| |
––––––––
Like sounds she heard in dreams - a child’s unanswered howl, the spinning lunacy of a hungry drill, their office TV vomiting abrupt Armenian, splotchy palms piping the front desk bell forever and forever - these aural layers smothered the necessary roar of Josephine’s critical orgasm.
Breathing and blinking, she flushed the toilet for some reason, and then washed her pulsing hands with care.
Her 10:45 was coming. Six long and short months, but he was coming.
Josephine wished she had checked the schedule last night before closing up, but she was tardy for dinner and so fled home in a hurry. Were she indeed aware that Jun Kamiya’s cleaning date was nigh, Josephine would have... what?
Showered? Shaved? Perfumed her workspace?
Nah.
None of that mattered, really, for Josephine was interested not in Jun’s entirety, but merely 32 perfect pieces of him.
She exited the bathroom and bumped into an older patient, his teeth a rotten fence leaning this way and that, pickets desperate for a coat of white paint.
Or extraction.
He pardoned himself in his language and grinned, exhibiting the full extent of his yellow dilemma. Josephine suppressed an urge to punch him in the mouth, to pulverize his maltreated bones. Instead, she marshaled herself and nodded, permitting him pass down the pinched hall with his jaw intact.
As animals that live or die on the health of their teeth, Josephine was daily astounded by the nitwits who occupied her Forest 3900 Dental Chair. They would open themselves to her, unashamed of their disgusting condition, ambivalent to the decomposition, and Josephine would command them to stretch their tendons wide, wider, widest, just enough to jam a teaching fist down their ignorant gullets.
How she relished the grinding creak of strained muscle.
Her own teeth? Well, she hated them. Aseptic, yes, but ugly, too small for her head. Gapped, like opposing rows of ivory tombstones. Yet they were Josephine’s just the same, unlike her husband’s dentition, whose implants looked rabbity and excessive. Worst of the family, however, was their preteen, a sweet-stuffing, candy-coated boy who was paying his debt of addiction with an oral crash of metal and wire.
But Jun...
Jun’s mouth was Josephine’s pure valley.
Her pit of pride.
“Josephine?”
Startled, the hygienist wheeled toward her door, ritual preparations nearly complete.
“Yes, Nuné?”
“Your 10:45.”
And Nuné stepped away, making room for Jun Kamiya.
“Hi!” he hailed, his smile like rays of summer sun.
“Hello,” replied Josephine, her childish excitement veiled by face mask, eye gear, and bouffant. Josephine noticed that he was carrying a small bag of wax paper but before she had a chance to inquire, Jun spoke.
“Sorry, come again?” Josephine mastered her will, bade it to listen to the words spilling forth from Jun’s teeth and not the talk of his teeth, those lyrical clicks, somehow wet, somehow dry.
“I said I saw the craziest thing this morning at my donut shop-”
“Donut shop?” Worry rattled Josephine’s voice.
“Yeah, the one over there on Colorado, you know it?”
“Umm, no. No.”
“Yeah, it’s my go-to spot. I guess it was my go-to, but after today, man, phew-”
Go-to? Wasn’t Jun the least bit aware that donuts were sugar, and that sugar ate enamel. How could he be so negligent, blessed with magnificence as he was? Jun’s gorging of donuts was akin to smearing feces on a Van Gogh.
“-like maybe twenty bees floating around in the display case.”
Josephine feigned a comprehending chuckle.
“And no one said anything about it! Very weird.”
“Right, that is weird.” Josephine turned her back to him and pretended to arrange her tools when truly she was arranging herself.
“Anyway, I brought this for you,” he declared, and set the crumpled bag down upon the counter. “With sprinkles, yeah, those rainbow sprinkles.”
Josephine ignored the gesture, pictured Eddie wolfing down a half dozen himself when he was that many years old, and did not thank Jun.
“Hey, how’s your boy?” he asked, as if listening to the very walls of her mind.
“Fine, thanks,” responded Josephine, colder than she would have preferred. “Mute the television?” she asked, knowing.
“Oh, yes please, thanks. News, blekh!”
Josephine obliged and reclined the chair, leveling Jun along earth and sky. The motorized whir of his descent dulled her needling concern, sort of hypnotized Josephine. It was her time now, her half hour of disinfection.
Josephine gingerly slipped goggles across Jun’s kind eyes and he smiled again, dazzling her with his gift. It allowed her frustration to finally flee.
