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.
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.
First I lost the first molar on my upper left gum. It’s no different than losing your baby teeth. It got wiggly, and then it came off. I had a gap, soft, fleshy, and, at least shortly after the tooth came out, somewhat wet and seepy. But unlike a new tooth coming in, the wet warmth of the spot just sort of grew, and then branched out. It curled toward my lip and eventually pushed its way out, like a seed sprout. From there it started tracing the contour of my face. I never got it to settle over my head like all of you.
I remember people being afraid of this, but I don’t remember anyone disliking it. I disliked it. The nervetooth got in the way of my lips. It buzzed and frizzled when I tongued it, when I touched it wrong.
People assured me that was the joy. The nervetooth brings a certain warmth, an exhilaration. I recently looked up some of the early interviews. First growers described it as titillating; they claimed it was sensuous. They claimed the nervetooth brought them infinitesimal sensory perception of the taste of the wind, the saltiness of dust in a breeze, the woodenness of their homes. It was like living in a world that never had eyes, and now they spontaneously could see.
Sadly many of these first growers were beaten or killed. Now we’re not so barbaric, but neither are the descriptions of the nerveteeth so passionate. I guess once all the eyes popped in and everyone can see, vision is no longer remarkable. But it should have been, to me. I wanted to feel what you all feel.
Instead, it made me queasy. Think of a slug, with button cell batteries embedded in its skin, sitting stuck on your gum and out your cheek. Should you worry it with your lips or your tongue, the batteries connect and you get a shock that tastes of metal. The slug then squirms angrily. This was my nervetooth to me.
Doctors told me it would pass. I would adjust, and the full ambient sensation of the nervetooth would take me.
My friend Melissa took it one further. She told me she secretly felt it hurt too. But the hurt, she said, felt good. It was a hurt to explore. She leaned close and whispered this to me.
I’ve been sitting on this moment for months. Running it through my head again and again. I truly think Melissa was telling me she liked me. I think for once I was being desired. I sit here now writing and thinking about this, and everything gets so twisted it’s awful.
Her nervetooth reached out to touch mine. My skull filled with blinding hot pain. I believed then and there the only way out was death. I felt, tasted, saw nothing less than a whiteout that seized my body and sliced a million paper cuts over every inch of skin.
I have seen nerveteeth kiss. It doesn’t happen like this. I’m so ashamed. I don’t even know when she left, or how long I had passed out.
I haven’t been able to reach her since. She blocked me. I’m so sorry, Melissa.
By then my nervetooth was reaching its second stage, where it knocks out the second bicuspid and second molar.
I was sick constantly. You know when you vomit, and it burns your throat? You’re left with a taste like rotted lemon acids laced with the musty part of habanero? Once I vomited with my nervetooth, my mouth always tasted like that. Like it seeped in. And I kept vomiting, frequently.
I’m sorry, everyone. I know you were all wanting something else from my story, now that I’ve finally grown my nervetooth. I still get your messages, about joining you. Being a member, once again, of our great humanity.
I’ve done it. What the early savages did. I pulled out the nervetooth.
You know, of all the most unexpected things about this situation, I didn’t realize they could come out so easily. Or maybe it’s because mine was rotten, or wrong, or grew incorrectly. Maybe it came out easily for the same reason it first refused to grow. Maybe my gums are just terrible, rotten inside, poor soil for the nervetooth to root.
But it came out easily. To be profane, it felt like picking an extremely large booger out of your nose. You know the type, where trailing the proper crystalized nugget is a string of snot that slides out from somewhere behind the nose, leaving your head feeling softly hollow and a little nauseous? Think of that, but slug-sized.
And did you know, they kinda melt? The nervetooth. I put it in a plastic container, I was not sure what to do with it. In my head, still spinning from hollow nausea, I think I was thinking about something like giving it to research. Not that I would know where to deliver it, or what. But I kept it because I thought it could be valuable.
But it melted. Right in front of me. Within minutes the syrupy red ventricles were nothing but a dull brown goo. Which I have in my refrigerator if you want to take a look. I don’t know why I keep it. I haven’t opened the fridge to look at it since. I suspect it’s rotted.
