An Apple A Day

ONE

when i was nineteen, or eighteen or twenty, my friends and i went to this party. some party in some strange basement-in-an-alley type place. the type of place we loved, where we felt like we were somewhere doing something. there was a show, some terrible band was playing terrible music. i will never remember who. that isn't important to this story though.

we all got idiotically drunk. the kind of drunk you look back on and wonder how you could ever act so free.

so idiotically drunk we took off our shirts. all of us. so drunk and dancing. so free so loud so uncaring. i had brought one of those idiotically large bottles of wine. you know the kind, the ones that look like regular wine bottles but magnified. i thought i was tough and dramatic. maybe free. anyway, no shirts, drunk, dancing. a friend i wanted to fuck took my idiot bottle of wine and took a idiotically large drink of it. he was an alcoholic. that isn't important to this story though. we kept dancing and he kept drinking. somehow my mouth violently collided with the bottom of the bottle. not purposely, mind you. very fucking accidentally. i remember it not being my fault and i'm sure he remembers it not being his. anyway, it hurt. alot. i knew i wasn't going to like what happened when i ran my tongue across my teeth. and i didn’t. a significant chunk of one of my front teeth was gone. did i swallow it? was it on the ground? i remember my third or fourth thought immediately after it happened was to wonder if someone was going to find it on the sticky floor the next day.

a few weeks or perhaps a month or so later my mom came to pick me up to go to her house for something, maybe for a holiday. maybe it was autumn then. i don’t remember. i remember walking out of my apartment and through the garden. filled with dread. i walked to her car and said “Hi mom” and i've always heard of people say how they 'could never forget the look on his/her/their face' but i'd never really believed it. my memory always has been spotty. but i remember that look. the look on her face when i opened my mouth and she saw my tooth. i don't think she looked at me again the entire time she was driving us home.

my parents paid to have it fixed. no daughter of theirs was going to walk around looking like that. i went to the dentist i'd been seeing since i was a child. she asked me how my mother was, how my brother was liking college. she even remembered what college he was going to. he has always been a patient of hers as well. my whole family had been. she asked me how it had happened. i tried to make it sound casual “Well my friend accidentally hit me in the face with a giant bottle of wine ha ha.” it did not come off casual or ha ha. i don't think she talked the entire time she was making my teeth symmetrical again.

this happened four, or five or three, years ago. my teeth still look symmetrical and you can't tell one is half fake unless you examine them closely. i forget it ever happened most of the time. the only times i remember is on first dates when i use it as a conversation piece, or when i want to eat an apple. i'm scared that if i bite into an apple my fake tooth bit will pop right off.

TWO

for three weeks straight i would wake up from dreams of my teeth crumbling in my mouth. the dreams would begin in a medley of scenarios, they never seemed specific enough to be worth remembering. then it would be the same, every time. i would run my tongue across my teeth and they wouldn't hold still, they would wiggle and feel frightening. i would then look in a mirror and bare my teeth to myself they would be unhappy shades of brown. sickly ambers and the muds of three-days-ago rains. horrified i would reach up to touch them. my fingers would meet bone and the teeth would just crumble crumble crumble at the slightest touch it looked like a roman ruin panic would overtake me as my mouth turned into the grounds of the parthenon.

when i wake i feel my teeth one by one, touching each as counting my eggs in my nest. not being able to avoid feeling as if athena was disappointed in me.

THREE

googling the family tree of zeus on a saturday night to find what goddess i could pretend to be that week. it hurt my head to read all the names and murders of such a tortured family.