MATT ROWAN / CLEAN TEETH
Foolish to forget. You did it at your own peril.
Teeth are evaluated clean when you go to the dentist.
Your Audible Itinerary always alerted you it was time to go, when at its regular interval it was time to go.
Once there, you were greeted by the exalted statue of Clean Mouth, a gray crew-cut wearing, facial featureless white statue holding a giant-sized toothbrush like a staff. Clean Mouth was a mascot, a mascot for your dental hygiene, all dental hygiene. As a symbol, Clean Mouth stood unsmiling, stoic, lips closed tightly, teeth a mystery. But Clean Mouths were also real-live bodies, who evaluated you very specially. You wanted to leave Dr. Hiraeth’s office with a positive review from Clean Mouth. You wanted a Clean Mouth to say yours was a clean mouth. During evaluation, it was always best that a Clean Mouth’s mouth remained firmly shut.
“We don’t want to hurt you today,” Dr. Hiraeth’s secretarial assistant greeted, always with a benign smile. Her greeting may have been true, inasmuch as she truly hoped that they didn’t need to hurt you—who was in this case you—or any of their patients.
The office was entirely white. Everything was white and without a single blemish.
There was a sign informing you not to smudge anything when you passed the threshold into the office. You obeyed the sign’s warning.
And your teeth necessarily came to see the dentist already white.
Dr. Hiraeth would inform you of your rights, as a teeth-possessing individual in society. “We need to see if you’ve been doing your job as a member of the clean.”
“I sure have, Dr. H. You won’t find a speck of the unclean in this mouth,” you assured the dentist. “Oh no you won’t.”
“Well, then, let’s have a look.”
***
Some years ago, a rebel believing he had everything to gain from battling against the system decided to come to the dentist with a mouth full of decay. Dr. Hiraeth was stricken with disgust. He couldn’t avoid throwing up. Such a waste of potentially good teeth, all in a body so insolent.
Such things have to be dealt with in a clean-mouthed society. And so Clean Mouth was born. A mascot firstly, but an enforcer, indeed. Men and women with the cleanest mouths were conscripted. Experiments were conducted. Mouths were made cleaner. Teeth were made bigger. And bigger. Bigger still. Till finally they were as big as teeth could seemingly get, and very likely, as clean as they could get.
And they brought out those Clean Mouths, now a means of getting things done.
The rebel was brought back to the dentist’s chair and seated. He opened his rotten mouth, and a Clean Mouth, in a white lab coat was called to evaluate. The rebel said he’d never do as he was told, his mouth would never be clean in the ways they wanted. What do you say to that? Mother fucker, what do you say? And Clean Mouth said nothing. Just spread lips apart so the clean teeth were revealed. Long and wide. Each a white mirror in which the rebel could view his reflection. A long, clear rope of saliva lengthened as Clean Mouth opened wide. The rebel didn’t like what he was seeing.
The rebel wasn’t trouble for Dr. Hiraeth any longer.
***
You were being inspected by Dr. Hiraeth. Everything was fine. Until there was a potentially serious problem.
“Your tongue, it has an ulcerous opening on its side, there. Disconcerting to me for several reasons.”
“Urner,” you said, your mouth held open by Dr. Hiraeth’s metal clamps.
“Oh no, indeed,” Dr. Hiraeth said, nodding vigorously. “This is bad hygiene. This is unclean.” He said the word “unclean” with guttural accent. He undid the metal clamps, allowing you to again speak comprehensibly.
You plead your case. “Dr. Hiraeth, with all due respect, the lesion is part of why I’ve come today. I wanted your professional opinion. I couldn’t make it go away on my own, but I swear, I did try.”
“You’ll need to have injections,” Dr. Hiraeth said. “They’ll need to be administered by Clean Mouth, as a reminder. Nothing too terrible yet. But I do stress yet.”
“Not Clean Mouth, Doc, please.”
“Yes Clean Mouth, Doc, definitely,” Dr. Hiraeth said, correcting your wrong ideas, his incorrectly worded request. And the looming shadow emerged from the empty hallway, and behind that the blinding bright white of the Clean Mouth’s teeth.
“No, no, no,” you could hear your shouting, progressively louder, until you could speak nothing at all, could not be heard though there was something muffled quietly beneath the audible efforts of Clean Mouth.
You left the dentist that day feeling terrible and run around.
You tried to follow in line. The long line of people marching to the places they were required to be. Your body itched all over and the specter of Clean Mouth loomed, literally and figuratively, because the statue was never far from your periphery and it loomed quite grandly always. You knew next time they’d take the brush to you. Your mouth didn’t feel better, either. Your tongue felt worse, despite what had happened. And this was not the end, an excruciating distance from the end.
***
A world ruled by the ruthless pursuit of only the cleanest mouths, the very best teeth. The strongest, fittest, the bravest teeth. They might be led in any direction. To bite down on the very soul of man or woman, whatever force could come forward and challenge.