My face is broken now. My jaw is uneven, the left half of my mouth has folded inward.
Now I know how Morris came to be the way he is. I had never understood Morris.
Morris is the panhandler outside my nearby supermarket. He used to scare me, always shouting for my attention, and my attention particularly. But one day I got up the nerve to ask him why, and he told me he just liked that I didn’t have a nervetooth.
He doesn’t either. But he had no teeth. And his face was folded inward at the jaw line, like a cartoon old man.
Honestly, I assumed his nervetooth was hidden in his mouth. When he spoke he’d keep his head lowered, never let me see.
But now I think he took his nervetooth out. I went, the other night, to ask him why. But he was not there. He was not there the next morning either. I asked the cashiers if they’ve seen him. They finally got tired of Morris sitting around. Morris has been taken away.
I’m sorry, Morris. I took you for granted. I didn’t even realize you might have some answers for me.
Now my face is collapsing like Morris’ was. And I have a new nervetooth coming in.
It’s different than the last one. I’ve never seen a nervetooth like this. I’ve lost seven teeth on my upper left jaw. This nervetooth is dark purple instead of cherry red. And it’s reaching out less like veins and more like pustules.
And it hurts when I bite with it. Not like a little battery shock, but more like an electric fence. I haven’t eaten anything solid for two weeks.
I was analyzing it in my bathroom mirror last night, and I found that small tugs started separating it from the gum — it can come out as easily as the last nervetooth.
But I’m afraid. I don’t know how many more nerveteeth can come, nor what more of my mouth they’ll take from me.
This is all to say, I’m alone and scared. I don’t know what to do. Everyone lives with their nerveteeth like normal, they don’t understand my pain or confusion. Doctors don’t know what to do with me. I don’t know who to reach out to anymore.
Can anybody help me? Does anyone know how to grow a proper nervetooth?
This story was written for the Soaring Twenties Social Club (STSC) Symposium. The STSC is a small, exclusive online speakeasy where a dauntless band of raconteurs, writers, artists, philosophers, flaneurs, musicians, idlers, and bohemians share ideas and companionship. Each month STSC members create something around a set theme. This cycle, the theme was “Growth.”
If you are a writer, you might consider joining us.
To experience my previous STSC Symposium submissions:
Falling
Shelley jolted shrieking awake with her night terrors. Simon had become used to it as a regular part of their sleeping schedule, and he pulled her close, the heat from him warming her clammy skin. She never woke up entirely, but murmured about falling from a great height. Always falling. The one time she woke up enough to sense, she cried about falling …
Machine House Lovers
They met at their car accident. Outside, night, he on the ground, lacerated with windshield shards, her crumpled form crushed a few feet from him. He was still awake. He crawled over. She was still awake. She was beautiful. Her face was the only part of her unmarred and its full size. Her chest and thighs had been flattened by the tires. Her arm, barely articulate, twitched and flopped toward him. He grabbed her hand and pulled himself over her. She smiled. He held her while she fainted, keeping her warm and protected from the sky.
A Perverse Habit
My friend J.R. had this thing about ‘corrupting Christian girls.’ It started junior year of high school when he dated Marie, who went to St. Augustine’s, the Catholic school across town.
To read my previous Uncanny Stories:
The Vacancy
Say you’re walking right along one of those green barriers to a construction site. At the end of the street, beyond where this plane of the barriers end, you assume that when you turn the corner there will be more barriers stretching down the rest of the property beside you. This assumption is not one your mind has the day-to-day capacity to question, not really — because if you were to turn the corner and find not only that the barrier didn’t continue around the corner, but that the back sides and volumes of the boards you are passing
Waste Lock
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Setbacks
This story is my submission Soaring Twenties Social Club's Symposium. The STSC is a small, exclusive online speakeasy where a dauntless band of raconteurs, writers, artists, philosophers, flaneurs, musicians, idlers, and bohemians share ideas and companionship. Each month we create something around a set theme. This month, the theme was “Fiction".
Tip Jar by Venmo!
As someone who recently learned they have a congenital facial deformity, this really hit.
👍👍👍👍👍