door, which is good for research purposes. The boy continues to screech and convulse as his mother carries him to the dental chair. My own teeth ache in sympathy; lately they’ve been hurting even more than usual. I watch Martin reach for the pig nose. He oinks maniacally at the child and peers down over his pink snout, trying to win a giggle. The boy hushes, a glimmering strip of spittle trailing from his mouth to his thumb. If I saw a pig-man standing over me wielding sharp silver tools, I’d do whatever he said, too.

I turn in a draft of my first dissertation chapter two days after I said I would. My advisor, Phil, doesn’t give a shit. He’s writing a book about the history of modern pornography and doesn’t have time to do things like advise. Instead he is consumed by hentai and the Marquis de Sade and the prospect of tenure.

To celebrate my milestone, my roommate Selin makes me an awful carrot cake. She stares at me with a dead glint in her eyes as I eat it. She does this often, bakes something for people and then insists on watching them consume it. Her hand creeps across the plastic table and back again, spiderlike.

“Good?” she demands, and I nod. 

Selin is getting a PhD in something adjacent to economics. We make good friends because each of us thinks that we’re just a little bit smarter and a little bit prettier than the other. She’s a little awkward and bad about the dishes, but for the most part we coexist easily. Sometimes I forget Selin is even there; she slips around our apartment in silence, a long line of vertebrae and then those hard blue eyes.

When I finish the cake, Selin rides the broom out of the closet like a witch. It’s Thursday, which means we have to clean the apartment. Selin hosts a game night every week because otherwise she wouldn’t be invited. Her finance friends are all tall and ill-dressed, and they smile at me when I go into the kitchen. Tonight they’re playing Sorry!, which is a game all the women are good at. The game pieces are translucent and pink like hard candy.

While Selin lays out the game board, I return to my desk and fold origami with my latest outline. The rubber ducks are good company, and I think that this is because we are alike. I, too, am a sitting duck. My only future plans are to sit around and read and wait for my teeth to fall out. If I’ve learned anything, it’s to not bite off more than I can chew.

A few days later I’m standing in the dental office with Martin, waiting for his next patient. He’s looking at me with red eyes while I stare at his bandaged knuckles. Sometimes he shows up to work a little high on marijuana, but he keeps a steady hand, and we’ve never had any complaints. The technician hums an off-key rap sample as she wipes down the chair. We inhale the smells of dentistry. Mint, latex, metal. Clove oil and hydrogen peroxide.

“What happened to your hand?” I finally ask Martin, and he scowls. 

“My grill. It quit working last night out of nowhere. Real nice one, too. There was no spark, nothing, all gone. So I figure it’s my fault, right? Operator error. I try to jiggle the knobs, rekindle the flame. It’s no use, but I keep trying anyway.” 

“Sure,” I say. Once again, I get the sense that we are actually talking about his marriage. 

“Now keep in mind, I’m starving, and I’ve got my weenie on the grate ready to go. Nothing. So, I get frustrated. I start kicking it, almost knock the damn thing over.” At this point, Martin starts kicking the air in front of him, almost losing his balance. 

“Not unreasonable, right? I paid way too much money for this piece of shit to crap out on me. And then finally I grab the hood, give it a good shake — only that’s when I realize the grill was on after all.” For several moments after Martin stops speaking, his foot continues to kick out in front of him, like he’s playing invisible hacky sack. 

“So it was my fault,” he says, “in the end.”

I check in the next patient and then try to get some academic work done. I don’t make much headway in proving that modernists mistrusted the postwar dental industry, or that they understood it as a repressive societal institution that destroyed man’s true self. Dentistry is after all a pretty bloody business, built on the threat of decay, and dependent upon absolute truths: your gums are receding or they aren’t. The realists don’t have much more insight to offer. I do manage to confirm that Huck Finn never had a tooth removed. Nor did he have access to basic orthodonture. Things might have been so different for him. 

