The Least Sophisticated Machine In My Face

I don’t like seeing my bones outside of my body. That’s a sign that something is wrong, wrong, very wrong. Needling-out, trailing-guts wrong. Like a loose nail ripping a canvas bag open from the inside.

No, I like my bones wrapped up safe and warm inside the meat of me, thanks very much.

And yet here I am, my mouth all crowded up with a full set of little paleolithic handaxes. Out there in the open, they seem pale and lost, like confused, deep-sea-dwelling crustaceans, poking themselves up to the surface of the ocean to see what sunlight is like.

My teeth are all hardware and no software. What your hammer is to your machine shop, what your fan is to your server farm, what your bedstraps are to your space shuttle — that is what my teeth are to my head. All around them, everything is wired up, electricity shooting all directions — a million incomprehensible miracles of chemistry and physics contained within the volume of a cantaloupe. And my teeth just sit there: inert, dull little knives. All mechanics, and barely that.