When I'm Dead

A sharp pain radiated through Carmichael’s mouth. It was as if a bolt had shot through his teeth and had firmly lodged itself in his jaw. His hand shot upward to protect himself from the invisible assailant.

Rocking back against the seat, his agonized holler bellowed through the apartment, “OWWWWWW!!”

Viola’s shoulder sank. She paused from wiping down the kitchen counter and rolled her head to the side. Watching her friend writhe in pain against the couch cushions, she called out:

“If you don’t SHUT UP and stop being such a god damn BABY!”

For added emphasis, she wound up and hurled the sauce-stained dishrag straight toward Carmichael’s head.

He ducked back into the cushion to avoid the flying dishrag. Everyone knew that a shot from Viola would leave a dent in whatever it hit, or worse. Missing Carmichael’s nose by well, a nose, the rag collided with the wall beside him with a hearty crack. It stuck for only a moment before collapsing in a jumbled heap on the carpet.

“Well damn V, it’s not my fault my fucking tooth broke,” Carmichael said, clutching the left side of his face.

Shane, who had until this point been ignoring the dramatic scene to his left, shot him an incredulous look.

“You absolute liar. It is ONE HUNDRED PERCENT your fault.”

Shaking his head, Shane leaned up from his sacred recliner, and with a cursory glance to the wall, he called out “V, you dented the wall again.”

Then, Shane turned right back to the television. Viola rolled her eyes and snapped her fingers twice. The dishrag flew back into her hand, and she went back to wiping the counters like before. With a quick, low whistle, she popped the dent out of the wall. Good as new, and in perfect keeping with their safety deposit.

Carmichael turned to Shane and started to say “I fail to see how it’s my-” but before he could finish, Tanya howled out from her room:

“YOUUUU are the one who chose to chew on a jawbreaker, and now YOUUUU are the one with a cracked fang, deal with it.”

He’d always had a penchant for hard candies. Carmichael considered it to be his “one” downfall. It was the only thing from being human he hadn’t been able to leave behind for some reason or another. His mother’s death? Piece of cake. Feeding on the blood of the innocent? Not a problem. But tell him to stop eating butterscotch hard candies, and he might have ended it all right then and there. He claimed that they only upset his stomach a little, but that was an understatement at best. He never had to announce that he was having a sweet tooth. The whole house knew when Carmichael had snuck a piece of candy because he would get cranky and belch smells that were reminiscent of old, rotten blood. Tanya affectionately called these his “Times of the Month.” Though, he claimed she was biased with a combination of wolf’s sense of smell and lesbian superpowers. Tanya would neither confirm nor deny this.

Carmichael sat back against the couch in a huff. He had been complaining about his tooth for weeks now, and while Viola might’ve been the most vocal, they had all had enough of his incessant whining. He felt it was unfair. It wasn’t his fault his fang broke; it was a piece of candy. How could he have known? He didn’t even think you could get hurt as a vampire, so how was he expected to know you could crack a tooth? But, while he felt he had experienced a cruel twist of ironic tragedy, everyone else in the apartment felt he was being an insufferable crybaby.

“Well, how am I supposed to deal with it, Tanya?” He hollered back. An immediate poor choice on his part, as it shot a new wave of pain through his tooth.

A moment of silence hung in the air that was quickly followed by the sounds of scuttling feet against the hardwood floor.

Her curly haired head popped over the hallway wall as she glared with squinted eyes and yelled:

“GOOOOOOOO TO THE DENTISSSSST!”

In a bout of frustration, Carmichael threw his hands into his face. They’d been telling him to go to the dentist for weeks. An easy enough solution. Broken tooth? Go to the dentist. But they had all seemed to neglect a very important piece of information.

“I AM BROOOOOOKE, TANYA!!” He hollered back.

Tanya rolled her eyes and came from around the corner with a flash of bright red basketball shorts. Shane looked at her, puzzled, the next Full Moon wasn’t for another two weeks? After a moment’s consideration, he figured that she had just lost track of the cycle and didn’t want to ask.

“I just don’t understand how you can be almost two centuries old and be broke. And you’re white? How do you fumble the bag that hard, Carmichael?” She said as she plopped down onto the couch.

Viola snickered from the kitchen. Dumping in one more handful of something, she set her pot on high to boil, she came to join them in the living room. She nestled into her beautiful green velvet chair that she refused to share and clicked her tongue to summon the ottoman.

“She has a very good point,” Viola said as she propped up her feet.

“Don’t get me wrong, we all are very grateful to have your company, as well as your help with the bills, but how do you not have anything set aside for so much as a single dentist visit?”

Carmichael rested against the back of the couch and stared up at the ceiling. Everyone’s eyes settled on him and awaited his answer.

In his defense, it was a pretty good answer.

“It’s not just a matter of the visit,”

He turned his head to look at Tanya, “as you so astutely pointed out I am almost two hundred years old, and while being so old may be a head start in some regards, as of late it’s much more of a hindrance.”

He leaned forward and pushed the tips of his fingers together, “I have no birth certificate, social security card, or even a driver’s license because when I was born, those concepts didn’t even exist. I can’t get health insurance without any of those things, which, up until very recently, didn’t really matter. So I-”

Tanya cut him off.

