What Remains

My grip tightened around the sink as my tongue caressed the polished edge of my final molar. I could feel its roots releasing, and I tipped my head back, trying to make the feeling last. Relief washed over me until the tooth gave way and rolled to the back of my mouth. I tried to prod the exposed hole with the tip of my tongue, searching for the last trace of that feeling, but I could only taste copper. The wound throbbed softly, taking the rest of it with it.

I lowered my head and spat into the bathroom sink. The tooth clinked against the porcelain, then slowly trailed toward the drain. I felt an impulse, a need to save this part of myself now sliding toward the blackness. I could not allow it to be lost. Frozen in place, I watched the molar drift, carried by a blanket of blood and saliva. All my muscles tensed. Just before it vanished, my hand shot forward and snatched it from the sink.

I sank to the bathroom floor with the molar clenched in my fist. I held it so tightly my knuckles hurt, afraid someone might take it from me.

Then I cried.

~

It had started thirty-one days earlier.

There was nothing remarkable about the first day I lost a tooth. My alarm woke me at the usual time, and my store-brand coffee tasted as stale as ever. I made breakfast without much appetite, burned my toast a little, and scrolled my phone long enough for the coffee to go lukewarm. It was the kind of morning I usually forgot before lunch.

After brushing my teeth, I leaned toward the mirror and noticed something strange.

The cheap LED above the sink made one of my canines look more crooked than usual. I remember feeling it then. An unfamiliar compulsion. The need to claim the tooth. To yank it free and keep it safe. To cherish it.

The sensation washed over me as I stood in front of the bathroom mirror, eyes fixed on the crooked canine. I had to leave for work, but I stayed there longer than I should have.

The thought of it followed me through the day. Whenever I had the chance, I touched the loose tooth with my tongue, feeling its edge and testing how far it would move. I told myself I was only checking whether it had gotten worse.

That was not really true.

As soon as I returned home, I went back to the bathroom mirror. I inspected my face, pulled my eyelids down, and traced along my jaw, searching for swelling, bruises, anything that might explain the loose tooth. I found nothing. When I opened my mouth, the canine had tilted farther forward.

At first, I tapped the tooth with my index finger. Every touch sent a soft tingle through my mouth, spreading outward until it reached my hands and feet. The tapping soon turned into gentle rubbing. I wanted more. I closed my eyes and pressed the tooth between my fingertips, chasing the warmth through my jaw.

Then the feeling stopped.

When I opened my eyes, my spit-covered fingers were holding a small white object.

My tooth.

It did not hurt. There was no blood. For a second, all I felt was disappointment.

I held the canine in my palm, wanting to drop it into the drain. Instead, I placed it on the edge of the sink and stared at it. It looked less like part of me now. The roots were black, with a dry, earthy crust clinging to them. When I touched it, some of the crust came away. I rubbed it between my fingers and felt a faint trace of warmth return.

I bent over the sink until my mouth touched the porcelain. The canine lay near the edge, wet and white against the basin. I pressed my lips around it and drew it into my mouth. Porcelain, dried water and dust filled my mouth as my tongue traced the surface.

I swallowed before I could stop myself.

~

The air around me feels colder than usual, but there is no draft against my face. I try to look around the room. No light shines through the slits in my blinds. No cars pass outside. No voices drift up from the street. Usually, that kind of silence feels peaceful. Tonight, it feels wrong. The room feels foreign, as if the air has been sitting there for too long.

My lips are dry. When I try to lick them, my tongue finds the socket where my missing tooth used to be. I let it rest there for a moment before sliding it across my other teeth. There is a faint earthy taste in my mouth, like damp leaves pressed into the ground after rain. As I suck my teeth to get a better taste, I almost expect some of them to shift, but they all seem firmly attached to the bone beneath.

A thud.

I try to get up to search for whatever made the noise, but stop before my feet touch the floor. The room is still too dark to make sense of. I call out, hoping my voice will be enough to scare off whoever is there.

Something moves to my right.

Then to my left.

A soft, rhythmic rattling passes back and forth through the room. I try to locate it, but the sound will not stay in one place.

Rattle…

I struggle to control my breathing. I am too scared to move, though staying still does not feel safer. I stare down at my chest, then past my feet toward the end of the bed.

The rattling moves again, slow and dry.

I want to cover my face, but my hands won’t move.

Rattle…

“Make it stop, please make it stop!”

Rattle… Rattle… Rattle…

A warm breath hits my face.

I turn toward it.

Two glassy eyes catch what little light there is. Wet strands of hair cling to a scalp I can barely make out in the darkness. Long arms disappear on either side of me, hands wrapped around the bed frame.

Something hangs inches from my face.

Small ivory shapes knock against one another with every breath it takes.

Rattle…

I open my mouth and scream.

~

Nightmares like that became common after losing my first tooth. They terrified me, but I did not wake from them the way I should have. I woke feeling calmer. Sometimes even relieved. After a while, I began to anticipate them.

Each morning, I got out of bed, wiped the sweat from my face, and pulled at my lips in front of the bathroom mirror, counting the empty spaces. Some teeth fell out on their own. Others I pulled myself. With every lost tooth, the warmth returned.

The fewer I had left, the more I thought about them.

Around this time, I noticed the first mark on the inside of my forearm. It looked like a small bruise with a pale spot at its centre. I assumed I had knocked into something and forgotten about it. By the next morning, there were three more.

Soon they appeared across my arms and legs. Small, circular bruises, each marked by a pale, hard blotch at its centre. They felt cold to the touch. One morning they would be on my arms, and the next they would have spread or shifted somewhere else.

