Teeth

Last night as he vigorously brushed his teeth with a firm nylon brush, thinking of nothing, safely insulated by action from the horror of Heredom, he suddenly felt his mouth fill with debris. Like the moraine from some hitherto unsuspected glacier inside his skull he found himself with a mouthful of rubbish that seemed to increase in volume as he thought it, avalanching ahead of comprehension.

His mouth became suddenly, unexpectedly – we know not the hour or the minute – an ossuary, a bone yard, a Parisian catacomb, countless thousands living and dying behind a wall in a shallow cave in an underground city in a bag.
Breathe now, he told himself - don’t be drawn into the rising floodwater panic. And on that note he called on all his considerable resources, tantric techniques, Pranayama, Yogic Flying, furious EFT tapping (sounding those meridians in desperate SOS percussion – bits of the ice berg still on his shoulders, fingers flying over the keys) prayers, mantras, om mane padme hum - anything he could recall from four decades of hippiedom, to stem the tide and recover sobriety of thought and action. And it paid off. The slow calming awareness arrived and our man became once more a scientist, detached, curious and focussed.

He carefully appraised, cautiously examined, the gathered rubble in his mouth in order to dispel the racing shadow of a future dark age - paused, felt and named the parts. First, he discerned bristles or wires or sinews – maybe the scaffolding or reinforcing of his dental work, a week old now. Next, a smooth irregular chunk of masonry so big he thought half his jawbone or a row of teeth, but rapidly narrowed down under sober scientific scrutiny to one mass, a tooth. Alarmingly he noted, from out of the body where he’d fled to better assess this horror - no pain. The inference? So far gone the decay, so rotten the internal dereliction of electrical wiring that he was already as good as gone, a walking dead man.

“Poor me”, he gushed, made pompous by grief. “As I reached forward to make my plans, my wee timorous beastie cowering plans, the future was already irrelevant, a fiction, a laugh. A preposterous joke that I should fall into the folly of taking for granted, even for one tiny atomic moment, the possibility of my own continuance. No more hearth and home. No more wife and family, no aging grandparents who two minutes before I pitied (but now would gladly swap with), no sons worrying about their future.”

He paused and dropped to a plateau of a darker hue. “Maybe falling even as I speak, like Icarus or the twin towers. At 9am standing and blazing for all the world to see, but doomed to fall like starlight centuries old, racing towards us from a place now gone.”

He drew himself up in order to increase the sonority of his words, imagined already the great crowd straining to hear him.

“I am soft sift in an hourglass, fast at the sides but mined with a motion that crowds and combs to the fall” he pronounced, hearing already the knocking of bones breaking and swilling in sinewed, threadbare fabric of flesh.

At this point, as he withdrew the toothbrush from his mouth he realised half of it was missing. Casually, as a new vista of hope stole through him he carefully and quietly removed the rotten fractured shattered fragments of the tooth brush from his mouth into his cupped palm and with a cursory examination dropped them surreptitiously into the bin and spat the remaining nylon bristles into the sink.

Meanwhile his memory planed and chamfered the episode into palatability and gently but firmly drew the curtains on the appalling glimpsed vista of mortality – for now. And, once more; awash with gratitude and with an earnest and quickly forgotten resolution to aspire to something or other, our hero returned in triumph to his old ways and pulled tight the tent of his own selfish universe against the winds of truth with renewed vigour. End