“Everybody gets nervous,” Martin is telling a squirming redhead. He’s wielding the water flosser in one hand and bubblegum-flavored toothpaste in the other.

“What makes you nervous?” the girl asks through clenched teeth.

Martin considers this. “Lots of things,” he says finally. “Bears. Plastic spatulas. My upcoming trip.”

“Where are you going?” asks the child.

“Yeah, where?” I call from the desk. Martin doesn’t have a vacation blocked out in the schedule, and I worry I’ll have to rearrange his appointments. 

“Reno,” he says gravely. 

As I pack up to leave, Omisha, the orthodontist, describes to me an article she read about dental archaeology. A skeleton was discovered in Denmark last month, and the remains supposedly prove that the Vikings performed cosmetic dental surgeries. “They think warriors carved horizontal lines into their teeth,” explains Omisha, “a practice which suggests early contact with Indigenous American communities.”

“All that from a couple canines?” I ask, shoving a few folders into the filing cabinet. The insurance records, like my research notes, have become unnavigable. 

“We can learn so much from teeth,” Omisha says. “Who you were, how you died. What you had for breakfast and whether you flossed afterwards. Teeth always tell a story.”

My teeth, specifically, are a bad story. As a kid I had cavities aplenty, especially after my father died and my mother gave up on limiting my candy intake. Then, in middle school gym class, I got hit in the face with a softball bat. It knocked out my eight front teeth and severed my lip totally in half. Now none of my incisors are real. (Even so, they ache frequently.) I don’t remember the accident itself, just a pleasant shade of black and then the floor of the gymnasium. The bat cleaved right through my upper lip so you could see the inside of my mouth, as if through the flaps of a tent. Blood galore and scattered shards of enamel. The scar is still discolored, but it’s only obvious if I smile, which I try not to do too often anyway.

It’s the season of sweat and miasma. I stay inside and pore over library books, searching for further proof that the tooth is a masculine emblem of American exceptionalism. When none turns up, I switch back to spelunking through the internet. I’ve started getting targeted ads for burial insurance and egg donation.

One afternoon, Selin wanders into my room and settles on my unmade bed. “I thought I saw a new farmer’s market off California Avenue,” she tells me. “But turns out the tents were full of homeless people.”

“You’re supposed to say unhoused,” I say.

“Why?”

As I think about how to respond, I feel an icy pain in my mouth. When Selin looks away, I spit out a small white rock, and then another. Every time a fragment breaks off my fake teeth I feel a gut-tugging panic, like the rest of me is about to start crumbling off too. The bonding resin they used wasn’t meant to last more than a few years, much less a decade. What I should do is get veneers; really, my whole mouth needs a makeover. I bet Martin would do it for cheap, or he’d know someone who could. But veneers are painful to install and expensive to maintain, and quite frankly I can’t be bothered with the hassle. What if they don’t match the color right — a few perfect pearly whites nestled between coffee-stained colleagues? And really, it would be strange now, not to carry these toothaches around.

“It’s a matter of semantic dignity,” I tell her.

“Oh, please. What are the homeless going to do about it? Take to the streets?”

“You know, once a year our office opens to homeless people — ”

“You mean unhoused,” Selin interrupts.

“ — and gives them free dental care. You don’t really think of dentistry as an emergency service, but you can see their relief immediately.” 

One older woman came in wearing a child’s T-shirt, constellations of track marks on her arms. “I can’t even think,” she kept saying, pointing to her mouth. “It hurts so bad I can’t even think.” She had four tooth infections, and her breath smelled like rotten cabbage. She showed Martin where she’d tried to extract one of the teeth herself, with garden shears. “I yanked and yanked,” she said. “Yank-twist-yank.”

I start to tell Selin this story so she’ll leave me alone. Selin hates dentists. She was supposed to get her wisdom teeth out in high school but refused, afraid of what she’d say under the silver fog of anesthesia. It’s not an unreasonable worry. Some people get loopy under conscious sedation, admit to infidelity or adoration. Once, an elderly patient alluded to a war crime.

