When Your Six Months Are Up

When Your Six Months Are Up

Spring 1990
An essay by Colleen F. Halley

You wait alone, tied down to the chair by a bib more like your dog's choker collar. It is that time again, that turns grown adults into quibbling babies...the five minutes in between the hygienist leaving and the dentist coming into you room, the cell. The silence scares goose bumps up and down your spine, but you realize: silence is nowhere to be found. The soft slow hum of the drill's motor stalks you, reminding you of the theme music from the last good horror flick you've seen. This time there is no popcorn crunching to break its mesmerizing spell. That unavoidable hum drags you into creating images you use to torture yourself until the dentist comes in relieving you of that task.

The chair tilts back just far enough to put the drill at eye's level. It stares at you, the drill, with the tip like a fang sharpened to perfection, finer than the point of a piercing laser. The tiny piece of metal gleams under the glow of the reflector lamp hanging above you, a rain cloud. The lamp places you under interrogation, yelling at you in the voice of a third world dictator, scratchy and sinister..."You! Yes you. Engaging in revolutionary activities... gum chewing, and a floss resistor? Treason I say (and so does your mouth). Away with him to the torture table... THE DRILL FOR HIM!" If only you could pull yourself away, you might appeal for help. This must be a violation of some sort of right.

You fear the drill so much you can almost feel how it will tear to pieces each and every nerve in your mouth, no matter how much novicane or gas they give you. You remember now. He'll ask you if you feel numb yet. You don't really know... can't feel too much. You amuse yourself for a moment clasping your tongue between your two molars and biting, feeling the tongue there, but not the actual bite as you grind. You think you're fine, that is until you hear the drill rev like a juiced-up car in a fifties drag race. The drill has been in your mouth for a couple of minutes, but now you HEAR it. Maybe you are just scared by the sound, or perhaps it is your ears that hurt. Whatever the reason, you now curdle like milk and grunt... the closest thing you can do to screaming since the nurse and dentist fight for space in your mouth, one drilling, one with suction and changing the gauze. Your feet jerk and jilt as if from electric shocks. It stops. "Everything all right here?" he will ask. You wish that you could tell him the truth: "NO, you are hacking away at my teeth like some stone aged barbarian and IT HURTS!" However, you settle for the simple, "I think I need a little more gas."

By now, just thinking about what lies ahead, you have broken a marathon sweat. He hasn't even come in the room yet.

To calm yourself, you reach over and grab the tiny paper cup and take a sip of water. The Dixie Cup with happy blue and yellow flowers on it jiggles in your hand, weak from the beads of sweat it too has shed. Then once again, you are thrown into thought... That's right... they'll ask you to spit out in the toilet bowl of a sink beside your seat. You can see it now... red, red, a deep purple, and red that will mix with the jet stream of water spinning around the edges of the bowl. And those few chunks of enamel that have been ripped from your mouth will stick to the side of the sink. You stir in your seat trying to look away.

Upon the desk, as if for decoration, sits a jar filled with and old yellowed liquid you know must reek of formaldehyde. The treasures of this chest are thousands of teeth. Molars, canines, incisors, and those infamous "front two". This could be the Tooth Fairy's closet. But the teeth stagnate there in the jar... the dentist's pride and joy from a sick sport. He is a hunter of teeth, collecting them all, as many as he can get. He probably plans to mount them in a pink cement of fake gums, adding a spring so they will chatter upon command. You realize you are to be his next victim. The jar awaits your contribution.

You never want to return, and if you could, you'd leave right now. But it's too late. You hear the door creak open behind you. The dentist has arrived, clad in the white coat, cape of a mad scientist-turned-hunter. He's not fooling you with that smile. You want to make a last ditch attempt to run from him, the dentist, the drill. The chair is tilting back further. There's no turning back. Your time is up.