RUPTURED

The pain begins on a Tuesday morning – an aching, wretched agony buried beneath the gumline, demanding attention from the moment Alice’s eyes flicker open in all their bloodshot glory. She thinks that perhaps she has some rogue piece of food jammed in the fleshy pulp of her mouth, mind flickering to vague memories of greasy kebab shoved down her throat with all the abandon of a beast mauling its dinner with sharpened canines. Three tequila shots deep, Alice had felt her spine shift as she transformed from marketing executive to wild beast with a gaping, drooling maw. She wanted to fuck, she wanted to consume, she wanted to eat. The fryer-slick meal did the trick to curb the insistent scream of her stomach at the time, but she still feels hollow the next morning, her bedroom swirling around her ears as she shoves an intrusive, probing finger into her mouth.

She notes nothing. No lodged debris of a rogue french fry, no fat-slick meat wedged in her flesh. Alice’s mouth, dry as it is, has no external violator, save for the finger she suckles on near-obscenely. For all her searching, she can find nothing to explain the uncanny tenderness, akin in sensation to what she imagines chewing on a rock would be like – soft, malleable flesh pressing against something unyielding.
She slips her finger out unceremoniously with a wet pop, drying her saliva-speckled skin upon her duvet, limp with the same sweat that coats her body. Alice burrows into the warm embrace of her blankets, tries to stave off her alcohol-fuelled trembling with the weight of it above her, like she is a child, like she can expel this monster of her own making by losing herself in this soft, familiar cave. She rouses a moment later by the pungent scent of her own body, her tequila-and-meat breath, the plaque lining her teeth and gums. She sucks in the stale air of her bedroom, pushing the mop of mousey hair back from her still eyeliner-smeared eyes. She is a mess. The ache in her jaw gives an affirmative roar of pain, then quietens enough that she might slip out of her soft enclosure, her feet hitting the matted carpet as the clock makes its lazy roll forward to 8:00am.

 

             “Did you or Dad,” Alice begins, swirling her tongue into the gap behind her molars, the slick sound amplified through the phone’s speaker, like she was slipping the appendage directly into the tight, wet heat of her mother’s ear canal, “ever have wisdom teeth?”

The pain is most noticeable now when she touches it. There’s a cruelty in knowing that she could stave it off by leaving her new wound alone, and yet she can’t help but draw her tongue back to the place where she can begin to feel the flesh part, becoming pulpy and wet with blood whose sting brings a coppery, sharp taste.

             “Nope,” Alice’s mother replies. She seems distracted – or perhaps, she’s just disturbed at the intimacy of knowing what her daughter’s tongue sounds like as it flicks wetly across her teeth, “neither do either of your sisters.”

             “Duckie is younger than me.” Alice pauses the obscene flicker of her tongue for the contradiction, “she might just not have got them yet.”

             “Duckie also got a brain injury, and an x-ray, and we know she doesn’t have wisdom teeth. Because of the x-ray.”

             “I got that.”

             “Why do you ask?”

Alice notes that her mother (and indeed, Duckie and Toyah’s mother, too, she doesn’t belong solely to Alice) seems perturbed, as if this admittedly banal line of questioning is a personal slight.

             “I think I’m getting a wisdom tooth. There’s a-,” she flicks her tongue against the curved wound, tastes its salty-sweet-bitter discharge, “a hole in my gum.”

It feels wrong to call it a hole. It’s not a hole – it’s an opening. An entrance. Far less passive than a hole. It feels unfeminist to call it that.

             “You’re not getting wisdom teeth. Me and Dad don’t have them. Toyah doesn’t have them, and Duckie won’t get them. I think you’ve probably worn a hole into it yourself. You’re always eating shit – maybe it’s finally catching up with you.”

Alice is less offended by her mother’s judgemental snideness towards her eating habits than she is at her passivity. Her mother’s body was once her home, her feeding-trough, her comfort; the duvet she enclosed herself in, with the same dank, heady scent as her own at home today. Alice could have wisdom teeth. She could have something growing inside her that her mother doesn’t know about. Alice has been inside her mother’s depths, but that intimacy has not been returned. Duckie and Toyah’s mother does not know what lingers within her. It could be anything. It could be a tooth. It could be a whole mouth with a whole set of teeth, and those teeth could have teeth, and she could be consuming herself from the inside out at this very moment, and her mother wouldn’t know.

             “Yeah. I gotta go to work soon,” Alice murmurs, forcing her tongue away from the playful pit of her new orifice long enough to form the words. Her jaw aches, cracking with the effort of being dragged to one side so Alice may explore herself, to enjoy the hole in her gum, to feel every inch of it.

Her mother hangs up first, but this time, Alice hardly notices. She flicks her tongue against the wound, and shivers with delight at the pinpricks of that near-arousing, angry sensitivity.

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