“And what of your son?” Josephine asked, her delivery as light as the prickles teasing her skin. How she towered over Jun, how she knelt before him. “He must be in elementary already.”
“Yup, first grade! Serj is completely ape about it. Growing up, getting big. It’s crazy.”
“It only gets quicker, my friend, enjoy him while you can.”
“I know! He was born, like, a month ago for Christ’s sake. It’s crazy!”
“So crazy.”
She laughed, he laughed, and then she told him to open his mouth.
Jun obeyed.
Josephine stared.
Awe shivered her sight.
“Excellent,” Josephine sniffed. “These are... these are A+ teeth.”
“ank oo,” clucked Jun’s larynx. His uvula spasmed in sync with hers.
Eddie’s grades, weekend plans, their noisy backhouse tenant, Clive’s fucking DUI - pointless futures obliterated by her present idyll, spread bare for Josephine, and yielding.
She tapped the blinding pearls with her proboscis device, reveling in their euphony, and so primed, Josephine began.
In spite of Jun’s poorly chosen breakfast, Josephine’s labors would be minor. They always were, for Jun was a spectacular steward of his teeth. Oh, she’d exorcize him of the rapacious crumbs - he would feel her there, feel her jolts and jabs - but otherwise, Josephine gazed upon a gallery of goodness.
The Cavitron gyrated to life and she breached him with it. Up and down she drilled, curving the corner of his pink gums, flirting with the flesh. Josephine guided the instrument with one latex hand as her other operated the saliva ejector, stridently sucking his drool and spitting it down the drain.
“Good?”
Jun winked in the affirmative, his face flecked with backsplash. The flashlight strapped to Josephine’s head guttered on and off and drew her attention to the hole of his throat. Red, slick, deep. Josephine fancied that she could see his soul down in that well, was in fact hearing the steady tick of his heart.
She grasped her scaler and carved away the miniscule buildups with the gentle devotion of an archaeologist. Josephine ran the sickle across every molar and incisor, edging each premolar and fang.
What would his teeth look like in her mouth? Remove those, she mused, and Jun would be rendered unremarkable. He wasn’t hideous, but neither was he a beauty. Freckle-free, hair which hung lank, not black, not brown, not blonde. Little muscle to show.
And yet.
The white gems standing at attention to her whim and wile pumped Josephine with an atavistic craving to straddle Jun’s head and suffocate him with her love. To grate his teeth against her parted lips.
Josephine flossed and polished, the coarse paste mirroring the mulberry wine of her blushed cheeks. The air/water syringe blasted clean the remaining detritus, a foaming whirlpool in which she longed to bathe or maybe drown.
And just like that, woefully, Josephine finished.
She brought Jun back up as he dabbed at his dampened face with the apron.
“Thank you,” said he.
“My pleasure,” she replied, and meant it.
Jun lingered, swaying on his bootheels. Josephine had rarely seen him so tentative. A talker, was Jun.
“Would you like me to ask Dr. Vartanian for a quick looksee?” she began, smelling something new in the air, a shift. “Or is there more I could-”
“No, no, I’m sure you did a fine job in there.”
Josephine pouted.
“Very well, then, I shall see you in six months!” she announced, straightening out her smock. Too long, far too long. “And steer clear of those donu-”
“I’m moving,” he blurted out.
Moo-ving.
A couple of syllables, harmless sounds to you and me, but the swish and strike of a sharpened ax to Josephine.
Outwardly, she remained still. Placid, even. Inwardly, she clawed like a cat in a burlap bag barrelling straight to an apathetic waterfall.
“Moving?” Josephine managed to croak.
“Yeah, it’s crazy, this job opportunity came up, you know, someone headhunted me. Good money, good opportunity for growth-”
“The woodworking?”
“My lutherie, exactly. That’s some memory,” he admitted, with a whisper of ware.
Josephine, still cocooned in her medical garb, still shielded, pressed on against the crush. “Well, none of my other patients build guitars and violins and things.”
Jun chuckled, and Josephine saw them - his teeth, her trove - gleam for what she suspected was the final time.
“Guess you’re right,” he conceded. “It’s not an everyday occupation - we’re few and far between.”
You have no idea! Josephine burned to scream and laugh and cry.
“So.” Jun spread his arms and let them flop, thus acquitting himself of any wrongdoing.
Josephine angled her neck in a bow, curt and professional, for fear of anything else becoming long winded and embarrassing.
