Dental Hygiene - A Short Story

Last night, I wrote a short story that was so dark, I'm hesitant about posting it. It's based on (and incorporates parts of) a couple of non-fiction pieces by Malcolm Gladwell and Tad Friend that appeared recently in The New Yorker, and was inspired in part by the writings of Franz Kafka and J.D. Sallinger, plus the recent events in New Orleans. For what it's worth, here it is:

One morning, as Gregor S. was flossing his teeth, he missed an area between his lower left molars. Being left handed, he often had difficulty reaching this area, when he bothered flossing at all. He would turn his right hand one way and then the other, but still not get a good grip on the floss. Plus, if he continue to try long enough, his fingers reaching into his mouth would eventually wind up gagging him.

In the area that he missed, a bit of food from the night before remained lodged between the molars and began to rot. That bit of food became colonized with bacteria, which fed off the sugars in his mouth and formed an acid that began to eat away at the enamel of the adjacent tooth. Slowly, the bacteria worked its way through to the dentin, the inner structure, of the tooth, and from there a cavity began to blossom three dimensionally, spreading inward and sideways. When the decay reached the pulp tissue, blood vessels and nerves serving the tooth, an insistent throbbing began. At the base of the tooth, the bacteria mineralized into tartar, which began to irritate his gums. They became puffy and bright red and started to recede, leaving more and more of the tooth's root exposed. When the infection worked its way down to the bone, the structure holding the tooth in began to collapse altogether.

This was not the first time that this had happened to Gregor S. The gum line across his entire mouth was highly irregular, giving the appearance that his teeth were all of different sizes, and many of his teeth were discolored and crooked.

The pain from his frequent toothaches caused him to drink heavily, and he was, by the time of that morning, a mild alcoholic. He had never excelled professionally, because his employers, finding his appearance unacceptable, shielded clients from him. He also noted that his opinions were not taken seriously by his employers, coming as they did from his unsightly mouth. His bad teeth were seen as a marker of poor parenting, low educational achievement and slow or faulty intellectual development, when none of these were actually true.

He had never married, as women generally found his smile unappealing. "If he can't even take care of himself," they thought subconsciously, "How will he ever take care of me?" The few that were able to overcome this handicap were eventually turned off by the lack of self-confidence and self-esteem that resulted from his crooked teeth. "There's three ways human beings express affection," a lover once told him as they were breaking up, "by smiling, by kissing, and by making love. Women are not attracted to your smile, so that option is not open to you. Your breath is bad," another side effect of the dental diseases, "so kissing is generally out of the question. And with those two ways of expressing affection gone, no one gets to the third option."

In truth, Gregor S. was a generally adequate lover, but he was handicapped by an anxiety of showing his teeth during sex. He always feared that if he smiled out of pleasure, or even opened his mouth, his partner would be repulsed, the moment shattered and the coitus interrupted. So he generally made love with his lips pursed together, breathing through his nose, which limited his oxygen intake and prevented him from especially vigorous intercourse. So he was generally thought of as an adequate but unexciting lover, when, in fact, he actually had a woman.

One evening, about a year after he missed the bit of food during his morning flossing, he had to drink several shots of whiskey and take ibuprofen for the pain in his infected molar before he went to bed. He undressed, and closed his bedroom door to cut down on any noise that might further hinder his attempt to get to sleep.

While he was sleeping, a tiny bit of pulp, a clot really, fell away from the rest of the tooth and found its way into an exposed, nearby artery and into his bloodstream. When it reached his heart, he suffered a cardiac arrest and died in his sleep.

Since he lived alone, no one discovered his body that next morning. His co-workers wondered why he hadn't come to the office, but his position was not important enough for them to worry themselves over him, so no one called on him to see if he was all right. He was not close with his neighbors, and had no lover who might come by to visit. So alone in his bedroom, his body began to decompose.

Rigor mortis had set in almost immediately, but soon his skin began to slough off in sheets, and then his body cavity began to swell from gas generated by bacteria. This swelling increased the sloughing off of flesh as his stomach and abdomen rose. Finally, he began to putrefy and decay, his organs liquefied and his brain came bubbling out of his mouth and ears. A black mold began to grow over his corpse and then the bodily fluids that had leaked out all over his bed sheets. Due to the increased humidity in the bedroom resulting from his decomposition (the closed door prevented fresh air from circulating into the room), the black mold spread from the sheets and pillows up the headboard of his bed, and then onto the walls and eventually even the ceiling where the vapors had been rising from his corpse.

When the police finally arrived at his house, having been called by the mailman who noticed the bills and magazines accumulating in his mailbox for weeks, they were impressed by how the black mold on the ceiling mimicked the shape of the corpse. It almost looked like a reflection or a black velvet silhouette over the now unrecognizable mass of decay.