An Old One.
Darwin Awards 2237
He woke up, head muzzy and warm-too warm. His tongue immediately went to the aching pit in his jaw where his tooth had resided up until eight days ago. It had just kind of crumbled. It didn’t really break off per se, it just gave out into a few pieces and now there was a hole that hurt. He got out of bed, stood up with his prick dangling freely south of his gut like a string hanging from a balloon. Making his way to the kitchen he surveyed the bottles next to his sink and poured some Kesslers into a near clean glass. First swallow and burn down and he goes to the living room, plops down in the recliner. Pulls the remote out from between his left leg and the arm of the chair. Another swallow of Whiskey. TV comes on. Nothing too exciting. The usual chaos and anarchy with a retro soundtrack. “Fuck this shit”, he mutters and throws the remote at the tv set. It bounces off the front. That hole in his jaw hurts. There must be some tooth still in there for it to be hurting so bad. He gulps the rest of the whiskey down then goes for a refill. Second glass goes down and while working on the third he decides that there is, in fact, something still in there where his tooth had once been. He can feel it. And he knows he’s got to get it out.
He goes to work, first with the pick end of a dental flosser. No luck. He bends the tine of a fork, and digs and pushes. The blood comes. He rinses his mouth and drinks more whiskey. Still it isn’t out. Suddenly it occurs to him he needs to just get something in there and give it a good whack or two. His first thought is a flathead screwdriver, and that’s the thought he goes with. He lodges the screwdriver in his mouth, in the bleeding pit in his jaw and up against what he’s sure is still stuck in there. He hits the thing with the palm of his hand. The pain is excruciating, there’s an audible pop, and the screwdriver busts through his gum and punctures the underside of his tongue. He screams, twice, three times. The blood is gushing. He spits, and there it is-the piece. Only it doesn’t look like a piece of a tooth to him. He bends, naked and drunk and bleeding, but before he can pick it up, his television blares loudly from the other room “PKX99 YOU HAVE INITIATED SELF DESTRUCT SEQUENCE”. His body explodes in a storm of fire, guts and wiring.
Tooncy is at his monitor when notification comes. Another one. He touches he screen in a simple sequence. It’ll be cleaned up. He clicks his headset and leaves the equivalent of a voicemail. “Biodroid Pkx99 inititiated self destruct at 0112 hours. Seems to be the same programming flaw. Recommending recall of the whole batch. The entire algorithm obviously needs some work in this model. Fourth this month.”
In-fucking-sane. Bravo. Have you ever done home dental work with the aid of high-proof alcohol? It’s amazing what an intrepid surgeon I was able to become. Hot knife that abscess and $AVE! I don’t think this counts as fiction, bro.
Dude, I (barely) recall writing this while part ways through a half gallon of Kesslers. I think one of my remaining teeth was bothering me at the time. I had a bad tooth I couldn’t afford seeing the dentist for once, believe it or not.
Is that when you hit bottom and started to floss regularly?
Floss? Isn’t that what holds thongs together?
And the abyss is bottomless. You look into it once in awhile, but as long as you don’t plunge headlong, again, it’s ok. Though occasionally it looks back, and that’s the hardest to live with.