Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Tooth Roots

I was in the bathroom of the house where I'd grown up. I was seated on the toilet, of all places, and a woman, whom I thought at first was my mother, was standing nearby. Doing what exactly, I'm not sure. While I sat there, I became aware of one of my molar teeth being somewhat loose, and apparently it had been so for a long time, so i decided it had been long enough, so i reached in my mouth and just pulled it out. In doing so, as I pulled it from my mouth, out came a rather long, tendrilled, viney "root" attached to the tooth. It was mostly white, perhaps just slightly greenish or yellowish in hue. I was about to ask the woman, who was familiar to me, yet now I realized she definitely was not my mother, whether she'd like to see it, since it was understood she had never soon the root of a tooth before; but I was a bit embarrassed by it, and so instead I dropped it into the toilet and flushed it away.

Then I was standing before the bathroom mirror, but I wasn't so much looking in the mirror as I was looking inside my mouth, the way one does with one's tongue, at another tooth that was a little loose, and whose root had started to protrude from underneath it. I took something, perhaps a toothbrush, and tried to persuade the root backdown into its place, but it didn't seem to work very well. All the while it all seemed to terribly real, and I though I suspected it was a dream, I just didn't seem to awaken. Finally, I looked at myself in the mirror, though only for a flash of a second, for in that brief moment, I saw roots protruding from all over my face. I closed my eyes, and felt worms sticking out from my chest and neck, so I started pulling them out, in a handful, and thankfully around that time I did finally wake.