“What do you mean it hasn’t really mattered? I’ll admit I’m not exactly well versed in the ‘acting,’ world-” she said acting with feigned quotation marks, Carmichael felt they were unnecessary,

“ -but how do you get paid for gigs if you don’t have so much as a bank account?”

Before Carmichael could answer, Shane interjected.

“Viola, your pots about to overboil.”

With a start, Viola jumped up and ran into the kitchen; the ottoman skittering away like a scared dog. She was always leaving potions and concoctions on the stove with an idle mind, but no one in the house but her was allowed to touch those pots. The best you could do was remind her and hope it wasn’t too late.

Luckily, Shane always seemed to remember on time.

Viola called from the kitchen, “Go on Carmy- I can do both.” Viola was the only one who could call him Carmy. Tanya and Shane weren’t sure if it was out of fear, respect, or something else that he let her, but they knew better than to ask.

“I typically just ask for cash or money orders, and most of the time people don’t question it.”

Shane paused his show and Tanya stared at him in disbelief, while Viola intently stirred whatever it was that she had in the small saucepan. It smelled vaguely of ginger and… something meaty.

“As I was saying,” Carmichael continued, “It’s not just a matter of having money for a dentist visit, I would need to get the funds together to buy a bunch of fake legal documents, and then I would have to find someone who I can buy those things from, and I just don’t have that kind of time.”

A moment of silence passed among the group. The awe of Carmichael’s absolute stupidity had left them all in a state of vague confusion and general bewilderment.

“So…”

Tanya opened and closed her mouth three times, trying to find the right words to say and coming up just short. So, Shane stepped in for her:

“Dude, I watched you lay on the couch for three days last week,” he said in the most clear and concise tone Viola felt he had ever used.

Tanya exploded.

“YOU mean to tell ME, that this WHOLE TIME you’ve been bitching and moaning about your tooth- all you needed was a forgery plug?!”

With her arms bunched up at her sides, she leapt off the couch and began to walk in circles; trying so hard to pace out her anger, it looked like she might wear a rut into the floor. Viola just kept stirring her own circles into her saucepan, matching Tanya’s pace in the opposite direction. She knew that Tanya would eventually get tired, and that there was nothing that any of them could say that would speed that up.

Better to just let her wear herself out.

Tanya spoke so quickly that it was almost impossible to understand what she was saying. You could occasionally catch a word flying by at the same speed as a dishrag. “Stupid,” “ancient,” and “putz” were among some of the most frequent.

After a few minutes of angry muttering and occasional shouting, Tanya ran out of steam. She took a big breath: in through her nose, and slowly out through her mouth.

“You’ve been living with a cracked fang, and subjecting us to your incessant wailing, for WEEKS-”

She made sure to use large circular hand gestures here to show the ever-encompassing effect of time,

“all because you didn’t want to go through the effort of getting a birth certificate and applying for healthcare? I know the phrase is ‘I’ll get to it when I’m dead,’ but you’re already there man.”

Carmichael sat against the couch, considering everything Tanya had said. Listening to her put it that way, he seemed foolish. Viola came back from the kitchen, wiping her hands with a new rag and tossing it against her shoulder. She looked at him and crossed her hands. Without saying a word, everyone knew what she had meant.

“You’ve been ridiculous, and it’s been at our expense.”

With the good side of his mouth, he chewed on his cheek, basking in the shame of being wrong. Tanya stood staring down at him from the middle of the floor, Viola watched from the doorway of the kitchen, and Shane, well Shane was watching TV again. Partway through Tanya’s meltdown, he had tuned back to his 3rd Rock from the Sun re-run. Now, he had turned his head so he could offer one eye to the screen and the other to Carmichael’s almost tangible embarrassment. He wasn’t entirely sure which one was more entertaining.

Carmichael, avoiding eye contact with all of them, stared firmly at the snake plant in the corner and said:

“… I understand, that I may have been… not entirely correct, regarding this situation… and that...I-”

It was Viola cut who him off this time, “I, for one, do not have all night to listen to a false apology.”

Tanya crossed her arms and nodded in solidarity. Shane watched as John Lithgow pretended to be a human.

Carmichael clenched his jaw and winced as his fang shifted.

“I am sorry that I have been so… upset; while not looking for a solution, “he paused, “I was unaware that I had made things so… inhospitable in the apartment.”

The words tasted like slimy malic acid in his mouth, like biting into a rotted, bitter persimmon.

He hated apologizing, for anything really. Nine times out of ten he refused to do so. Most of the time he felt that there was no way he’d been in the wrong. He had been alive for three, four times as long as the rest of them. He had ten times the experience that they did, and he just knew more than the rest of them, surely.

Tanya said a quick “thank you,” and went back to her room to continue scouring the internet for any job that wasn’t at her parents’ store. She had grown weary of walking in every morning and being asked why she hadn’t found a husband and child the night before. Especially since the answer of: “because my girlfriend and I aren’t looking to kidnap or adopt,” had only brought more conflict and tension.

