Teeth
By Suki Litchfield
At night she dreams of teeth. Mixed in with the images of old boyfriends and her daughter as a baby and whatever she’s seen on TV recently is the dream where all her teeth fall out, one after the other, like pearls from a string. In the dream Rita runs her tongue over her bare, puckered gums. She can feel herself actually doing this in her sleep, but when she wakes up in the morning, all her teeth are there.
Rita wonders if this is a common dream. She asks her daughter, who in real life is grown up, with kids of her own.
“No, I’ve never had that one,” Angelica says. “Did you ever have the one where you’re late for the first day of school?”
The dream stays with her. Every night it appears in some form or other. The day after a famous game show host dies, Rita dreams she is on his program, and when she goes to shout out the answer, her mouth is suddenly full of teeth. Each morning the first thing she does is feel for them with her tongue. Only after she ensures they are all there does she turn off her alarm and reach for a cigarette.
In truth, her gums are swollen. Quite often they ache. One night after work she stops at the drug store and buys some dental floss. But when she goes to use it, her gums bleed so badly she throws away the little plastic container.
Rita worries she is becoming psychic.
“Maybe teeth symbolize something,” Angelica says thoughtfully. “I know when you dream about fish, you’re actually dreaming about sex.”
But Rita can’t think what teeth could symbolize, and every day she wakes up afraid her dreams are true. Finally, the morning after she dreams she is standing in the kitchen, waist-high in smooth white teeth, she feels it: one is loose. It is the one in front of her upper right eye tooth, and soon it gets to the point where she can visibly wiggle it with her tongue.
“Ma, that’s disgusting!” Angelica yells, spilling her coffee. “Jesus Christ, see a dentist!”
Rita knows it is falling out. Her dreams begin to focus on this one particular tooth. She has nightmares that it falls out while she is waiting on a customer, or that it falls into someone’s food. She becomes terrified it will fall into her throat while she sleeps and choke her to death.
But when it does happen, she is on the phone with her daughter, and it drops right into her hand. And it doesn’t look like a pearl at all, but is bloody and grayish and rotten at the top.
THE END
Author Bio: Suki Litchfield's short stories have won several awards, and they have been published in small publications like Down in the Dirt, The Lascaux Prize, and the current Scare Street collection, “Night Terrors.” She lives in St Augustine, Florida, where she works at a haunted inn.