Every Tooth Knows the Way Home

How it begins

The tooth was on my kitchen table when I came home.

I had locked it in a laboratory drawer.

It stood upright beside the fruit bowl, casting a small shadow toward the window.

I checked the door.

Locked.

The windows.

Closed.

Then I called Jon because he had keys to the building and a lifelong talent for making bad news sound like a maintenance issue.

"Is anything else missing?" he asked.

"Something has arrived."

He came upstairs with his tool bag.

The tooth looked ordinary. Pale. Clean. A molar, broad enough to stand without assistance.

I had received it as part of a denture that morning.

None of the teeth belonged together.

The records said otherwise.

Jon looked at it and went still.

"Where did you get that?"

"Work."

"Which client?"

I told him.

He put down the tool bag.

The name belonged to a house demolished before I was born.

At the laboratory the next morning, the drawer was locked.

The denture inside had a gap.

Another tooth was missing.

I checked the dispatch ledger, the alarm log and the parcel label. Every ordinary explanation ended in a record someone had completed too neatly.

When I returned home, Jon waited outside my door.

He was holding an envelope.

"Found this in number eight."

Number eight had been empty since my mother disappeared.

Nobody used her old room.

The landlord had kept it locked through three failed sales and a proposed demolition.

Inside the envelope lay the second tooth.

Along its edge was a fine blue line.

My mother used to mark things she meant to come back for.

Jon looked toward the stairs.

"I think," he said, "you should ask to see the room."

That night I left the first tooth on the table.

In the morning, it had turned.

Its shadow pointed toward number eight.

The fruit bowl had not moved.