Possible Histories of a Found Object
I found the tooth lodged in the space between the toilet and the wall, in a place I’d never look unless I was cleaning, which I was that morning, on my knees with a sponge and a multi surface antibacterial spray. Kitchen surfaces, it said on the bottle, but I hoped the bathroom floor counted because that spray was all I had to work with on my first Saturday cleaning after unpacking in a new apartment.
The gold tooth was actually brown from how it had dulled out of a mouth and ended up, God knows why, on the floor near the porcelain slope at the base of the toilet bowl. At first, I thought it was a baby june bug’s exoskeleton. Then, a piece of rotten corn. I picked it up with rubber gloves, ran it under the water and polished it with a face towel until it shined: a golden molar. Victor Hugo’s Thenardiers combed through corpses after Waterloo to find these and sell them. They sat among the dead and yanked these out with pliers and hammers. That’s what I thought of as I tossed the polishing towel into the hamper.
I placed the tooth in a small box that held the charm bracelet my mother bought me one Christmas, when I was seventeen. For a moment I set the molar against the silver chain, beneath the tiny crossed Bible and the theater masks. I considered finding a way to loop the tooth among the charms and wear it, explaining to those who asked: here is the Bible I no longer read and the stage I no longer grace and the tooth I found behind the toilet bowl. That dulled misfit sat delicately among the silver charms in the bed of cotton of this black glossy gift box. I returned the cover and moved on with my day.
The sick reality of the object (and by that I mean: the fact that it had been in somebody’s mouth) mostly eluded me. I was more concerned with the experience of the tooth itself, how much it had witnessed: vocal cord vibrations, carrot mush and potato chips, violent shoves of floss, countless waves of saliva. Of course, all those gusts of hot breath. Then again, I pictured how the Thenardiers combed through revolutionaries’ corpses for their bounty.
I knew nothing of the person who lived there before me, how they could have taken this tooth from the mouth of a corpse in that very bathroom where, daily, I would make myself vulnerable. It probably came from the mouth of the adult who had preceded paying my rent. Or maybe that renter had taken it from somebody else’s mouth. This opened up the possibility that it was a haunted object, depending on how the tooth had been extracted. Perhaps, in that very bathroom, the renter had socked the tooth’s owner in the jaw. Maybe the socked person spit out their golden molar and missed the toilet. But why did the renter sock them in the first place? Did they cheat on the renter? Did they call the renter a cunt?
The tooth remains in the box, next to the charm bracelet, waiting, perhaps, for another artifact. I’ll add it to collection of these useless and neglected objects. Maybe I could leave them behind for the next renter to discover and guess about. Maybe, after guessing, they would understand something about me. Like, why I ever would hold onto these things I don’t use, or what they could possibly mean to me.
Nora Bonner is a fiction writer and writing instructor from Detroit, Michigan. Her stories have appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies, including Shenandoah, Quarterly West, Juked, the Indiana Review, the North American Review, Hobart, and the Best American Non-Required Reading. She recently earned a PhD in Creative Writing from Georgia State University. When she’s not writing, she serves as a program coordinator for the Chillon Project at Lee Arrendale State Prison in Alto, Georgia, where she also teaches writing and literature.