I always wonder what confessions I would make in a diazepam stupor. Perhaps I’d divulge the odd fantasy with ropes, or the desperate urge to look away when other people smile like they mean it. 

Once Selin is gone, I open my email and see that my advisor has written me back. He’ll get to my draft soon, he promises. He’s just started a chapter on the postmodern peep show. I watch the pink sun sink behind the hills, dragging the day behind it. From the windowsill, Shakespeare duck looks at me with disappointment.

I walk a different way to work today, on side streets with more shade. Enormous pines loom overhead, their branches tangling with redwoods and blue oaks and palm trees. I like seeing the new window signs, which advertise memory clouds and green data and other technologies that sound like poetry. Every property I pass is worth seven figures. 

When I approach the office, my clothes are blotched and sweaty. I’m early, and I think I see the other receptionist on her way out. Just in case, I hide around the corner until I can be sure she’s left. If I were to meet her, it might cause some sort of cosmic rift, I think. Inside, I find several curly, dark hairs caught under the space bar of the keyboard, and I allow myself to think she is taunting me. 

A middle-aged woman is stationed in the waiting room. As soon as I walk in she starts speaking, her blonde hair frizzing every which way. “You know what’s weird?” she asks. “Everything in your mouth is constantly touching itself.” 

“That’s true,” I say, though I’m not sure it is. I reach into my bag and pull out a highlighter and a printed journal article on the lexicology of orthodontia. 

“Have you checked in already?” I ask.

“Oh, yes,” she says. “You know, I love getting my teeth cleaned. If I don’t brush three times a day, it feels like my teeth are wearing sweaters.”

Thankfully, Omisha comes out to collect the woman. I can see Omisha is carrying cheek retractors. They’re basically big plastic hooks that pull the flesh of your face to the side, and the resulting expression is the grotesque, gummy smile of an idiot predator baring its teeth. 

“Sweater vests,” the woman tells me on her way out of the room. “Since teeth don’t have arms.” 

I send out some appointment reminders and start reading the journal article. I find very little but come up with several questions: why is odontalgia such an ugly word? Is toothed pronounced like beloved — like toothéd? Was Dr. Seuss a modernist? 

At some point in the afternoon, Martin rushes out of his office.

“What time is it?” he asks.

“Tooth-thirty,” I tell him.

“Oh, phew!”

“Just kidding,” I say. “It’s ten past three.”

“Dammit,” he cries, and then he’s out, muttering something about his kid. The front door is plastered with a peeling decal of our office’s lascivious mascot, Timmy the Tooth. Martin leaves it hanging open wide. Martin has seemed a bit more out of it lately, and I wonder if he’s moved up a drug class or two. His divorce will be finalized next week. 

I skim through another article, which says nothing of substance but manages to thrice use the phrase “dento-existentialism.” Afterwards, I survey the office’s sticker collection. Every child is offered a sticker as a reward for their bravery, although sometimes adults also want stickers. I’m in charge of ordering them, which is my favorite part of the whole job. This month, there are cute woodland creatures and characters from Scooby-Doo, which I used to watch with my father on the weekends. 

When Martin returns at quarter past six, my suspicions about his substance use are confirmed. The office is supposed to be closed by then, and I’m using the bathroom before my walk home. The doorbells clank and thump, indicating his arrival. When I come out of the bathroom, Martin is already slumped over in the dental chair. He’s got a sedation mask strapped over his nose, a round blue snout with two long tubes that connect to a canister of nitrous oxide. Muddy shadows flicker across his slack figure.

Martin inhales audibly and lets out a glorious groan. I’ve tried laughing gas only once, and I liked it so much I know I can never do it again. During that thirty-second high, not much can touch you. It’s like floating around your own thoughts, which are softer than usual, and brighter, spinning slowly on a pink-lit carousel. 