“We uproot decay,” you remembered a teacher teaching in school, when you were school-aged and very trusting. “The foundation of any society lies in strong roots. So teeth have become a beautiful metaphor for everything that extends beyond the body, the mind, the physical self, and joins the collective spirit, the spirit to shape and to sculpt and to build upward and outward along the outside, jointly, in concert, as a single healthy entity. Clean teeth must be had, for the health of the mouth, for the entirety of the body. And they will be had.”
There were the videos, the white-suited men and women who followed the example of the dental professionals. They welcomed a new tomorrow in which the body was free of all the ugliness that had existed in the past. They would fight and claw to the bitter end to remove it, do what was required. That was what the video told.
That did nothing for your tongue, which you knew, given their rather draconian methodology, would be cut from your body if you didn’t find a way to fix it yourself. That was what Dr. Hiraeth himself had said, as you were leaving, cramped and terror-stricken after your encounter with Clean Mouth.
And who were you? A bespectacled cretin already. Frail, bent at the spine. They must already have been hoping for just cause. Get rid of you. The eugenic approach, good societal hygiene. What was wrong with your tongue? Perhaps it can be so wrong that the entirety can be righted.
They’d recommended you to a specialist, Dr. Hiraeth’s office had, with specific instruction that you go to the specialist with a clean mouth, tongue treated and no longer a problem. By who exactly? How? Where was this transformation supposed to be delivered from, bestowed magically upon you, the frail, the weak, the bespectacled. A happy rotten tooth? No, a happy stain on one single tooth in the mouth of an entirely efficient organism.
You should be bleached clean away.
“Your tongue is still disgusting. It’s been disgusting and it remains truly repellent. Arrestingly repellent. Yes, awful. I could go on and on,” the specialist said, an officious man with a long, slender nose.
“Irgh triehdr tergh ferx ergit,” you, whose mouth was clamped, said.
How you’d tried to fix it was: a clumsy effort to cut into your tongue with a hot steak knife, one of the few knives you possessed. It didn’t work out. You were quickly infected by all sorts of microorganisms bad for proper oral hygiene.
“Not hard enough, hardly. All correctable, though you should have done it yourself, and I’ll be noting that in your file, but now is the time for your tongue,” the specialist removed a long, cutting surgical device, like a pair of scissors but for medical purposes. He cut jaggedly into the tongue and removed it totally from your body. He had a metallic tongue set aside on his table, too. It looked wet and serpentine and a bit evil, like an eel. You howled as the specialist did his job without anesthetic, offering only and instead a few paltry words of your needing to remain calm and relaxed.
A Clean Mouth had been tasked with ensuring you made it to your appointment with the specialist. You left the examination room holding your jaw gingerly, rubbing it in an attempt to soothe some of the general pain you felt. The specialist had given you some drugs. You had taken those drugs and were now feeling in certain ways truly numb.
“With a tongue like that,” the specialist said, “you could really keep some clean teeth. What do you think about it?”
“I wouldn’t mind,” you said, happy to be so articulate with your new tongue.
The specialist nodded at the Clean Mouth, who took you right away.
***
Dentists have checkups, routinely. Dr. Hiraeth was no different, no exception. He kept his mouth in superlative condition, however, and so never had it been for him a cause of anxiety.
“Well, your teeth are perfect,” said the dentist inspecting him.
“No surprise there!” Dr. Hiraeth said. But the dentist didn’t laugh or even utter a sound of acknowledgment, so Dr. Hiraeth said, without any humorous intent, “I should say I’m not surprised.”
“Well, there is the matter of your tongue, of course,” the dentist said.
“I’m sorry? My tongue is blemish free,” Dr. Hiraeth stated pointedly.
“Oh, I’m sure it’s no big thing. Very easy to miss. I would have missed it myself if, you know, we hadn’t been instructed to check tongues ever more closely than we had previously, with each successive examination. But who hasn’t missed the instruction of an Abiding Mandate every now and then, come from On High? Again, no big thing. Your punishment won’t be very severe at all, in fact. No Clean Mouth required, even,” and then the dentist directed her attention to the doorway, “Could you come in here for a moment?”
The long mechanical tongue preceded you, who’d finally found good work, a rightful place in society.
Dr. Hiraeth screamed and screamed until he could scream no longer, because of exhaustion, you’d be likely to imagine.
Matt Rowan lives in Los Angeles. He currently edits Untoward Magazine. He’s author of two story collections, Big Venerable (CCLaP, 2015), Why God Why (Love Symbol Press, 2013), with another, How the Moon Works, forthcoming from Cobalt Press in 2020. He’s also a contributing writer and voice actor for The Host podcast series. His work has appeared in >kill author, Pacifica Literary Review, Booth Journal, Necessary Fiction, and Gigantic Worlds Anthology, among others.