Loose Tooth: Origin Story
Before he was Loose Tooth he was just a tooth. Lowercase t tooth. A lower second molar, to be exact. The environment in which this tooth lived was catastrophic. He was inundated daily with beer, cigarette smoke, whisky, sour candy, raw popcorn kernels, vomit and sponge toffee. He overheard the most offensive, sarcastic and hateful things in that mouth. The words whizzed past him throughout the day, growing worse and worse as he was forced to bathe in a mixture of whiskey and pickle juice. This tooth was unable to reach out and catch the words before they flew out the cave’s opening and caused him to be hit repeatedly, jarring him into a state of unconsciousness.
He was only truly happy twice in his lifetime spent in this fetid cave. The first time was years ago when he was very young and he was scrubbed with a stinging yet luscious cream on stiff plastic bristles that scoured him until he felt shining and alive. This feeling was fleeting and faded after one night’s rest, expiring with the crunch of a candy cane and a tidal wave of cream soda. The second instance of happiness was a few months following this initial scouring, when he was examined under harsh lighting, exposed to a mild yet pleasant sedative, poked and prodded with metal instruments, and then scraped, polished, buffed and bathed into a glistening pearl. He evoked these memories in the harsh stinking reality of the early morning, when he often awoke to a reversing of the previous night’s beer consumption and the ensuing acrid smoke that caused him to feel grimy and dead.
This particular tooth was not alone in his misery. He had twenty six roommates, many of whom shared his feelings of revulsion and demise on a daily basis. Every one of them had witnessed the untimely death of five of their close friends and cohabitants. Some died of a horrible ugly sickness that slowly turned them grey and lifeless. Others were shattered to pieces and ejected forcibly from their home onto hard concrete in a spray of blood. Nobody had ever escaped alive. But one tooth dreamed of someday living a life outside the rotting crypt in which he was born. He dreamed of being loose.
One evening, after a near constant deluge of bourbon, gin and cotton candy from both directions, things began to get very loud. Profanities bombarded all twenty seven teeth, louder than ever before and everyone prepared for the worst. They were shaking in their roots and then the blows came. Left central incisor shattered almost immediately, followed by its neighbour, left lateral incisor. The majority of their fragmented bodies were discharged from the cave, but small shards remained in their roots as a grim reminder of their former residents. Lower second molar was pounded once, twice, and on the third blow, he was rendered unconscious as he fell from the only home he had ever known into a bright white shaft of light.
He awoke with a shiver and grimace, unused to the glare of daylight, and slowly took in his unfamiliar surroundings. He was covered in dried blood, and was no longer in the warm and reeking cavern he’d called home his entire life. He looked down at his body. He was whole. And he was loose. A Loose Tooth. He stood up slowly and stumbled as he began to walk for the first time. He tripped and fell, but got up again and stabilized his gait. The possibilities seemed endless.
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