Something to Chew On

I have a very uncommon condition relating to my pearly whites: they just grow. For four months, all day, every day, I feel them moving in my mouth. They grow wider and longer and thicker. It it isn’t a pleasant feeling. I’ve got scars on the roof of my mouth from when they’ve started poking through. There’s only one thing to do about it. I bought a pair of pliers from a local shop. The worst one to get out is always the first. It’s not that it hurts less afterward but at least then you’ve started and it’s closer to being over. I used to keep them in a drawer to satisfy my hoarding instincts but they started falling out and ending up all over the house. I eventually just began throwing them away. I only know anyone else has gone through this experience from the forum. There’s only seven active members including myself.

Every morning my teeth look like they belong to a toddler. By lunch, they’re starting to get too big for my mouth. By the time I’m leaving work at five forty, the pain is intense and unceasing. I can usually get them all out in a half hour. I pop a couple pills a doctor friend of mine gave me for back pain I made up, and go to bed. The next day it starts all over again. I don’t think I’d be able right now without the forum. I actually made a real friend on there. We called each other on the phone about once a week. He was "MosaG" on the forum but, in real life, his name was Paul. Paul was a good guy. He said the whole messed up situation started for him more than a year before we became friends. He actually used to use a hammer. Apparently, that didn’t work out very well and he’d had to pull leftover pieces of his teeth out with tweezers.

Anyway, Paul quit responding to my messages a few weeks back. I thought he was busy or having a bad day at first. Then more time passed and I decided to check his Facebook. There was so many people praying for him and missing him and no answers as to what had actually gone down. His local newspaper told me. He had been found outside his house. His whole head had been destroyed. The police couldn’t decide if it was a baseball bat or some kind of pipe bomb. They said it was definitely gang activity. My friend was dead and no one could even say for sure what had happened.

Five nights ago, I drank a tall glass of vodka in bed and proceeded to rip my teeth out. I placed them on my night table and passed out from a combination of the alcohol, the pain and a very long day. When I woke up, the teeth weren’t there. I thought I must have knocked them to the ground and I looked for a second. All I turned up was an empty cookies and cream ice cream container and broken pencil. I went to work. When I returned home that evening, I found garbage strewn across my front porch. I investigated and found something had torn into my trash bags. Well, I thought that at the time. Now, I know something tore out rather than in.

That night, I performed dental torture on myself, same as usual and threw the bloody lumps of bone into the garbage before taking a quick shower and going to bed. I was woken maybe an hour later by a loud thud in the kitchen. I grabbed a BB gun from my closet and put on shorts so as to not show any murderous thieves my wiener. Then I rushed downstairs and into the kitchen. There was nothing. The small white trash can I keep by the fridge had fallen on its side. I picked it back up and shoved a few food wrappers and an empty cigarette carton back inside the bag. I wouldn’t have thought anything more of it but I caught something out of the corner of my eye. It was white and a little shiny, about the size of a large cockroach. It darted across the floor and disappeared under the fridge. It couldn’t be what it looked like. I checked inside and around the can. No teeth. Not a one. I knew I had thrown them away in the kitchen. I thought for a moment I was going crazy. Maybe the whole thing was just in my head. But no, my imagination wasn’t good enough for that. What I was going through was real. I decided I must have forgotten and flushed the teeth. I went somewhat uneasily back to bed.

I was woken shortly before sunrise by the sound of something colliding with my bedroom window. I glanced outside and then I saw it. My whole yard was a sea of white. There were more teeth out there than I possibly could have lost. Had they been breeding somehow? Some of them were the normal thumb size they usually are when I take them out but others were comparable in size to large dogs. They stood like a mob of angry villagers gathered to destroy a monster. It was then I heard the words.

They came from my mouth and echoed cavernously in my skull. “Open up. Open up. Open,” spoke the voice but it wasn’t just one voice it was a million indescribably cold, indescribably cruel voices. I closed my eyes and sat in terror for a long while. Eventually, I fell asleep somehow and was later woken by the alarm on my phone. I looked out the window. When I saw nothing but grass and a little deer shit, I told myself it was just a dream. Then a molar ran up the old oak tree and that moment of hope disappeared.

The voices returned a little after lunch that day. It wasn’t as loud or intense at first but pretty soon it got even worse. I had to squeeze my hands so fiercely my knuckles turned white to keep from screaming out in pain and terror in front of all my coworkers. I called off sick the last three days. The command to “Open up.” just keeps getting louder and increasingly hateful. I feel sick all the time. I don’t know what I did to deserve this but I know what they want. They want my mouth. I also know how Paul died. He opened up. He gave in. They ripped his jaws open and shattered his skull. It was over for him. No more pain every day. No more fighting to keep control. Just peace.

I can see them outside my window again tonight. There’s so many. They’re desperate for me to accept them and let them do what they want to do. They just need to destroy me and then they’ll go away. I’m wearing my funeral and wedding suit. I’m sure my blood and brain matter will ruin it but I want to die looking semi-decent. I’m heading outside now. I tried to fight it but it was always coming to this. My friends, it is time for me to open wide.

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Written by Gomez Capulet
Content is available under CC BY-SA