Written by Flavia Brunetti
“They’re the dark spots here and here,” my dentist says, pointing to the X-ray on the wall. “I thought you’d only have one, but there are two!”
He says it like I won something, lifts two fingers, as if I’m not going to understand. I do, I want to tell him. I really do understand the concept of multiple empty spaces tucked underneath the enamel, burrowing close to my brain.
“It might be because of the teeth grinding,” he continues. I suddenly remember he was my father’s dentist before mine, and my aunt’s, that in this office he has somehow taken care of generations of our mouths, mine the only one living now. “Even two years ago, your teeth were a different shape. It’s gotten worse, you’re causing damage.”
“Have you seen the world outside?” This I do say out loud, push it out past the always-present initial urge to never make someone else uncomfortable. But then I stop, because the world outside is not my dentist’s fault. There is a TV mounted high on the wall, and I have glanced up at the news reeling out of the ticker twice since I sat down, flinched away both times, forced myself to look back. Why would I be surprised that black holes appear between my teeth?
He doesn’t even seem put off by me. (I wonder if my stoic father or my elegant aunty ever said anything untoward, sitting in this chair.)
I take the new night guard he hands me. “The soft one you’ve been using isn’t taking enough of the hit,” he explains. I look at it, the hard plastic in its bright pink box. Another thing molded to save me from myself, something new for my tongue to find its way around in the night, the heavy weight of my jaw in an unnatural hold, all these words that can never come out.
“You’ll get used to it,” he says reassuringly, and I wonder if my brave aunt would have thrown something across the room, but I doubt it. I get up, smile politely. Not his fault.
“That’s what I worry about,” I finally say back, when he has walked me out of his office, and I head down the stairs into a velvet Roman afternoon, just turned evening.
First published in Shadow and Sax.
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Flavia Brunetti (@whichwaytorome, flaviinrome.substack.com) has lived between Italy, Tunisia, Libya, Palestine, and the US, but came home to her city of Rome, Italy, to find the perfect espresso and search for stories. Her writing, fueled also by her work in international humanitarian aid, often explores time, belonging, and grief. She is the author of novels The Web of Time and All the Way to Italy. Her shorter work can also be found in Roi Fainéant Press, The New Humanitarian, Writer’s Digest, The Nerd Daily, Sky Island Journal, and others.