~ a short story
Midori sat in the long chair and turned off his mind. He faced a window the size of a wall. Leaning back, mouth open, he stared into the woods surrounding the railroad. Midori was at the dentist and his annual cleaning was about to begin. Dr. Smith spun around on his stool armed with metallic tools and a cheesy smile.
“How are we doing today?”
Midori grunted a “Good!” with a deep breath.
“Open wiiide,” said Dr. Smith as he peered inside his mouth. “Fillings look fine. We been brushing and flossing?”
Midori did not answer — truly, could not — as his dentist got to work mirroring deeper angles and digging away with the akimbo weapons of his trade. The young man took care of his teeth, felt confident that Dr. Smith would see so.
“I’ve been tracking the news,” Dr. Smith began. “Made a Twitter account… and whoo boy, it’s getting pretty crazy out there, right?”
Trying to *unlisten* to the older man’s musings, Midori leveled his eyes on the treeline beyond the window. Smith’s practice was in a small building astride the highway, built right along the railroad tracks where developments ended and a grimy forest began. The same daydream started to play as Dr. Smith hummed out words and scratched at his patient’s enamel with glee.
“The elites are really planning something methinks heheh…” Dr. Smith chuckled to himself. His eyes were glazed as he ranted. He always spoke with a naked superiority to his tone, like a Redditor or the long-ago captain of a high school football team. Midori briefly wondered whether he hit every one of his patients with the same routine, repeated it and improved as he went. A shuddering breeze struck the fall trees and toppled another layer of oranging leaves. Overcast clouds streamed through midday, peaking bits of sun into the canopy. Something was out there. Midori shivered. A distant rumbling in the brush prickled his neck against the leather with goosebumps.
“What is it that these so-called “elites” do, huh?” Dr. Smith was into it now, the blade had reached Midori’s molars and was carving out plaque with the gusto of a berserking northman. “They don’t actually produce anything. They manage and shape and choose who gets to go where. They are all about control.” Smith had the trinocular dentist goggles on now and looked like a cyborg torturer. Day outside grew colder; beyond the trunks there in the near distance, Midori felt the shimmering summoning of a monstrous future.
Everything begins in the trees.
Where did that thought come from?
“…Why would we even need these strong men to lead us? Why must we bleat ourselves to their whims? “Elites.” What a word. Like these parasites are better than us? And yet we worship them! The celebs are our new gods. Something just feels totally fascistic about the psychology of it all…” Smith pulled away from his mouth. Midori was breathing more heavily now but the dentist seemed not to notice.
“Don’t you think?” Dr. Smith asked the young man during the reprieve of a suddenly vigorous cleaning. The dentist heaved from his chair, winded with spent energy.
Midori had not really heard the man’s train of thought. Instead, he instinctively asked a question that was gnawing at the edge of his consciousness,
“Do you ever see strange things in those trees?” Midori asked in a ghastly tone. He pointed beyond the window, to the treeline of the autumnally-fit pines and firs.
Dr. Smith paused in confusion, then turned on his stool to look beyond his window.
“What?”
This was the last word the dentist ever spoke.
A great figure suddenly burst through the leaves, threshing past branches and trunks like a hot knife through butter. A seven-foot tall werewolf ran on all fours, destroying the suburban forest in its wake. All teeth and hair and eyes the color of murder. An overcast Thursday became an apocalyptic moment of supernatured ultraviolence as the wolf-man hybrid closed the gap between the treeline and the dentist’s window in a single frightful leap, instantly shattering the entire quadrant of glass panels in a bursting explosion.
The dentist’s head was severed in a single blow and the trays of instruments flung into the air. Glass debris covered everything. Midori watched in still fright as the werewolf paused amidst the blood rain to drink in the delights of its damnable work upon the corpse of a man who went to school for a decade.
Midori’s dentist daydream had become true. And yet, at this moment, as the monster’s ears perked up at the sound of his last breath from the chair, Midori felt the bridge between him and the universe was larger than ever. ~
