TEETH
Richard Stern
In the multiplied objects of the external
world I had no thoughts but for the
teeth. For these I longed with a phren–
zied desire.
-POE,
"Berenice"
Ah Miss Wilmott, how did you come to think what you
did? Is all your interpreting so askew, so deformed by self-interest?
And is your self-interest so unbroken a pup that any street whistle
seems its master's voice? To think that you were misled as wisdom
itself was being certified in your aching jaws? Those third molars,
so long held back, and then so painfully emergent, fangs and cusps
clinging savagely to the gum flesh. "Impacted," said Dr. Hobbie,
and despite the kind, soft-beaked, confident face behind the metal
glasses, you shuddered. You remembered the last one, also impacted,
eight months before, also in the Bank Building, though two flights
up on the ninth floor in a large office afloat in the strawberry light
off the lake. Dr. Grant, the extractionist, Miss Blade's recommenda–
tion, a strong fellow with white moustache and a post on the Executive
Council of the American Dental Association, just back from a down–
town committee meeting to have a go at your trouble. A lovely
May day, the creamy air swimming over the
I.e.
tracks, enough to
make you forget the pain, until Dr. Grant, eyes asweat under his
speckled horn rims, leaned over your open mouth and blocked out
the view. And then, the tugging, the hammering, the cracking,
chiselling, wrestling, blood squirting into the cotton gagging your
mouth, blood dripping past it down your throat, your heart pumping,
