The Tooth Fairy, by Andrea Gomez
Malena’s jaw ached, a great pain spreading from somewhere deep to the surface of her molars. Early morning was beginning to creep into the corners of her room, casting strange shadows onto the unpacked boxes of clothes that lined her walls. She threw the sheets off of her bed and pressed her hands around her face. It didn’t help.
It had been two months since she moved into her new high-rise apartment, and everything was still unpacked. The move was fueled by the panic of turning 40, and it still did not feel like a home. The future seemed too close, too present, too immediate. She wasn’t wild or adventurous or particularly spontaneous anymore. In ten years, she would be 50, and another ten after that, she would be 60. She was basically geriatric and had nothing to show for it.
Still, the apartment had perks. From the balcony, she could peer across the border into the grocery store's parking lot on the other side. Sometimes, she would make herself a cup of tea and people-watch. She saw families pack groceries for the week, couples with date night ingredients, and men with bouquets of flowers. Malena sometimes fantasized that one of them would look up and fall madly in love with her shadow.
The truth was that she was lonely. The US had stolen most of her friends. She was the last one left on the border, fiercely devoted to the desert land that raised her. Summers were especially boring. For three months of the year, her boyfriend, Leo, worked at a fish processing plant in Alaska. Every day for those three months, he would try to convince her to move up North with him. “You’d have to drag me dead.” She would text him on WhatsApp.
The US was not a stranger to Malena. She grew up crossing the border every Sunday to split a soft-serve ice cream cone with her mom. She had her SENTRI card faithfully renewed. Malena supposed it was the leftover pieces of the teenage punk girl inside of her that refused to follow the path of her social circle. “Fuck the American Dream,” the voice would whisper. The toothache began to pulse higher into her face and brow bone. It made her want to cry. She reached for the bottle of painkillers sitting on her bedside table. Malena had gone to see her dentist, Dr. Romero, the day before. She hated his chiclet white teeth and beady eyes that always seemed to judge her.
“I don’t see any abnormalities.” He laughed. It made her feel stupid for being there.
“But it feels like something is pulsing here,” she said, pointing to her jaw, “Like almost… pushing?”
“It’s probably a migraine. Women your age usually see a spike.”
“What do you mean?”
“Perimenopausal. Unless you’ve already gone through it –”
“No,” she interrupted, “You aren’t listening to what I’m telling you.”
Dr. Romero sighed as if her symptoms were a nuisance, a buzzing mosquito around his face.
“I can prescribe a small batch of painkillers, but nothing more.”
Hours later, the pills weren’t working. The pain in her jaw was only growing more intense. Trying to eat was almost unbearable. Her bones made a popping sound every time she opened her mouth.
Outside, a group of teenagers began to scream the lyrics to an old song.
Fuck it, she couldn’t take it anymore. She had to do something. If anything, it would give her a story to tell her nieces.
Malena made her way to her bathroom and turned on the light. She looked like shit. Dark circles cast a deep shadow under her eyes, her long black hair frizzy and dull, her skin dry and almost yellow. She leaned in. In the mirror, she could see the tiny broken blood vessels inside her eyes.
She opened the mirror cabinet and grabbed the pair of pliers she sometimes used to turn the water to the sink on and off.
Another sting of pain ice picked through her face. Her face burned for release.
With one arm wrapped around the sink, she kept steady as she positioned the pliers at the base of her molar. Malena closed her eyes and pulled. Her knees buckled, her heart raced – she pulled even harder. Sharp misery blistered through her body, sudden nausea threatening to make the situation worse. She could taste metallic hot blood running through the rest of her teeth.
She blinked one eye open. The molar was cracked in half, and its roots still held strong, refusing to detach itself from her gums completely. She spit blood and pieces of a tooth into the sink. It was going to take a few more tries. She could do it, and she knew it. She clamped the pliers down again through tears, twisting with force in tight circles. Something cracked.
The remaining tooth had collapsed into tiny fragments, and the roots slid out effortlessly. But something still felt hidden, something still felt stuck.
And then she saw it. Through blood, it swirled at the base of her gums, in the space where her tooth once was. Eel-like, it looked like it was burrowing itself into her flesh.
Malena panicked, moving towards the bathroom cabinet to find a pair of tweezers instead. Desperate, she moved its sharp edges deeper into herself, her gums soon turning into a mush of blood and tissue.
Finally, she was able to grasp it. At first, she thought it was a parasitic worm, the kind that lived in the fish that Leo would sometimes send pictures of. But it seemed to grow tendrils out of nowhere, wrapping itself onto the tweezers. It expanded as she pulled, getting wider and wider until it was as thick as her thumb. The creature was at least a foot long with no eyes, no mouth, and with slimy, scaly, limblike tendrils. Its head began to tighten around itself, becoming more solid until something sprang out of it. It fell to the floor. Still in shock, Malena instinctively reached to feel for it. It was angular and small – it was a molar!
Malena snapped out of the haze. She gasped at her own reflection – blood was dripping down her lips onto her shirt. The pain in her jaw was replaced by a cotton ball sensation across her teeth. And stranger yet––when she washed out her mouth, there was no evidence of the self-extraction. It was as if the wound healed itself––smooth pink flesh where there should have been a mutilated disaster.
The tendrils began looping around her wrist. The creature was trying to make its way up her arm. She tried to shake it off, but it refused to budge. Using her toothbrush, she managed to shove it into an almost empty bottle of mouthwash.
Teeth of all sizes and colors began to fill up the bottle. The creature began to slither in between them like water.
“What the fuck do I do?” she whispered to herself, “Think, Maria Elena, think.”
She grabbed the bottle and walked to her balcony. The morning felt dry and humid. Across the border, people were loading their cars with water bottles and ice cream. Part of her wanted to hurl the bottle as far as she could to the other side. She wanted it to split open in that parking lot and grow into a giant teeth-hungry monster that would thunder its way to Alaska and scare Leo back home. Or maybe she could leave it at Dr. Romero’s office and laugh as he tried to mansplain to his patients that, yes, there was a monster in his office, but no, there was no cause for alarm.
The creature slid back down to the bottom of the bottle. Malena uncapped it cautiously, taking a tooth out and staring at it in the palm of her hand. It was a canine. A sudden urge to suck on it came over her.
Carefully, she brought the canine to her mouth and licked all of its edges. With her tongue, she guided it to the back of her mouth.
She closed her eyes. And chewed.
She grabbed another and another and another, repeating the process as if it was communion, as if it was sacred.
When she reached the bottom, and only the creature remained, she paused. Her teeth felt sharp from the feast, and she wasn’t sure what to do next. The thing quivered, sucking itself into a corner of the bottle.
Malena looked across the parking lot again. A dog chased another, and a car got towed away. She looked beyond there, towards the hills of suburban houses and strip mall specks. Only the desert remained the same on both sides, sand and creosote filling in the gaps between buildings.
She tightened her arms around the bottle. It was done. She went back inside. She turned off the lights. And slid back to bed.
Andrea Gomez is a first gen Chicana, born and raised under the Southern Californian sun. In 2020, she was named an Emerging Content Creator by NALIP and has bylines with Collider, Tor.com, WeAllGrow Latina, BoldCulture, CV Independent and more.