I meet my advisor at a cafe on campus. His brown hair sticks up like antlers, and his fly is unzipped.

“Teeth,” he says pensively, nodding at me. Then he launches into a prolix spiel about the vagina dentata, or the toothed vagina, which sits at the intersection of our scholarly interests. Phil wants to know if I think this brand of body horror is rooted in female desire for protection or male paranoia around emasculation. I tell him I think those are the same. 

Eventually, we wend our way to discussing my dissertation. I can tell he hasn’t read a thing I’ve sent him because all he has to offer are vague thematic statements. Strangely, I hope it is my writing and not the subject that Phil has deemed unworthy of his time. He takes a sip of coffee after every sentence he speaks, as if to buy himself time to think of the next one.

“Teeth are rich symbolically yet also practically so necessary to the human experience. Teeth are the gatekeepers of the body. We use them to talk, to feed, even to fellate,” Phil continues. I’ve been under the impression that teeth are definitively not supposed to be involved in that last endeavor, but he’s the expert. Soon he starts down a tangent about odontophilia, a fetish he’s evidently come across in his research. 

“Of course, in contemporary pornography, biting is a relatively tame category of behavior. Now I’ve found that some of the more extreme erotica, say, body modification, can involve pulling out a partner’s teeth.” Phil trails off. “My suggestion is that the invention of the internet exposed us to too many deviant sexual bodies.” I nod. Like other concepts that predate me — sliced bread, for example, or God — the internet is not something I’ve ever thought of as having been invented. It’s as if, like me, it just appeared one day in the nineties.

Phil is talking about the vestal aesthetics of the snuff film when he abruptly falls quiet. “Sorry,” he says, after a long pause. “I keep thinking of my wife. The first words I ever said to her were, ‘Excuse me, is that blood or lipstick on your teeth?’”

Selin’s friends are playing Clue this week, and they invite me to join. We sit in a tight circle around the board. An argument over the characters ensues, during which the national debt, anarcho-communism, and Derrick’s fat mother are all somehow invoked. Selin takes Colonel Mustard; I get Professor Plum.

I don’t know how to play, but neither does anybody else. Mostly I toy with the miniature weapons scattered across the board. Selin passes around bone-dry oatmeal cookies that even a horse wouldn’t eat. 

The boy next to me spits out his first bite. He’s French, a burgeoning cryptocurrency expert. “I hate to tell you, but these are terrible,” he says. Even though he’s right, I want to defend Selin. It’s hard to watch the eagerness in her face, the way she wrings herself out in conversation.

In the end, we discover that Mr. Boddy was killed with a rope. Selin and her friends go out for ice cream. Once I’m alone I notice that the overhead lights are humming. 

“Shut the fuck up,” I tell them.

I get into bed and light a joint and let it dangle from my mouth, watching its ginger embers bob in the window reflection. I think about Martin’s misbehaving wife-grill, the way he mimed kicking it into the ground. He used to bring home big bouquets from the florist next door, irises and baby’s breath, week after week.

I’ve still got the slipknot prop in my hand, and I pinch its ribbed yellow plastic. I decide that rope is the best Clue weapon. I’ve never known anyone who’s been killed with a lead pipe or a wrench, much less a candlestick. But ropes, they get the job done. I’ve got good evidence; my father hanged himself in the coat closet when I was in second grade. Because I was young, my mother told me he fell while walking down the stairs at night. “He was just so tired,” she said. “And it was dark. He couldn’t see where he was going.”

My father was not a dentist, but dentists have appreciably higher suicide rates than the national average. I think this is because they get bitten so often, or because everyone hates coming to see them. I remember very little of my father, except that our last conversation concerned Scrappy-Doo.

Of course, the murderer got away.

The joint goes out and I relight it. When the munchies hit me, I open the bag of peach rings stashed in my desk. The parts of a tooth sound like parts of a fruit: there’s the root, the crown, the pulp chamber. Once, a dentist found a live guava sprout growing in a Taiwanese man’s molar. I suck the sugar off the rings and try to maneuver my tongue into the middle holes. 

