NOVOCAIN

It rains diamonds on Neptune, Zoe reminds herself. She knots her face and clamps her hands on her thighs, the better to ponder the impossible through the streaked windows of the bus. A small bird bounces off the glass, and Zoe looks back at it twitching on the road’s yellow line. She watches it recede into the distance; she knows what it is to feel small.

            The guy next to her is coughing up his TB or whatever, and Zoe concentrates on statistics that have some bearing on that, i.e. the fact that a simple sneeze can propel itself through the air at 200 MPH. Or maybe those are stats on an orgasm. She wracks her brains while he hacks away. They have not made eye contact the whole trip, and maybe Coughing Guy doesn’t know she’s there; she can’t know for sure, but he doesn’t even try to draw in his knees when Zoe crawls over them at her stop.

       She signs in at the dental office, and the receptionist pushes the new-patient form at her from the hole in her window. Zoe carries it to the seat at the end of the receptionist’s finger, and spreads the paper across her knees like she wants to spank it. How do you feel about dentures? How well do you tolerate pain? She writes out the same answers as she did last time, and the time before, her purple sleeve dragging across her green plaid knees. When she dressed this morning, she’d stared at her mirror until the clash of colors began to vibrate. She wanted people to see her. She was sick of being invisible.

            In the examining room, the hygienist who always matches her make-up to her uniform beams the overhead light into Zoe’s face. “You’ll enjoy being a new patient here,” she says. “The staff is very caring.” Does she rehearse that line in her sleep? Zoe wonders.  The zebra-finch dreams of its own song while it sleeps.  A high-strung drill screams from the next cubicle. Last night she had the crumbling-teeth dream. What does that mean again? Powerlessness? Anxiety?  She breathes through the nose while the dentist’s familiar voice, muffled, floats in under the door. Spit! he says. Spit! Spit!  In the corner, a pillow with an embroidered tooth has a hypodermic aimed at it. Zoe smiles because that’s what it says to do on the pillow. She focuses on the fact that while frogs have teeth, toads do not.

The dentist enters without a greeting, motions to open wide. Electrical impulses travel from the skin toward the spinal cord at a rate of up to 425 feet per second.  Dentist and hygienist divide and conquer Zoe’s mouth expertly. There’s sucking and stretching, buzzing and puffing at the usual intervals and in the usual order. While the professionals work over the abyss of her mouth, Zoe realizes she is witnessing an affair. It’s in his showmanship and her admiration for it. They finish up, congratulate each other, and move on out together like shepherd moons herding the particles of Saturn’s rings. Zoe manages a wide grin, even with all the instruments stuck in her mouth.