An Unfortunate Inheritance

I read a story once, where the main character turned into a cockroach. As my classmates argued about allegories and the unbearable weight of banality, I doodled a bug in my notebook. The story made no sense at all.
In the yellow light of the bathroom’s naked bulb, an overturned cockroach wiggled feeble legs. “I feel ya,” I mumbled through toothpaste foam.
Maybe I finally understood the allegory, ten years too late. I rinsed. The plastic case of floss judged me from the cracked edge of the sink.
I flicked the cockroach right side up and stuffed myself into the only clean pair of scrubs left. Mr. Denovan, a human cockroach if I ever saw one, had a notorious gag reflex and I’d drawn the short straw yesterday. He’d bucked and swayed in the chair as I inserted the tray for his dental molds, and then he’d leaned over and puked. On me. So, yeah, I was seeing the appeal of roach life.
The clock’s minute hand ticked over. I was nearly late, and I couldn’t afford another tardy. Lucinda had it out for me. She always scheduled me with the worst patients, like Mrs. Granada, who made Mr. Denovan look like a peach, and she’d added a written warning to my employee file when my car broke down, even though I’d made it to work—on foot!—barely ten minutes late.
My nametag wasn’t on the dresser. I shook the sheets away from the mattress on the floor, a.k.a. my bed. I couldn’t leave without the nametag. Cockroaches scurried out from under the mattress, disturbed by the flapping sheet. Once, I’d been disgusted by them, but when I ran out of roach killer, we learned to live with each other.
I rifled through the dirty clothes. I had to touch the biohazard scrubs from yesterday, still sopping after being rinsed in the sink, but the nametag wasn’t pinned there.
Knee-deep in fusty laundry, I sat back on my heels. What was I doing?
One day I was doodling bugs in English class and the next I was rifling through vomit scrubs to get to a job I never wanted in the first place. My hands were palm up on my knees, damp and sour-smelling; I was a supplicant to an indifferent god. “I am going to apply for jobs,” I told the black mold in the corner of the ceiling.
With the decision, a weight lifted. Briefly. The clock ticked over another minute. I wouldn’t make the 8:13 bus if I didn’t leave in the next five. I still needed the damn nametag. I resumed my scrambling.
In my haste, I knocked over the silver picture frame on the dresser, the one my parents had given me as a “gift.” In the picture, they stood in front of a wall bristling with dental degrees, wearing matching grins of perfectly straight, unnaturally white teeth. The photo was a constant reminder of everything I had failed to accomplish. I left it on its face. They’d better get used to disappointment.
“I’m quitting,” I told the back of the picture frame, so I didn’t have to see the judgment in their eyes.
I found the nametag mixed in with the bills, most stamped OVERDUE in ominous red capitals. Three minutes to get out the door. I scurried into the hall.
“Ow!” I jumped back. Something small and hard stuck to my bare foot. I unstuck it and brought it up for a closer look—
my stomach dropped, like I was in free fall
—and hurled it away with a choked off gasp. It clattered on the floor, skittering into a dusty corner. It was a tooth, a second bicuspid, with the root still attached.
My heart thundered in my ears. I ran my tongue around the inside of my mouth, searching for fleshy holes. I wasn’t missing any teeth.
Another tooth, a molar, glistened near my toes.
My stomach roiled. It was a bad joke, it had to be, but I didn’t know anyone sick enough to scatter human teeth around my apartment.
I pressed myself against the wall and skirted the molar as though it might leap at me. I didn’t want to touch it with my bare skin. Again. It was bad enough having my hands in people’s mouths every day, even with the flimsy protection of nitrile gloves. I had rubber gloves under the kitchen sink. I could use those and the dollar store brush and dustpan—
I froze on the threshold, hands clutched to the side of my face in a silent imitation of The Scream.
A body was stretched out in front of the fridge, blood smeared on the cracked linoleum. His arm covered most of his face. A graying beard jutted from beneath the tattooed bicep. A biker, based on the leather vest.
The man groaned and I screamed for real.
He moved his arm, revealing a face that looked more like raw meat than soft human skin. Between split lips, something was very wrong with his teeth, more wrong than the filmy pink blood gathering in the crevices.
“Come,” he croaked, gesturing to me.
I moved forward, unable to resist his command, even though my heart was trying to escape through the bars of my ribs.
He reached out, fingers down, like he was handing me something. Like a moron, I extended my hand. He pressed something into the tender flesh at the base of my thumb. Sharp pain. I jerked away. Three bloody spots straddled the beginning of my lifeline.
