by Sarah Lada
Awakening, it was still dark on the other side of the window, but I heard something. Laughing coyotes? A rooster? An orphaned child? I shuffled out of the bedroom to the bathroom, avoiding all lights, and opened the window that faced the woods. Coyotes and giant owls sat at tree-and-log desks, doing their work, scratching a language into the wood with their claws and talons. Hunched and occupied, they were silent in their scratching. But where was the laughter? Was it just a mattress sound? A trick of the ear and pillow? Was it the subtle breathing of the human in the bed with me? One of the owls wore my pair of broken glasses, but I thought they were still in the trash? I went back to bed, wondering if I could talk to the coyotes and owls out there in the frosty otherworld. Talk to them through my hair like alien imposters do to speak to the mothership. I have been thinking about cutting my hair. A drastic, wavy shoulder bob. Maybe I can gift them my hair.
Judging from the waxing light outside, I figured it would soon be time to wake up anyway. I would be getting teeth pulled out of my jaws shortly after the sun greets the frost. My beloved teeth. My beloved enjoyers of roughage and gluten. Where will they go? This is important to a woman who still wonders where her childhood Lite-Brite and Pound Puppies are. I spent the morning running my tongue along them. My bone-flowers. My cave-pearls. My calcified stones. Pestles in my mortar-mouth.
I told the nurses that I promise that I have veins. When the surgeon arrived and before my arms were strapped down, I dislocated my jaw and mouth from my face, told him, Here, this will be easier. At this point, I was under some mild twilight anesthesia, but the surgeon told me that he had waited all his professional career for a patient to hand over their jaws. He took my jaws into his hands and placed them on a sanitary tray. I looked at my jaws, for the first time, in absolute awe. I made observations of the wearing down and pin-prick holes. The wayward wisdom teeth not following their birthright path. I told him about the time I found a young deer skull with the lower jaw still attached. I knew it was young due to how bright, bumpy, and beautiful the molars were. The surgeon smiled and encouraged my jaws and tongue to stop yapping so that he could get to work. He uncovered his tools, shiny as the river in moonlight. He picked up what he called elevators, which he used to wedge in and loosen the molar. Then a screwdriver-looking thing called a luxator relinquished the ligaments that attached to the molar as forceps lifted the molar—my poor, spinach-grinding, corn-corrupting, chicken-chewing molar.
He also proceeded to extract what wisdom I had left from my mouth. The other teeth, especially the canines, talked amongst themselves, but I couldn’t console them. They sat in existential contemplation, like the coyotes and huge owls, in the ecotone of my mouth. They spoke in a guttural, bolus-language I did not understand. I wanted to apologize. I promise I flossed but not enough. I brushed twice a day. It all comes down to genes and, well, I kept my wisdom a little too long, and it led to complications. Most people lose their mouth-wisdom in their twenties. I hope all of you can understand.
I wanted to ask to keep my teeth. Put them in my garden where they’ll decompose into the roughage. The joy of someday eating my own teeth or feeding almost forty years of my life to someone else in a side of Brussels sprouts, pasta sauce, herbal tea, or salsa.
Before I knew it, everything was over. The surgeon cradled my sore, raw jaws in his hands and walked them over to me like a blessed offering. I cradled my jaw in my hand and peered down into the open plots where maybe a small seed can be planted. I thought of the tobacco seeds at home drying on the windowsill. I wanted to plant flowers in the little holes. See how they take. Or maybe a quaking aspen sapling, their leaves that shimmer and shine like rattling teeth on the bough. The surgeon said he couldn’t help me replace my jaw due to liabilities. My personal removal of my jaw was not part of the insured procedure. Then he bashfully said he wouldn’t quite know how to do it regardless. I shook the part of my head attached to my neck, and my jaws in my hands said, No problem, doc. I got this. He and his three technicians watched as I replaced my jaw on my face. The technicians placed cotton absorption pads into my mouth and led me to a sink to wash the blood off my hands.
No pomp or circumstance—or maybe I forgot that part—I only recall being led down a corridor where my beloved husband stood waiting for me. I had earlier, in the waiting room, referred to myself as a cow being brought in, mutilated, and sent out a back door. I don’t remember what way he went to drive me home. I did wonder why we were on the highway. Every dried-up shrub or plant on the roadside was an iteration of my happy golden retriever.
The metallic taste in my mouth attracted a cacophony of crows, metallic treasures in their own beaks. In hordes, they followed us down the highway and all the way home. It wasn’t until I unsteadily stood up out of the car that I realized the crows were the wind, and their shimmering treasures were snowflakes. The season’s first snow. I grew black wings anyway and walked into the house sideways so to fit. I’ve never had wings before. I practiced my wingspan as the dogs barked around me. I made tea to drink when it became tepid enough, according to post-surgical standards. I built a nest of blankets, pillows, a journal, skeins of yarn, literary journals, Dostoevsky, and a month-by-month garden book which I will peruse in hopes to learn what can be planted in the garden of my jaws, and when.
Sarah Lada is a mental health worker residing in the ridges and valleys of central Pennsylvania. Her work has been published in Motherlore, The Fourth River Literary Journal, Bella Grace Magazine, and other places.