“Well, goodbye.” Turning, taking himself away.
“Where are you going?” Josephine sought, grabbing in the dark.
Jun stopped under the threshold, at the rim of corridor traffic.
“Home.” The way he said it almost rang like a question.
Josephine’s face mask puffed as she exhaled her frustration.
“Where are you moving to?”
Again, she could read a modicum of concern steal across his face and slink through his body, silent expression that loudly wondered how it was any of her business just where in the world he was moving to.
“Santa Cruz.”
“Ah, lovely. Lovely. Beautiful country up there.”
She hadn’t stepped a toe in Santa Cruz.
“Take care, Jacqueline,” Jun said to Josephine.
“Yes,” she muttered. “You too. Good luck.”
He smiled, but withheld.
Josephine jetéd across the room and shut the door in one motion. She pressed her back against the wood, wanted to feel its grain choke and consume her. Instead, she slid down until her ass hit the rickety tile, loosened like a toddler’s canine and ready to be plucked. Josephine’s hands dangled between her knees as she listened to the assault rifle patter of an X-ray machine from somewhere in the building, deaf to the trickle of her tears. The apparatus began to buzz, its malfunction plainly audible through the cheap drywall. How many times had she admonished Dr. Vartanian, requested new equipme-
Something within striking distance was rustling, tapping. Josephine no longer heard the brutal rhythm of the X-ray, it had stopped, but that zizzing drone amplified nevertheless. She looked up from the ground and her vision landed on the squashed sack delivered by Jun, his dreaded donut. Josephine could see a blotted shadow flitting within the sunlit bag, flying its trapped centimeters.
Poor bee.
––––––––
Finding his address was easy enough.
Through the generous picture window of the house on Cordova, just six taunting blocks from where she worked, Josephine spied the nape of Jun’s shaggy neck. It wobbled with laughter as he watched a cartoon about some sort of scientist, or possibly a lab technician, and his adolescent assistant.
Up the road, Josephine could hear a garage band’s nighttime rehearsal.
The kit she’d packed at the office waited beside her on the passenger side.
The valise she’d packed at home behind her in the footwell.
Before leaving Clive and Eddie, she lied, and neither of them asked any questions. They believed their wife and mother and told Josephine to have fun at the gym. The final image of them together made for a grotesque tableau: Clive testing the strength of a slackening implant, Eddie harvesting leftover Chinese from his filthy braces.
Josephine exited the Hyundai and loped across the dark street. A street lamp flickered alive and dead like the flashlight strapped again to her forehead.
She swung the wrought iron gate and it yowled into the evening, a rusted banshee. Josephine bunched up her shoulders against the screech and cursed her carelessness. Fast glances ensured her momentary safety, this fully uniformed dental hygienist.
On she went.
A potted olive tree adorned Jun’s furnished patio, its reaching tendrils welcoming Josephine like a well-mannered valet. She was thankful for the doused porch light and unbothered by the Ring monitoring system staring at her. If it could see through the medical blues disguising all but the flat sheen of her dilated eyes, Josephine would be surprised.
She made a fist and knocked, the tenderest rap, as if it were a naked nerve tethered to a contaminated root.
During her ten seconds of waiting, Josephine clenched a spring-loaded syringe.
The unlatching lock, the outpouring glow.
“Hel- what-”
“Jun, hello.”
“Jacqueline?”
They spoke through a sliver.
“What are you doing here?”
“Pardon me?” Josephine stepped forward and diminished the cavity dividing them.
“I said what ar-”
The needle slid up from below and bit Jun beneath his ear. She injected him to the hilt.
Josephine let herself in.
Already Jun staggered, and the back of his knees rammed into the coffee table. His body spilled across the rug while Josephine locked and bolted the door. Swimmily, Jun dragged himself away from Josephine’s tall approach and bumped into his fireplace, milky plaster streaked black by soot.
He was mumbling now, mumbling like the cartoon on the television.
Josephine hunkered down next to him, out of the window’s line of sight, and practiced patience. In minutes, he’d be manageable.
Rick and Morty. This show was evidently called Rick and Morty.
That particular episode finished about fifteen minutes later, some drivel which concerned oracular fortune cookies, nothing very funny to Josephine’s sensibilities. As jaunty credits rolled, she turned and found a living corpse.