I felt neither anxiety nor disgust. Instead, I prodded the blemishes, investigating them. The skin around each mark reacted to my touch, sending warm ripples through my body.

The centres, however, hurt.

A sharp warning sting.

Not yet.

The room began to feel different. It no longer seemed so claustrophobic. I still spent most of my time there, but I no longer minded the closed door, the stale air, or the same four walls around me. My alarm kept going off every morning even after I stopped getting up for it. Notifications gathered on my phone until I stopped checking them altogether.

I stopped asking myself whether I was getting worse.

After a while, I started to believe it all had a reason.

I kept returning to the lost teeth. I ran my fingers over their smooth surfaces, tracing the ridges of their roots. I kept them in a glass jar on the table beside my bed. I liked seeing them gathered in one place. From time to time, I would unscrew the lid and turn the jar gently in my hands, listening to the soft clatter they made against the glass.

Sometimes, when I woke from one of the nightmares, I reached for the jar before I even turned on the light.

Over time, the compulsion changed. I began placing the teeth on my tongue, letting them sit there before rolling them around my mouth. Sometimes I chewed them, felt them grind between my remaining molars, and swallowed them. Each time, the warmth returned.

I told myself I was putting them back where they belonged.

I buried some too. I pressed them into the soil and spent hours staring at the small heaps of dirt, waiting for a sign that something had taken root. Nothing ever did.

I kept checking.

Time started to blur. I only felt clear right after losing a tooth. Everything else became easier to ignore. I stopped caring about food, showers and clean clothes. Hunger came and went without much meaning. Some days, the teeth I swallowed felt like enough. I knew that could not be true, but I believed it anyway.

When I looked in the mirror, I barely recognised myself. My eyes were tired and bloodshot. My clothes hung from me. My mouth was stained red. The gums had swollen around the empty spaces, soft and angry-looking, leaving only one tooth far back in my mouth.

I kept touching it with my tongue.

It was still firm.

That bothered me.

By the time my crying stopped, the final molar had left a deep mark in my palm.

I was still sitting on the bathroom floor, my back against the cabinet, waiting for the warmth to arrive.

Nothing happened.

I opened my fist and looked at the tooth.

Disappointment came first. Then anger.

I pushed myself up and struck the bathroom mirror. A crack split across my reflection. I hit it again, harder, until pieces of stained glass broke loose and scattered over the sink.

I didn’t want it to be over.

Not like that.

Where was my reward?

I rushed into the living room. The jar of teeth stood on the table, its surface smudged with dried blood and saliva. I picked it up and held it against my chest. All those teeth gathered together, all that waiting, and now the last one sat in my hand.

I wanted to unscrew the lid. I wanted to drop the molar inside and hear it join the others.

But what then?

Once the last tooth was inside, what would be left for me?

No.

Still clutching the jar, I made my way back to the bathroom. When I unscrewed the lid, the smell of rot filled the room. I almost put the lid back on.

Instead, I flipped the jar over the sink.

The teeth clattered against the porcelain.

For a moment, I just listened.

Then I opened my hand and let the molar fall with them.

In the shards of the broken bathroom mirror, my reflection smiled back with a toothless grin.

I saw the blood before I felt it.

Small streaks of red flowed from my gums and painted the porcelain. I tried to swallow, but my mouth kept filling. My nails dug into the sink.

“Mmmake ih shtop!”

The words came out wet and wrong.

More blood spilled from my mouth. I dropped to my knees, coughing, one hand pressed against my throat. The teeth sat in the basin above me, half-submerged in red.

“Ah’ll doo ennyfing!”

The warmth returned.

I caught my breath.

The bleeding stopped so suddenly that for several seconds I remained on the floor, afraid to move. Blood coated my tongue and ran down my chin, but no more came.

Then the pain started.

I looked at my arms.

The bumps had risen.

Every swollen mark had turned hard and white at the centre, pressing against my skin from underneath. The same was happening across my legs, my stomach, my chest. There were more than I could count.

I had to get them out.

I squeezed one of the larger bumps on my forearm, but my skin held. Whatever was inside was not sharp enough to break through on its own.

A shard of mirror lay beside my knee.

I picked it up.

For a moment, I held the glass against the swollen skin without moving. The white centre pressed upward beneath it.

I cut.

The pain nearly made me drop the shard.

I felt faint. My stomach tightened and the bathroom shifted around me, but I knew I could not pass out. I pressed my forehead against the side of the sink until the dizziness passed, then squeezed the wound as hard as I could.

A thick black liquid seeped out and ran down my arm.

I wiped it away.

The smell reminded me of wet soil.

I lowered the shard back into the wound.

My vision blurred, but I kept cutting until something pale pressed through the opening.

At first, I thought it was another tooth.

Then it moved.

A tiny white body worked its way through the cut. Its shell had the polished shine of enamel, narrowing at the bottom into thin, root-like legs. It dropped onto the bathroom tiles and remained still for a moment.

Then it scurried away.

I stared after it.

Another sharp pain tore through my thigh.

Then my shoulder.

My stomach.

Across my body, the white centres began to split through the bruised skin.

I sank against the cabinet and watched more of them emerge. Some forced their way through the cuts I had made. Others pushed until the skin opened around them. Black liquid ran across my arms and legs and pooled between the tiles.

The little things scattered through it on their root-like legs.

One passed close to my hand.

I raised the shard.

My arm stopped before I could bring it down.

I did not know why.

I lay there as more of them began to cut their way out of me.

It was not over. I knew that much.

Whatever had started this would come back tonight for the rest.

Don’t defile it.