I’ve thought about it, and my father must have looked up how to tie the noose. Maybe he read a manual or looked it up on the internet; nowadays, wikiHow has great step-by-step graphics. It doesn’t seem like the kind of knot you can just intuit. Yank-twist-yank. 

On the first day of August, the AQI reading is so high that we’re advised not to go outside. A nearby wildfire creeps closer and closer, until it’s so close that the dental office shuts down for the day. The air is a pretty orange that recalls chemical warfare. The campus feels empty, except for a few lone students walking around in cloth masks on the sidewalks below. If we didn’t go through this every few months, I’d think it was the end of days. 

Once or twice a year my teeth hurt so badly I can’t talk. Today is one of those days. My entire front jaw feels hollowed out, and I fantasize about severing my head from my body. I have to signal with my hands to ask Selin to please do her dishes. There are three mixing bowls going sour in the sink. Selin pretends not to understand. 

By noon the entirety of my head is throbbing, and I wish I could shift my consciousness down into my feet, or out of my body entirely. Instead I take four Motrin and wait. Selin watches me as I try to find faces in the sagging red clouds. She’s baked me a dozen tiny lemon muffins that I cannot eat on account of my toothache. 

Smoke plumes across the distant hills. Wildfires aren’t always bad; they occur naturally in many environments, clearing dead kindling on the ground and returning vital nutrients to the soil. It’s the man-made fires that are the problem, the ones that burn too long and too often.

When she thinks I’m not looking, Selin dumps the muffins into the trash. The pain in my mouth starts to shift — pulsing, throbbing, then steady, like the settings on a vibrator.

My advisor sends feedback three weeks late: “The problem with this writing,” he writes, “is that it is too writerly.” 

It’s a good thing I don’t have ambitions in the academy. I’m just clinging to the coattails of studenthood. I think it’s best this way. Long-range planning begets little but the illusion of stability and a basic knowledge of Excel. I guess I would like to acquire more ducks. I still don’t have a dentist duck, which seems like a serious gap.

Six more Motrin. Every year the pain gets a little worse, lasts a little longer. It’s hard to imagine a life that will hurt this badly. It’s impossible to imagine one that won’t. 

I look at my reflection in the black mirror of the microwave. It’s a sad picture, so I try out different smiles: a wry smirk, then a big grin. Every tooth is uneven, chipped and stained, cheap replicas of what once were there. I keep on smiling at myself, running my tongue over the scar on my lip where the tissue is raised and twisted. I beam mid-laugh; I simper demurely. There’s no smile I can find that hides the disfigurement. 

I walk in on Selin eating raw sugar late at night. Spoonful after spoonful. She doesn’t even stop when she sees I’m there, just smiles and keeps going, her chin bearded in sticky white specks. Her whole face looks swollen. All I can think to say is how much plaque will build up. 

Minutes later, I hear her go into the toilet. A gag, a splish, a splash. Ugly words like “ulcer” and “erosion” get caught in my throat. As I stand silently outside the bathroom door, I remember what Phil said about teeth being the gatekeepers of the body. They are designed to keep things out but also to keep things in. 

“Don’t brush right away,” I say softly, through the door. “It ruins the enamel.”

The office’s air conditioning breaks. The temperature is butting up against one hundred. We walk around in a dermis of wet salt, tooth dust sticking to our skin. Because the air is still smoky, we can’t even open the windows. It’s so hot that the plastic on the dinosaur floss sticks begins to melt. Martin ducks into the exam room between patients, always closing the door behind him. By four o’clock, he’s downright cheerful, oblivious to the sheets of sweat slipping down his skin.

The last patient is grossly cherubic, plump-faced and puddle-eyed, and he leads his father into the office with the authority of a prison warden. The man shuffles slowly behind his progeny. 

