She was competing for the prize of loser of the month, sixteen years old and the terror of a first hole in her mouth, sixteen years old and an abnormal rocking, and the fear of losing her teeth prematurely, as in dreams in which one by one they fell white on the parquet floor. And the noise was that of a spilled sack of beans, except that they were her teeth instead, not 28 or 32 but hundreds of healthy teeth shining, the epilogue of a hyperdontia cured in a sinister roar and without any supervision.
Months of uncontrolled chewing, eating molar against molar, filing how much, vaguely, could still hurt. And then kindergarten, the black circles on her arm, winters spent hanging drawings ready for the next extraction. Jealously guarding every little uprooted treasure, the token never paid to an ugly rat, which, come to think of it, wouldn't really need of milk chewers but picks them up anyway.
Now, at age 16, removing a tooth is the same as in your twenties. Maybe not asleep under anesthesia. Maybe you're lucid enough to rip it out yourself. Maybe it was another trophy to be kept in plastic cups wrapped in plastic wrap and you made trash out of it. Maybe it was a piece of you and at 16 years old, what matters, is to accumulate.
For the rest, and at best, she would have died asphyxiated as in her nightmares, by those bony little slugs she used to spit everywhere, swallowing as many of them. Such a copious loss is because, in truth, she was never good at counting. We know, there is always the rabbit that eludes you: at twenty you risk it with violent men, at sixteen you fear a hole in the third quadrant. So my child, what will you be afraid of, tomorrow? This is not a mortal wound and in fact, and thankfully, that cavity so deep, we have always escaped it.
