Famous Writers Discuss Flossing
What does it mean to floss?
Gabriel García Marquez
Many years later, as I faced the oral surgeon, I was to remember that distant afternoon when my father took me to discover floss. At that time the pharmacy was a store of three aisles, built along a glistening river where fluoride flowed, crystallized, and shone like the edges of an ice cube. Dentistry was so recent that we lacked names for many things, so I just pointed at the waxen silk thread. Thursday at midnight in a mad operation, I held the silken line between the interstices of my teeth and blood circulated through my gums with the fluidity of an anthem that the river sings, only to return to the sink, purified by salivary love.
Bashō
Like wires holding birds
The floss carries out the gunk
And my jaw goes — Pop!
Leo Tolstoy
Good floss is all alike; every bad floss is bad in its own way.
Everything was in confusion in my bicuspids. The first premolar in my third quadrant was carrying on about some roast beef and turbot sauce Beaumarchais that the second premolar had been hiding, before discovering the sordid periodontal affair. Though they had not seen a brush in three days and welcomed…