“I hate you” is the first thing the boy tells me. The father says nothing, just closes his small eyes. The pair has arrived a quarter of an hour early for their appointment, and Martin is still locked in the exam room. I knock on the door to let him know that his patient has arrived. There’s a startled thunk and the sound of plastic snapping against itself. When Martin exits the room a few minutes later, his pupils are swollen, and he’s smiling so hard I have to look away. 

I take a sip of water and the chill burrows through my teeth into my skull. When the cold headache subsides, the technician has the kid all set up in the dental chair and is smoothing the paper bib across his small chest. 

“I’m scared and I hate you,” the child tells Martin. I have to admire his honesty, until he twists around and looks at me through the open door. “I hate you more,” he tells me. 

“What did I do?” I ask. 

“Let’s settle down, buddy,” says the father. “Hate is a strong word.” 

“I hate you,” the kid tells him. 

The father sighs. “I believe you,” he says. 

Martin picks up the excavator, whose twisted titanium spindle admittedly does not inspire trust. Then the tech hands him the mouth mirror, which he tries to coax between the boy’s lips. Martin once described the exam process as like mapping haunted caves. 

The boy bites down so Martin can’t pull the mirror out. He gently wiggles its metal stem back and forth, but the boy shakes his head in protest. 

“He just lost his first tooth,” offers the father. The mirror is wedged in the fresh hole. 

I get up to grab an expired Pepsi from the office fridge. When I return to my desk, the computer monitor flickers green. I think about cataloging a few invoices and then turn to my research. I’m combing through an academic blog post on false teeth in Faulkner when a shriek comes from the exam room. 

“The human animal requires a lot of upkeep,” Martin is explaining. The kid is sniffling dramatically, with his mouth pressed shut. It’s hard to tell whether he’s alarmed by the use of the phrase “the human animal” or by the fact that Martin is waving around a slender syringe full of novocaine. 

“Eating lots of sweets can cause cavities, like the ones we’re going to fill in today,” says Martin. “So let’s listen to Dad when he says we should brush our teeth, okay?” 

Since Selin’s pig-out in the kitchen last night, that song from Mary Poppins has been skipping and restarting in my head like an old record. A spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down… in a most delightful way! I hum the chorus as I pretend to do busywork. 

“Looks like it’s time for a special friend,” I hear Martin say. A rustling, and then: “Meet Monsieur Cochon!” 

If the boy was crying before, he is absolutely squalling now. He thrashes in the chair, knocking back the dental light and blinding his father, who staggers backward into the technician. The kid’s flailing arms knock over Martin’s gleaming platter of tools. They clang upon impact with the ground, and the noise makes the boy cry harder. 

“Hate piggy, hate, hate,” he sobs. 

I walk into the room, involving myself against my better judgement. Martin, who has not taken off the pig nose, is making obscene oinking sounds. His face is sweating and pink, as if to make his performance more convincing.

“Bacon,” the father is saying. “He’s like bacon!”

The child is still screaming and Martin has started crawling around on all fours, snorting and squealing with savage enthusiasm. 

“Be reasonable,” I beg Martin. It occurs to me that pigs are known to eat almost everything, every part of a human, except for the teeth. 

“Be reasonable,” I beg the child. 

“Like Wilbur! Hot dog! Peppa Pig!” 

The boy is screaming at an incredible decibel. I approach him with open hands and one of the smiles I practiced in the microwave. I lower my voice to a soothing timbre and lie to him, even though kids always sense mendacity, can smell it on your breath. I tell the boy that the dentist won’t hurt him one bit, that he’s a good boy and there’s no reason to be scared. I tell him all this with my best attempt at sincerity. But the boy doesn’t listen, and his light-up sneakers flail in space, the plastic tread patterned with spirals and stars. He looks up behind me at whatever it is I can’t see. Then he rears up and kicks me in the teeth, sending what’s left of them down my throat, past my tonsils, into the galactic black, down and down and down.