At the Library of Teeth
by Marie Vibbert
At the library of teeth, you will find a truth you had forgotten. Begin in the comfortable colors of the children’s room. Comb through bicuspids like lentils and molars like castings of flowers, both in rounded bins with plastic rakes. Don’t let this experience touch that tender red socket where you wrenched the truth away from your chest. Every tooth is defined by the emptiness it leaves.
Follow the signs to the adult section where insides are exposed in diagrams and formulas. Gone is the invitation to play. Here, one keeps one’s hands to oneself. It is no place for hidden truths; icy air imposes order on the clear surfaces and every incisor is properly alphabetized.
Join the procession up the tusk-shaped stairs, slippery and round, to the animal and exotics balcony. Keep an open mind as you are presented the serrated tables of elephant teeth or the porcelain aglets of venom-injecting snakes. Linger by the strangest exhibits and wonder what makes a tooth a tooth, if any shape, any size is permissible. Make your way higher, up the ivory spiral to the archival attic.
Now, under the slopped roof, in the dusty curls of dentin and dictionaries, is when you truly feel your missing truth. Once you tied a string to it and slammed a door. Perhaps there is someone to blame: a mentor, a friend, a well-meaning advisor? Quietly, patiently, they urged you to stop rolling a thought around in your mouth, to stop feeling the wriggly places under your psyche.
Regardless, the decision was yours alone. Some child-self chose to extinguish wildness in favor of the adult-self, to sever its heart from the world of objects, from running fingers through lentils. Teeth as teeth without words or use or expectation. Under meaning, inside shape, behind the things we trained ourselves not to see, there is a missing peace.
View the lost child-self in the ledgers, become nothing but letters, but the violence cannot be undone; every universe expands. We can only hold moments of clarity like this, where we see the trace fossils of our complicating.
X-rays are available along the back wall. You go to them to study your soul for the soft splotch of decay, the place where you stopped letting yourself be raw and unprepared.
Zip the idea back into your mouth, tuck it under your tongue, and you may leave this place with the hole intact.
Hugo and Nebula finalist Marie Vibbert has had over 90 stories in professional magazines including Clarkesworld, Analog, F&SF, and Amazing Stories. By day she's a computer programmer.