Josephine took Jun’s drugged head into her lap, and loathed him. She pried apart his mouth, heavier than she had anticipated, and shoved in her gag. It propped Jun for her, thrust him agape like a trap, like a trap.
From her kit, Josephine produced the silver forceps.
She clamped her implement upon his farthest tooth and slowly tugged. Yanking, right to left, left to right, winning. Within minutes, she appraised her spoil, bloody and veined.
Josephine continued down the fringe.
To work on him twice in the same day was itself a satisfaction, but where earlier there had been rapture, now Josephine could identify nothing more than famine. She fixed on four more teeth and fished them out successfully, the thock of each pull shooting a shockwave along her spine. Jun’s gum was a gory trench, a pathway of carnage well documented in world wars.
By the time the next episode of Rick and Morty had concluded, Josephine was already blazing through the upper level, her breath soupy with sex. She scrubbed the pliers clean of viscera and recommenced. Josephine secured the anterior. She rocked it for a while but never felt any give. She increased the pressure of her fingers and tugged, jerking Jun’s mandible with furious-
Snap! like the seal of a vodka bottle, or a square of refrigerated chocolate.
Unimportant dust settled on Jun’s spiritless tongue.
“Are you the Tooth Fairy?”
Josephine dropped the forceps and the broken fragment of Jun ricocheted across his hardwood floor. The voice had come from behind, so she craned her stiff neck.
A pajamaed little boy stood a couple of yards away, a stuffed pig tucked inside his armpit.
“Are you the tooth fairy?” he asked again.
She was.
“I am.”
“You don’t look like a fairy,” the boy stated.
“Naturally. But you must believe me, Serj.”
Upon hearing his name, the boy’s eyes banged open and the piggy fell.
“But... but my daddy’s teef, they’re already out, aren’t they?”
Just about, you little interfering shit.
“Yes, Serj, but I am here to take them for a special cleaning, back at my castle.”
“Oh.”
Josephine scrutinized Serj.
“And how are your teeth, young man?” she asked.
“Pretty good. Most of my adults are in, see?”
Serj grinned, lifting his lips and presenting.
Josephine quivered from scalp to sole.
Jun, Jun was nothing, he had ceased to exist.
The boy, he was everything.
Like his father, Serj possessed impeccable teeth, but unlike Jun, these were unmarred by time, they were fresh and glimmering. Pristine bone!
“My lad,” purred the Tooth Fairy. “You have A+ teeth. Do you know that?”
––––––––
The blowing wind did two things: it cooled the sweat standing on Josephine’s skin and dried the cast of Serj’s mouth. It was sheer dumb luck that her kit contained the materials necessary for such an impression.
The child had consented, eager to send a facsimile of himself to the magical lady’s enchanted castle for her minions to examine and deify.
“I have never in my line of work seen teeth like yours, Serj.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
She drummed them with her bare hands, his small, pointy chin captive in her palm.
“And you swear it won’t hurt?”
“I swear it, Serj, swear it on my invisible wings. You’ll be back in bed before your daddy wakes up and this will all seem like the most marvelous dream,” she promised him.
And she was true - the whole procedure lasted fifteen minutes.
Josephine walked Serj back to his bedroom, down a passageway lined with mandolins, and fanned the X-Men comforter atop him - Eddie slept with a similar duvet, and there ended any similarity.
“This is for you,” Josephine murmured, and slipped a folded twenty under his pillow.
The boy thanked her.
Jun remained where she’d abandoned him. His bottom lip, once buttressed by a phalanx of unrivaled finery, sagged and drooped into a ruined, baseless maw.
She collected her accouterments and absconded.
The freeway was deserted so Josephine let the Hyundai climb and run, darting north for the sands of Santa Cruz. She jangled the Saran Wrap which kept Jun’s teeth, and their twinkling music made her giggle. Serj’s mold, the gift of an innocent, was becoming surer of itself on the dashboard.
Josephine’s burning arms ached and her eyelids gained more weight with every passing shudder.
The toil had done her in.
Hunger pawed at her stomach.
She directed her ringless hand into the wax paper bag nestled within the cup holder. From it, Josephine produced a donut, one stippled with rainbow sprinkles, and ate it whole, her jaws unhinging like a viper’s. She gnashed her graveyard teeth into the soft cake and sloshed the particles between their empty spaces. Josephine crunched into something bitter, the thorax of the fighting bumblebee, and did not mind its dying sting, for no venom could wound Josephine.
An angel was smiling at her.