How to Grow Your Nervetooth

An Uncanny Story for STSC Symposium: Growth

It came in finally.

I wasn’t sure I’d ever get one. I have some memories of when I was younger when they scared people. They didn’t know what it was and they didn’t know what it was for. Do you remember that? I remember my parents freaking out about it being ‘infectious.’ It turned out not to be an infection, but I remember there were many who resisted it as an infection anyway.

Now everyone has a nervetooth. I was the last one to get one. Documented: the news used to check in, ask whether I had one yet. Yeah, I’m that guy. But now that nerveteeth are normal, the news doesn’t really ask me about mine.

These days we look at photos, movies, old people stuff, you know, when we talk about how humans used to look before the nerveteeth. People tell me I look like a time traveler without mine. It’s strange to see human faces so smooth, without the extruded red, coral-like veins that curl out of people’s left lips and slowly wrap around their heads.

In English class back in high school, we did a project about changing notions of beauty, and there were some of my peers and me that felt like humans without nerveteeth looked like angels. Pure and unblemished. Now the hottest celebrities have the most ornate nerveteeth. I got attention a few years for lacking my own, but it never got me any romance. Sometimes I’m treated no better than a biological curiosity.

But anyway my nervetooth came in. And it is not as I expected.

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To be clear, everything was going fine as we have seen it happen before. Before babies were born with their nerveteeth, when people regularly grew them no matter their age. So the process is well-documented. It should have felt right.