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Buckets of Teeth
7 May 2008 14:33The room was bare except for a yellow bucket of teeth in each corner. The kind of buckets you’d see kids using at the beach to build castles. A bare, humming light hung in the middle of the room like a lure.
That light was a miniature sun lighting up the inside of the dry concrete cube. It felt like a bunker in there. Stale. Beneath the light, there was a drain that hadn’t been used in what looked like decades.
No blood, no other liquids. The place was as dry as a texas lawn in August. Dust was thick in there but there were no foot prints.
All we had to go on was the teeth. Each yellow plastic bucket contained hundreds of gleaming teeth. They’d all been polished to a bright sheen.
There were animal fangs, human molars, baby teeth, and even a few short horns. No apparent order or specific age. There were teeth with the gold fillings still in them. There were teeth with the old metal fillings from when I was a kid. There were teeth with the new ceramic fillings and caps. There were little, tiny teeth that looked like they’d never had the chance to bite anything at all.
There were the tiny needles of kitten incisors, impotent snake fangs, a shaking of small, sharp teeth that must have come from city scavenging animals. Raccoons, maybe. It was hard to tell with no skulls to match the teeth up to. No beaks.
It would be tedious to separate the animal teeth from the human teeth but a few experts had been set aside to do just that. It would probably take a week. The hope was to find something exotic that would help us identify at least one set of teeth and ascertain if the owner was still alive, dead, or reported missing.
I had a bad feeling about the room. It was like the ordered museum of a non-human mind. It felt wrong and I felt watched. Some animal part of me was scared of the predator that I was sure was standing behind me, trying not to breathe on my neck.
Teeth. One of my strongest defenses in a fight. Plucked out and put in a pail. Why didn’t the killer stick to humans? I went through the ways that a person would have access to this many teeth without harming the owners and I wasn’t coming up with much.
Maybe a taxidermist that lived close to a mortician? Why were the expensive gold fillings still in the teeth? I clenched my jaw, suddenly conscious of all the chewing surfaces in my mouth and how they all fit together.
I felt like I was looking at buckets of car parts.
I had a feeling this mystery was going to get worse before it got better.
tags
That light was a miniature sun lighting up the inside of the dry concrete cube. It felt like a bunker in there. Stale. Beneath the light, there was a drain that hadn’t been used in what looked like decades.
No blood, no other liquids. The place was as dry as a texas lawn in August. Dust was thick in there but there were no foot prints.
All we had to go on was the teeth. Each yellow plastic bucket contained hundreds of gleaming teeth. They’d all been polished to a bright sheen.
There were animal fangs, human molars, baby teeth, and even a few short horns. No apparent order or specific age. There were teeth with the gold fillings still in them. There were teeth with the old metal fillings from when I was a kid. There were teeth with the new ceramic fillings and caps. There were little, tiny teeth that looked like they’d never had the chance to bite anything at all.
There were the tiny needles of kitten incisors, impotent snake fangs, a shaking of small, sharp teeth that must have come from city scavenging animals. Raccoons, maybe. It was hard to tell with no skulls to match the teeth up to. No beaks.
It would be tedious to separate the animal teeth from the human teeth but a few experts had been set aside to do just that. It would probably take a week. The hope was to find something exotic that would help us identify at least one set of teeth and ascertain if the owner was still alive, dead, or reported missing.
I had a bad feeling about the room. It was like the ordered museum of a non-human mind. It felt wrong and I felt watched. Some animal part of me was scared of the predator that I was sure was standing behind me, trying not to breathe on my neck.
Teeth. One of my strongest defenses in a fight. Plucked out and put in a pail. Why didn’t the killer stick to humans? I went through the ways that a person would have access to this many teeth without harming the owners and I wasn’t coming up with much.
Maybe a taxidermist that lived close to a mortician? Why were the expensive gold fillings still in the teeth? I clenched my jaw, suddenly conscious of all the chewing surfaces in my mouth and how they all fit together.
I felt like I was looking at buckets of car parts.
I had a feeling this mystery was going to get worse before it got better.
tags