Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-31665168-20170404031553

When I was 8 years old I lost my first tooth. Like most kids I was quickly informed about the benefits of the tooth fairy. After having it explained to me I immediately snuck my tooth under my pillow and tried to get some sleep.

Upon waking up the next morning, I was very disappointed to find that the tooth was still there, seemingly untouched. At first I thought I had done something wrong, that there was some step in the ritual that I had forgotten. I went into the kitchen where my mother was making breakfast and I asked her about it. Her reaction was a nervous smile and a pat on my head. I kept prodding at her, but she would just whisper under her breath to be a good boy and eat my breakfast.

Finally, I gave up and just went about my day, hoping that maybe tonight was the night I would get my payoff. When I awoke again the next morning the tooth was still there, just as it was the night before. This time, however, I noticed something odd. There was a large chunk of gum on the bottom of the tooth.

I became panicked, feeling around in my mouth and fearing that I had torn too much out of myself. Everything seemed normal, but my pulse was still racing. I ran downstairs and berated my mother with another round of questions. I was met with her continual attempts to change the subject; I noticed that she was crying. I started to get really worried and scared so I started crying too.

Eventually my father helped calm us both down, and a few more days passed. I'd check on the tooth every now and then and each time I did a little more gum was growing onto it. After a few weeks new teeth sprouted from the excess gum and that's when I thought I had figured it all out. My parents were clearly unwilling to explain it to me, so I came to the conclusion that I had to look after it until it was ready for the tooth fairy to pick up.

One day, I took a spoon from the kitchen and started carving out a hole in the wall of my room. I cautiously placed the growth there and covered it back up with a blanket that I thumb tacked into place.

A few months went by and the growth became larger, it started gaining bits of jaw and skin. As insane as it sounds I legitimately thought I was doing the right thing.

Then one night I was awoken by a loud knocking at our front door. I got scared and ran to my parents’ room where I found my mother and father dressed in their finest clothes. I didn't understand what was going on, but my mother put her arms around me and promised it would all be ok.

My father turned to me and asked, "Where is it son?”

I was still half asleep, so I just kind of stood there looking at him blankly. He repeated the question, adding to it, "Your tooth?"

I remember his smile; it was a sickeningly wide grin. He seemed downright giddy, like he had just won the lottery or something. I told him it was in the wall and he asked me to show him, so we both went over to my room. He saw the blanket that I had covering the hole and he ran up to it, tore it off, and grabbed the mass behind it.

At this point it had an eyeball, part of a mouth, a half-formed ear, and some sort of inhuman tendril growing out from where a nose would be. My father gleamed with pride, pride that at the time I thought was directed toward me. I then followed him back to the front hall where my mother opened the front door.

An elderly man walked in with every inch of his body, other than his face, covered in a thick black shawl. In his right hand he was carrying a red rucksack. My father walked up to him, got on his knees, and presented the growth. The elderly man took it out of my father's hands and inspected it. He ran his fingers over it, shook it near his ear, and smelled it as if he were buying something from a fruit stand.

The elderly man then shook his head in approval and handed my father a small box. The man then placed the growth in the rucksack and left. My father hugged my mother and they jumped up and down a little. Then they told me to go back to sleep and that they love me very much.

From that point forward my parents anxiously awaited me losing my other teeth, going so far as to try and goad them out. They'd feed me candy and make me eat hard foods like apples and stale bread. Eventually a tooth would come out, and the growth process would start all over.

At some juncture there were at least five growths happening all at once, my parents having moved them to a more supervised location in the living room. When I'd walk in after school I would be greeted with bits of faces and parts of bodies. I had noticed early on that my father was keeping one growth sectioned off, and he didn't give this one away when the elderly man would come to visit.

<p class="MsoNormal">I got curious one afternoon and asked him about it, and all he would tell me is, "We're keeping this one for ourselves."

<p class="MsoNormal">One day my curiosity got the better of me and I looked in the boxes that the elderly man had been leaving with my family. They were filled with these pictures of red buildings. Sometimes it was the same red building from multiple angles, other times it was different buildings that all looked similar but were clearly different.

<p class="MsoNormal">One picture was particularly odd; it showed a row of houses on a street at nighttime. The red house in this picture had no doors but many windows. The other houses in the picture had lights shining from them, but the red house was pitch-black.

<p class="MsoNormal">Sometimes I would catch my parents looking at the pictures at night. They would sit at the end of their bed for hours staring at a single image, smiling. I never asked them about it because I felt like they would get mad if they knew I had looked at the photos without their permission.

<p class="MsoNormal">When I was 11 years old I started running low on baby teeth, and my parents started to get less patient waiting for the teeth to fall out. It got so bad that one night my father completely broke down and started smacking me in my face. After realizing it wouldn't work, he took a pair of pliers and forced the few baby teeth I did have left out of my mouth.

<p class="MsoNormal">I had never been that upset or scared in my entire life, and my mother, who had more sense left than my father, called the police. We waited for hours, but for some reason the police never came. My mother and I just sat by the front door, crying.

