Waiting Room

I can’t wait for the laughing gas. I ripple pages of last week’s People, a little boy in shoes that cost my month in wages reads Stone Soup, is that still a magazine? his mom tallies her Glamour sex quiz with a borrowed pencil, she erases things a lot, I hear a drill. Doctor Greenberg, prepping shiny picks, needles, a fluorescent light bulb in the lamp keeps flickering, it washes us out. The boy’s virginal Garanimals are rumpled, his incomplete molars fleshy holes sought out by the pink tip of his tongue, fingering in his pocket a Sacajawea left under his pillow by the fairy, the fairy who deals in teeth. I have had no cavities, a genetic blessing like the soft curl in the boy’s fine hair. But today I have an appointment, surgery to extract useless impacted leftovers of days when bones needed gnawing. I want to wiggle my tooth again, eat an apple and leave a canine in its flesh, whistle through a hole in my mouth. My name is called. I await the laughing gas.