A Tooth's Story, a Short Story by Me

 I've been waiting a little while to share this one because I wanted to make a art piece to post along with it.  Maybe you'll see one in a couple weeks. This story started with the idea to make a collection of stories all around the theme, "collection." I've always liked the idea of collections, I've collected many things over the years, when I was young I collected keys, old and unused or just lost keys I found random places (I got up to 12). Some of the stories I have written, of plan to, are strange like this one (certainly more strange than keys), some are metaphorical, some are serious and a little more normal. 

P.S. this story isn't true, and it also is really short and could almost be described as more of a character sketch, or a another character's journal entry, than a story. 

Let me know what you think!  Did you collect any strange or normal things as a child or now? Comment below! 

A Tooth’s Story 

My mouth was bleeding, bleeding because I was the type of kid who could never let life do its thing. I suppose I still am that kid here and there. When a tooth even started to loosen in my mouth I managed to get it out in a couple of days. It started on a Thursday, this happened on Sunday night.

"MOM," I yelled.  Did I mention that I was a kid who yelled?  A loud kid with a battle against life?  That was me.

"Jane, what is it?" she never bothered coming into my room until I arrived at a more specific need, she could hear me from where she was quite clearly.

"I LOST A TOOTH," my mother was in the other room.  I didn't need to yell so loud, but looking back, no one ever told me that.

She came to me.  I think I surprised her a little, my legs tangled in my bed sheet, and two drops of blood on my t-shirt under a strangely placed grin. I couldn't stop. There was a hole in my mouth, my lips were lined with red, but I couldn't stop grinning. There is something unique about kids, if I were to get blood on my shirt now I wouldn't smile at all. In that way I've changed.

"Oh dear," my mother said, and smiled too. They are infectious after all.

I spent the rest of the evening writing a note to the tooth fairy. I dictated everything I wanted to say as my mom printed it out on a dry erase board. This was what we did. We had to write it ourselves but to assure the correct spelling and punctuation of the note, this is how it was done.  I didn't want the tooth fairy to be confused I suppose.

I copied the words onto a blank sheet of printer paper, doing my best to copy my mom's even lines and smoothly humped letters but landing in a lane only slightly better than the squished and misshapen letters my left-handed eight year old self usually created.

My mother collected teeth. It started before any of my siblings were born, before the thought of me. It started with a dog, but maybe before even that. I think it had to do with the idea that keeping something as small as my tooth was like bottling up that time and those memories, the early growing up memories, and storing them in plastic baggies in a place not many see. It's amazing and strange and wonderful, thinking about how a human is formed from practically nothing. Some would say, and in only some scenarios, a baby is a product of love. A tooth could be too, in a smaller form, something from nothing and a reminder of a time riddled with hard and wonderful moments of growth and change.

There is one thing I remember from the note I wrote to the tooth fairy, "I hope you are real but if you are not and if my parents are the ones who take my tooth, I think that's okay too because then I won't really be losing my tooth." As it turns out I am like my mother, or I am in some aspects. But whatever I am now, that's what I said then and now I don't think I would keep any teeth. Not my own, not a dog's, not even a kid's. And maybe that is another one of the many things that will change. Maybe I will learn, again, to like or love something that grew from nothing, something as small as. . .

A tooth, existing alone in this world, I suppose, is a strange thing with a story of its own.

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