Spring Cleaning

A few months after Christina left me, I visited my dentist.

In front of my right molar, there was something gummy and tender that I encountered by accident. My tongue bumped up against it one night while I was trying to remove an unruly popcorn shell. Whatever it was hid from me in the mirror, discernible by touch but not by sight. A part of me that was not yet dead, but on the brink of it, just barely holding on.

It was early April, and outside, the soft blue sky sang, while inside the sterile dental office, I clamped my mouth shut, uncomfortably intimate with the whirring saliva ejector.

“Open,” Brittney the dental hygienist instructed as she probed my mouth with the tubular wand.

“Good, now close,” she affirmed and cleaned up the spillage that had leaked onto my paper bib.

The dental office had barely changed over the years. I stared at the porous yellow and white ceiling tiles as Brittney logged on to the computer at her station and clicked her way to my patient profile to make sure my newest medications had been added. The medications that helped me feel like myself again.

A year ago, I lost my sales job. I was once the top soil salesman of our town’s home garden store, but when the numbers went down, I did, too.

Upon being fired, I returned home, feeling as though all of my senses were muted. After a while, my ex, Christina, had grown tired of pushing, of trying to resuscitate the wandering corpse I had become.

I finally had started taking antidepressants, coming around to the idea that there were other things besides garden store sales that I could look into doing, but by then, she was gone. Leaving me with an ache and viscous memories.

“Hello, there,” the dentist said as he entered my room. I could never remember his name, but he had a large nose and a flat mole below his left eye. I opened my mouth for him, and he began drilling, scraping, and yanking bitterly at the tender spot. All of the muscles in my neck clenched in response.

 “You might feel a little pain,” he said, “I’m going to try to get this thing out of here.” He continued to excavate, and my mumbled terror slipped by unheard.

I felt his metal tools dig into me, just as a ribboned worm crawls deep into the springtime mud, yearning for the warm green-brown womb of the ground. Just as I continue to burrow in my worn blue comforter these days, upon waking up and remembering that Christina’s gone, and she won’t be coming back.

Robin Bissett is a fiction writer, editor, and teaching artist from West Texas. She reads manuscripts for Split Lip Press and serves as the Communications Assistant for the San Antonio Book Festival.