Murdermouth Previously unpublished. I recently got a job with a dental plan, so I decided it was time to get my teeth cleaned. It had been so long that the dental clinic had to dig back into the paper files to find me, and the accounting clerk greeted my arrival with a heavy sigh. The hygienist's reaction was no different. I brushed and flossed regularly and with gusto, but time had caused my teeth to nearly double their mass with tartar. “I didn't want to have to do this,” she said, and brought out the ultrasonic cleaner, a demonic little stainless steel wand that bombarded my mouth with high-frequency sound waves. Iceberg-sized hunks of nastiness dislodged themselves in the onslaught; I wrung my shirt with my hands and my face contorted like an infant's. The problem was a thin metal bar that ran along the back of my lower incisors. It had been put there by my former dentist when I was a teenager, to prevent the teeth from shifting. At the time, he promised to remove it in ten years. Twenty years had passed, however, and the thing was almost impossible to clean behind, both for me and for the hygienist. During a break in the action, I asked if the wire—a bridge, she called it—could be removed. She brought in a dentist, and he took a look. “To be honest,” he said, “I've never seen one of these on anyone past 26.” “I'm way past 26,” I admitted. “I don't want to pull it until I know what it's doing there. Who put it in?” I named my ex-dentist. “Well, can you get your records?” “Uh...I'm afraid not.” I'd had a perfectly good dentist when I was a child—a kindly old man with an amiable manner. But he worked across town, and appointments with him necessitated a car trip. As I entered late adolescence, a new guy up the block added an office to his house and hung out a shingle. His wife worked as the hygienist and secretary. The prospect of walking to appointments won my family over—we switched. The new dentist was a stiff, severe man in early middle age. He never quite looked you in the eye when he talked to you, and when he did talk, it was in a sarcastic, resigned sort of drawl, as if speaking aloud were a last resort he'd been forced into. For all that, though, he was a perfectly good dentist. When the bridge went in, I was a teenager, and in open rebellion against my family. Well—not really. My idea of rebellion was joining a friend in throwing pancakes off the roof of a parking garage, or sneaking casual clothes to school in my backpack, and changing into them there. I would just as soon have sat home reading than gone out joyriding on the strip, and I'd never smoked a cigarette in my life. But I had a sense of myself as being different, and misunderstood, and I couldn't wait to leave town. College was less than six months away, and the closeness of my goal intensified my alienation. So when the dentist began telling me, as his latex fingers probed my mouth, about how he and I were misunderstood, and people were out to get us, and I was right to want to escape, I couldn't help but agree, moaning “Ah-hah!” through a small pool of my own saliva. I left the office girded by an uneasy bond with the dentist, and by a piece of wire on my incisors. My mouth felt weird, and I couldn't stop probing my teeth with my tongue. I went to college, and then graduate school, and I got married and had children, and eventually I forgot the wire was even there, except when trying to floss behind it. The dentist, meanwhile, had bought a small farm on the other side of the neighborhood from my parents, and began raising would-be prize steers, as a hobby. A falling-out with his wife drove him to start living in the farmhouse. Though separated, the two still worked together. My father would see the dentist walking past the house every morning and afternoon, in his dental smock, on his way to and from the clinic. One afternoon, my father was out in the driveway, and the dentist, uncharacteristically, wandered over to talk to him. He told my father that his wife had messed up the books—clearly she was out to get him. “Really?” my father asked. “Yeah—in fact, I've got the FBI looking into it.” “The FBI!” Their conversation was interrupted when the door to the dentist's office opened—it was clearly visible, two blocks away—and his wife emerged. The dentist hid behind our car, then scuttled into the garage until she was out of sight. I saw the dentist once more. I was in town with my family, and he invited our kids up to the farm. He was divorced by now, and ought to have been renewed by a sense of freedom, but he was just as sour and evasive as ever. He led my children to the cows and rabbits and goats as if he might have preferred to be elsewhere. It would be another few years before the news arrived that the dentist's ex-wife was dead. The dentist had shot her in the back one morning, at the dental office, then called the police. At the trial, he would represent himself, and claim he'd done it in self-defense—his wife had been plotting to kill him. He was convicted and went to jail; last fall, his dental license was officially revoked. “Well,” my new dentist told me, his hands on his hips. “Let's just take it out of there, then.” The procedure took three painless minutes. “Do you want to keep it?” the hygienist asked me. Indeed I did. I brought the bridge home in a little manila envelope. It resides now beside my bed, in a glass jar filled with artifacts of a perfectly uneventful life—expired beach tags, foreign change, movie tickets, campaign buttons. My mouth, once again, feels weird, and I can't stop probing my teeth with my tongue. c2009 by J. Robert Lennon.