The Happy Birthday Tooth Ache

Her mouth was in agony. The pain had been so immense for the last two days that she really felt as if she may lose her mind. With each breath that she took, it was like she was inhaling fire, as her entire mouth lit up with the pain of just one tooth. There was no moment of reprieve, as she sat and suffered through the pain.

With no money in her bank account, and the health insurance status of the United States nothing more than a joke, she knew she would just have to ride this one out. There would be no medical assistance this time. This time she was all alone with a mouth that had turned against her, and a tooth that had called up arms against her entire system. The world was cold, and dark, and there seemed to be no end in sight.

She lay awake in the dark, listening to the sounds of city life outside. She heard car alarms, people talking too loudly, somewhere an owl hooted, and Godzilla was clearly attacking the city just a few blocks over. But none of this mattered. Not to her. Not to that evil, God-cursed tooth that was spouting off more hate speech in her mouth, than Donald Trump at a rally in the south of the United States. The pain was all encompassing. Nothing else mattered at this moment. And she wondered to herself if anything would ever matter again.

Hour after hour, minute after minute the pain consumed her. It was all she could do to keep herself from getting a pair of pliers and ripping the son of a bitch right out of her swollen and aching jaw. What else could she do? She had thought about moving to Canada, but that seemed a bit extreme for a tooth ache. She just couldn’t see herself calling people “hosers”, and spending her day watching hockey. She wasn’t even sure if she liked hockey, and nobody in Canada hated hockey. That was a universal fact.

She looked at the dim light of her cell phone and sighed. It was just shy of three o’clock in the morning, and she had to be up at five to get ready for work. Despite the immense pain in her mouth, she knew that there would be no calling in sick to work. Her bosses would only assume that she were calling in sick because today was her birthday. Not that a birthday mattered much after you turned 21, and that birthday was just a little bit in the rearview mirror for her.

Despite the pain that it caused her to do so, she laughed a bit when she realized that this tooth would not see another birthday. One way or another, if this pain kept up, she would kiss that fucker goodbye. She would throw a party for its death. She would dance a damned dickless jig on its grave. She hated it. She hated that tooth more than a good, kind hearted human being hated Donald Trump. If Trump were the devil, which she wasn’t convinced that he was not, that tooth was Saddam Hussein.

As the seconds kept ticking by, she realized that she was slowly losing what was left of her sanity. It was as if every thought consuming her mind was directed at that tooth, and what she could do to stop the pain. She thought of the string tied to the doorknob trick, but realized that she wasn’t ten damn years old, hoping to get a couple quarters from that whore the tooth fairy. She thought that she could maybe talk the thing out, as if it were some kind of terrorist holding her mouth hostage, and she needed to coax the damn thing out of her mouth. She thought about getting a hammer, and smashing the thing into hell, but was worried she might accidentally hit another tooth. But none of these seemed like the greatest idea in the world.

After far too much time wondering what she could do, she came up with the only solution that really seemed to make sense. She thought about something that a friend of hers always said. It was an obvious act, something that would ease any pain in just a moment. She got up out of bed, and sighed in the darkness. Saying a quick prayer, she closed her eyes, and ran face first into the wall. Immediately upon contact, she knocked herself out, her body falling in a heap to the floor.

She lay like that for a few minutes before she slowly started to come back into the waking world. The pain in her face was intense. She was pretty sure that it was worse now than it had been at any point during the last two days. She reached a finger into her mouth, and felt an immediate desperation, as sitting there in the back, on its pedestal of lost hopes and dreams, still attached, and still screaming its hate speech, like that cheeto-dusted asshole that ran the US, was that tooth; that evil, God hating tooth.

Finally, she had had enough. She knew now what she must do. It was the final solution, and really, she didn’t know why she hadn’t thought of it before. It was pretty much brilliant, something that her friend would have suggested so much earlier on. She knew that the best way to deal with anything was to set it on fire. It really was the best of a bad situation. She would burn that tooth, and its entire place down!

She rose from the floor, and walked to her nightstand, grabbing the cigarette lighter (she had quit smoking years before, but always kept a lighter on her... just in case), before walking with her head held high to the bathroom. Somewhere in the back of her throat, a mean, and angry laughter started to rise. This was it, this was the moment that she had been waiting for. Finally, the pain was going to come to an end. She was going to burn that son of a bitch right the fuck out of her mouth.

Laughing loud enough to wake Satan himself, she filled her mouth with a nice sized swallow of lighter fluid. The coolness of it was enough to calm the pain in her mouth, but not enough. Not nearly damn enough. She figured it was just the tooth crying out in desperation when the pain had damn near ceased.

“Too late, you fucker,” she said, laughing maniacally through a mouth full of lighter fluid. “I gave you a chance out, and you didn’t take it. This is fire, you asshole. And now you die,” she screamed out loud, as she lit the lighter, and touched the flame to her fuel filled mouth. Anyone listening would have just heard gibberish, but she was sure that the tooth understand. The tooth always understands.

Her mouth was immediately filled with glorious, dragon-like fire. A fire so intense that it seemed to consume everything in sight. And as she waited for the tooth to melt into oblivion, she smiled to herself, watching the bathroom catch alight. Her hair started to burn, and she didn’t even care. The flame from her hair jumped to her nightgown as she felt fire start to burn her alive. But none of this mattered. As long as the tooth was burning, nothing else mattered. Metallica wrote a song about it, with lyrics and shit.

Just before she died, she smiled amid the flames, knowing that that piece of shit tooth would never hurt her again. It would never hurt anyone again. And that was worth all of the death in the world. It was worth everything.