The thing he held clattered to the floor. Another molar, its three roots tipped with my blood. The man let out a great sigh.
“What the hell!” My skin itched all over. No amount of washing could hope to scrub away this case of the screaming-meemies.
“Your duty,” he said. “Tooth lover.”
I could have said anything. You have a strange accent, perhaps, or what happened to you, or, better yet, how the hell did you get into my apartment. Instead, I burst out, “I hate teeth!”
He closed his eyes and I thought I saw regret flash across his mangled face. He murmured, “I’m sorry. You were closest and I… I had no time. You are Tandenfee now.”
I leaned closer. “What is that? I can’t understand you.” My back itched uncontrollably. God, was I breaking out in stress hives?
“Tandenfee. Ratón Pérez. Zubnaya feya. Tooth fairy. You are a tooth fairy now.”
The laugh burst out of me, a harsh bah! that scraped my throat. I snapped my mouth shut so hard it made my teeth ache. I pressed fingers to my cheek, feeling the bony protrusions of teeth under a layer of doughy skin. “This isn’t funny.”
He coughed wetly. Blood spattered his lips. “No time. At nightfall, the hoektanden will come. You must leave.”
“Whook-tan…?” I shook my head. His skull had been bashed one too many times. “This is crazy. I just renewed my lease. I’m not leaving.”
He struggled for breath. Little pink bubbles popped at the corner of his mouth. “Your life… depends on it. Instructions… in my satchel. Take it and go. Leave my body.” With a sudden burst of adrenaline, he sat up, seizing my hand. “You will do fine. You have the training. We Tand Feeën have always been dentists, of a sort.”
I wrenched my hand away. “I’m not a dentist, I’m a hygienist. And I just decided to quit!”
His eyes widened and then he slumped to the floor, dead.
I sat there for a long moment. Ignoring the terrible itching on my back and the pain in my jaw, I waited for him to pop back up and say it was a joke. But he stayed there, mouth and eyes wide open, still dead.
The 8:13 bus was long gone. That didn’t seem to matter, though, because I could make out tooth marks in the ravaged flesh of the man’s face. I could read the imprints there, and in the supple leather of his perforated jacket, the size of the bite, the number of teeth, and the type; whatever had done this to him, its incisors were needle sharp. I stuck my forefinger in a hole made by a canine. It came out of the leather streaked with blood.
“Oh my god.” The whook-things were real. They’d killed him. His dead body was in my dinky kitchen and I was late for work and monsters were going to come for me when the sun set.
Instructions, he’d said.
I had to roll him to release the satchel trapped beneath his hip. My hand touched something crunchy and I jerked back. The tips of bottle-brown beetle wings poked out from the bottom of his leather jacket. A shiver rolled up my back, like crawling fingers. Wings.
It should have been the least scary thing compared to what had happened already this morning, but for some reason it was the worst. I could pretend that the guy was crazy, maybe even that coyotes had gotten to him or something. The wings, though. The tip of one had snapped and I could see the dried blood inside the chitinous shaft.
My shoulder blades spasmed with sympathetic pain.
The knees of my last pair of clean scrubs were tacky with blood, which had seeped from under him while we talked. His staring eyes were as brown as his wings and his mouth, still agape… The wrongness of it drew me in. I touched a tentative finger to his chin and peered closer.
He had two rows of teeth nestled against each other, like a shark.
I retched. The bitter tang of stomach acid burned on the back of my tongue. Not real, I told myself. But I couldn’t deny the wings, or the blood pooling beneath his shredded body.
I tore open the satchel. On top was a battered book, no title. I flipped to the first page, a list of names and dates. The last line said
Gerard Pagani, 1985 to…
Before my eyes, an end date appeared: 2022.
Alex Campbell, it wrote my name beneath Gerard’s. 2022 to…
I dropped the book, scrambling away. I couldn’t catch my breath. My knees had smeared blood across the linoleum, connecting me and Gerard with a streaky red line. The tooth he’d used to mark me sat in the middle of it.
These hives on my back, they were unbearable. I tore off my shirt, curling my arm around to scratch the worst of them, right between my shoulder blades. Beneath my fingertips, I felt the sprouting bud of my own set of wings.
My gums ached where my second set of teeth had started to come in.

***

Gabrielle Contelmo writes character-driven fantasy and speculative fiction in all lengths, from flash fiction to novels. She received her degree in psychology from Union College in 2011, which she now uses to psychoanalyze her characters. She is a member of the South Carolina Writer's Association and has been published in Potato Soup Journal. You can find her on Instagram @gabrielle.contelmo.