Hot Dentist
by Katerina Ivanov Prado
My teeth are rotting. I avoid the dentist’s office for as long as I can, because the dentist is handsome. The dentist makes jokes while he scrapes around my mouth. The dentist laughs, bright as the peels of a tangerine. The dentist has beautiful hands, too large to be carving milk teeth. I don’t trust myself around him. I also do not trust him.
Sometimes he looks a little too long, traces me like I’m wax paper. Sometimes he says stay still, through his paper mask. I am trying to stop finding orders like that so horribly sweet. I am a bee caught in syrup: paralyzed both from being commanded and the insinuations of my obedience.
After the vicious end of my relationship with X, I tried not to want anything. It feels the same now, to want someone and to fear them. I stopped touching people. It wasn’t a conscious decision, but when I realized, I felt the sort of control I’d been missing for a long time. It was almost powerful: desire was something I could crush down, aluminum under my heel.
Three cavities, the dentist says. Clustered in my molars.
I’m filled with relief, at the numbing shot. The slip of control as the anesthetic slides to my lips. At least if my body obeys, it won’t be because I told it to. I shiver like sunlight on a fresh sheet of ice. I lose feeling in my tongue. It falls out of my mouth. It feels, horrifically, like a surrender.
Growing up in Florida, I was prepared for what to do when faced with alligators. We’d have drills in P.E. where we ran from cone to cone, pretending the space in between was swamp. It’s useless, my gym teacher admitted after we had completed the exercise and were left panting and dripping on the rubber floor. Alligators are faster than you, stronger swimmers, can climb higher. When they jump, they double their length, snout to tail. So what’s there left to do when you see an alligator?
Play dead! A student cried. He fell theatrically, and brought his knees to his chest—curling himself inwards, vertebrae exposed.
No, the gym teacher said, that’s bears. With an alligator, if you freeze, you’re dead.
Hold still, the dentist tells me, as if I could move. I stop breathing. The buzzing turns off. He takes my limp pink tongue and returns it to behind my lower teeth with his gloved fingers. It is too tender.
Does this hurt? It does. I feel my mouth filling with blood.
No, I lie, full of want and terror and his fingers in my mouth. I can’t feel anything.
Katerina Ivanov Prado is a writer from Florida. Her multi-genre work has been published in The Florida Review, The Nashville Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, The Pinch, Joyland, The Rumpus and others. She has won the John Weston Award for Fiction, the 2019 AWP Intro Journals Award, and The Pinch Nonfiction Literary Award and the Florida Review Nonfiction Editors’ Award. She is an MFA candidate at University of Arizona and is writing a novel.