<p class="MsoNormal">When those growths had finished and the elderly man had collected them, the only one left was the one my father had put aside. It was full bodied now, but whatever it was it wasn't human. I still vividly remember the night when I woke up during a thunderstorm to find the thing had crawled up the stairs and into my room. It was inching closer and closer to my bed its "arms" making horrifying scratching noises against the ground.

<p class="MsoNormal">When I started screaming at the top of my lungs my father showed up, bursting into the room and grabbing the thing off the floor. He then proceeded to cuddle it in his arms caressing it like a baby. He walked out of the room with it, paying me absolutely no attention and leaving me crying in my bed.

<p class="MsoNormal">A few nights later there was a knock on the front door and I instantly assumed it was the elderly man. My parents and I approached the front entrance, but only after my father had hid the growth in the kitchen cupboard like he was playing some sick twisted version of hide-and-seek. My mother opened the door and the elderly man walked in with an expectant look on his face.

<p class="MsoNormal">My father started to shout at him, telling him to leave and that he'd attack him, that it wasn't his to take. All the while the elderly man just stood there with that same expression on his face. Eventually my father broke down completely, smacking the floor wildly and spitting at the elderly mans feet. When it was clear he wasn't going to leave, my father suddenly got very quiet and turned toward me.

<p class="MsoNormal">He looked between me and my mother's face expressing to her the new plan. He moved forward trying to grab me but my mother pushed him back, screaming. He then tried to comfort her, "This is the only way, we have to do it this way, we need it, we need it."

<p class="MsoNormal">Eventually he whispered something in her ear, and her demeanor changed immediately. Suddenly she was laughing hysterically, shoving me forward as fast as she could. The elderly man grabbed my hair and dragged me out into the open air of the night as my parents were still laughing and jumping up and down like giddy children.

<p class="MsoNormal">There were no cars in the street; instead there were at least twenty other people all dressed in the same black shawl standing in an orderly line, waiting. Each had a full-sized growth in their arms and they were just watching as the elderly man picked me up and held me in a similar manner to them.

<p class="MsoNormal">The procession marched down the street and as they did I was screaming. The front doors of all the other houses were open but each was pitch black. The houses themselves were only lit by streetlights, which were flickering on and off at odd intervals. I screamed as hard as I could but none of our neighbors showed up, nor any other human beings.

<p class="MsoNormal">The procession marched on and on, the street seeming to extend beyond its normal length. The houses started to repeat themselves. The only difference would be a small light, like the kind from a candle, coming from a window or the front door. When I would look down I would notice the gravel on the street getting more and more fine, almost like a gray beach. The grass of the yards started to become flat as if they were cardboard cutouts.

<p class="MsoNormal">After what seemed like an eternity I finally saw a new house, and it was smack dab in the middle of the street some ways down. The house was entirely red, with no windows, doors, or even a discernible roof. When the procession approached the front of this building, the first figure dropped his growth on the ground and it immediately began to scratch away at the building.

<p class="MsoNormal">I vividly remember the red material coming off like putty, making a small hole just large enough for the growth to fit through. The creature that had made the hole forced itself inside, letting out a kind of demonic chirping noise and viciously flailing the back-half of its body around.

<p class="MsoNormal">After the first creature crawled in to the building, each person in the procession took turns dropping the growth they were carrying and waiting for them to go into the hole. Some of the creatures would try and resist and when they did the shrouded figures would force them in.

<p class="MsoNormal">When the man holding me approached the building and dropped me onto the ground I just kept screaming. Ahead of me in the hole I could hear a cacophony of the demonic chirping and I could see a bunch of the same small lights I had seen in the houses as we walked down the street. They weren’t candles but simply little dots of red light that seemed to just be floating.

<p class="MsoNormal">In the center of the dark I saw some kind of entity. Its face looked long and narrow and it had small red circles where eyes on a human face would be. It had what looked like a hand at the base of its chin pushing up as if it were trying to pop its own head off.

<p class="MsoNormal">I turned around to look at the elderly man and started begging him to let me go. He had this worried look on his face and started to forcibly push me inside. I could see the faces of the other figures and they all had a look of disgust about them. The elderly man was getting desperate and eventually managed to overpower me and throw me inside the small hole that was barely large enough for me to fit through.

<p class="MsoNormal">That's it, that's all I remember of my entire childhood. It's like the rest is blanked out, with my next memory being waking up on the day after my eighteenth birthday. At that point I was already living on my own, and while I couldn't remember the specifics I knew that in the present day I was simply working a job as a department store clerk.

<span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-fareast-font-family: "TimesNewRoman";mso-ansi-language:EN-US;mso-fareast-language:EN-US; mso-bidi-language:AR-SA">I know somewhere out there someone has gone through this same thing. I just wait day after day, forcing myself through therapy sessions, hoping that someone will come forward with their experience too. I feel like then maybe I could live a normal life, even though I know deep down, I never will. <ac_metadata title="Self Surgery"> </ac_metadata>