Viola nodded and walked back to her saucepan, stirring it twice before grabbing a cleaned-out spaghetti sauce jar from the cabinet above her. She set a thin piece of cheese cloth over the opening of the jar to catch the bits she didn’t want floating about, and poured in a deep coffee colored liquid. It smelled like cinnamon and oranges, but followed with the strong residue of bone marrow. After it had had time to settle, Viola would bundle the cloth together, tie a cord around, and let it steep for at least another two nights. Without looking up to the living room, she called out: “Be awake before 7 o’clock tomorrow night, and I’ll have someone come by to fill things out with you.”

Carmichael leaned forward to look into the kitchen. Viola was staring down into the jar, watching the liquid twist and turn. He thought it was glowing amber under her gaze. He sat there for a moment, wondering who it was that she knew that had access to fake legal documents and why it was that she knew them. He didn’t ask though; everyone knew better than to ask Viola anything. Viola knew what she knew, and she did what she did, and that was the end of it. She was filled with mystery that way. So even though Carmichael didn’t know who he was going to be meeting with, or how Viola was going to get them to meet with him, he did know two things:

To say thank you, and to be awake before 7 o’clock tomorrow night.

“So! Tell me how it was you cracked your tooth again?” The hygienist asked.

Carmichael cleared his throat, “I was eating a jawbreaker, and I guess when I went to swallow, it must’ve hit my tooth wrong.”

The hygienist looked at him with her gentle eyes and cocked her head to the side, as if to say, “it’s okay, you can tell me the truth. You were chewing on it, weren’t you?”

He didn’t trust it. He’d said his story, and he was sticking to it. A few seconds of tense, silent battle passed between them, before she accepted her loss and moved on.

“Well! My name is Kelly, and I have to say you’re lucky you found us tonight! A cracked tooth hurts like the dickens, and there aren’t many 24-hour dentist offices in the area,” she said with her obnoxiously cheerful voice. “Have you filled out all of your paperwork?”

Carmichael nodded; he had fudged the truth on quite a few details to get into that office. That night he met with mysterious Viola’s equally mysterious friend, he was able to leave with a new social security number, a new birthday (though he wasn’t a fan of the year), and even a license. After that, he was able to get on a cheap little dental insurance plan that was about ten dollars a month (which he felt ate too far into his candy budget). And once that was all settled, he managed to find a cheap little clinic that ran after dark.

“All right,” she said as she reclined the chair, “what I’m going to do is take a quick peek in your mouth, and then I’ll report what I see to Dr. Toney, and we can go from there!”

He leaned back against the cool plastic seat and felt the relief wash through his body. It had been almost a month and a half since he had cracked his fang on that damn jawbreaker. Finally, the pain would be over. Sure, they would ask questions about why his tooth was so long, but he already had answers prepared for it. He would just tell them that he had always had long canines, something about it running in the family. They wrote about it in his hometown paper, don’t you know? Then, they would put a glue or something on his tooth and then everything would go back to normal, except this time he would know better than to chew with his left fang.

She snapped her blue nitrile gloves on, got the tools together on her tray, then rolled her little stool over to him. With one fluid motion, she extended the lamp arm above him and flipped on the switch. It bathed him in an uncomfortable glow that felt eerily like sunshine, only without the warmth, or the burning sensation.

“Okay, so if you could open big and wide for me, I’m just going to take the little look!” She chirped in her happy, six cups of coffee fueled voice.

He took a deep breath and opened his mouth as wide as he could. It felt grotesque and oddly vulnerable. He ignored the way she clumsily finagled the mirror into his mouth, chocking it up to a lack of experience. He associated most things humans did to a lack of experience. Oh well, this would all soon be over.

Then, he heard a gasp.

His eyes flicked toward her, and he saw that the annoying cheer had faded out of her eyes, and a look of intense bewilderment had replaced it.

“Whas hwrong,” he mumbled around the tool in his mouth, “isih y tooh?”

Kelly didn’t say anything at all for a moment, she just kept staring down at him.

After a few painful seconds, she swallowed the big lump that had formed in her throat like an oddly placed bezoar, and managed to eek out a single “um.”

Um? Um, what? What was “um” supposed to mean? He assumed that she was about to bring up the “odd length” of his canine teeth, so he jumped to cut her off at the pass.

“ecause ih is aout y teeh, hey hah ahways een hong-”

“No um,” she blinked tight and swallowed again, “it’s just that um… I don’t see anything.”

Carmichael’s nose scrunched up and his eyebrows furrowed.

“whayou ean? Y tooh ih cacked. Oo cah see ih cearry?”

Kelly leaned back, her eyes never leaving the mirror in his mouth.

“No, you don’t understand. I just CAN’T see anything.”

Finally, it dawned on Carmichael just what it was Kelly was trying to say. Dread and frustration filled his stomach as she quickly pulled the metal tool out of his mouth. He sat up and watched as the blood drained from her face. Her hand shook as she gripped the mirror tightly in her fist. He chewed on the inside of his cheek as they stared each other down. Her eyes gaped wide like unblinking golf balls with tiny black dots drawn in the center.

Of course, Kelly hadn’t been able to see anything.

There had been no reflection when she looked into the mirror.