The Dentist’s Fetch

That winter, my mother’s ceramic studio smelled of wet clay and kiln ash, and my best friend’s mother, a sculptor named Rita, kept a human skull on her workbench for reference. Rita had gotten it from a retired dentist who’d used it to teach patients about oral hygiene—that was the story, anyway. The skull was yellowed, with a missing canine and a crack running from the temple to the jaw. It sat on a velvet pillow, mostly ignored, until the evening of the deep freeze.

I was twelve, and my friend Elena had invited four of us to her apartment above the Italian bakery. The building was old, with steam radiators that clicked and hissed, but her room faced the alley, and the draft seeped through the window frames. She had heavy wool curtains the color of oxblood, and we pulled them shut against the cold, turning the room into a cave. We lit candles—stubby ones from the kitchen—and played cards on the floor, the shadows of our hands flicking across the walls like spider legs.

It was Elena who remembered the skull. ‘Let’s play a game,’ she said, a glint in her eye. ‘We’ll pass it around and tell stories—scary ones. Whoever gets it last has to keep it until the next full moon.’ We all agreed, feeling brave. Elena fetched the skull from her mother’s studio, holding it by the cranium. The bone was cold, colder than the room, and it seemed to drink the candlelight.

We took turns, speaking in low voices. I told a tale about a bridge that collected teeth, and others shared their own inventions. But when the skull reached Leo, the friend before me, his story faltered. He claimed the skull’s jaw moved, a slight click, like a wind-up toy. We laughed nervously, but his hands shook as he passed it to me. As I took it, I felt a pulse—not mine, but a dull throb against my palm, as if the bone were hollow and filled with something alive.

I ignored it and started my story, about a dentist who extracted more than teeth. Midway, the candle nearest to us guttered and died, leaving a wisp of smoke. The room dimmed, and I noticed the skull’s eye sockets seemed darker, deeper, as if they held a liquid. I passed it quickly to the next person, but the damage was done. The game ended when Elena’s mother called us for dinner, and we left the skull on the floor beside the cards.

That night, I dreamed of a hallway lined with doors, each one ajar, and behind each door, a faceless figure holding a jar of teeth. I woke with a metallic taste in my mouth, as if I’d been chewing on foil. The next morning, I called Elena to apologize for my story, but she said the skull had disappeared from her room. Her mother blamed the cat, but the cat was old and arthritic, and the skull was heavy.

Three weeks passed. The cold snap broke, and we resumed our rituals. But strange things began to occur. Elena found tooth marks on her violin case, though no one in the family played. Leo, who had first claimed the jaw moved, started grinding his teeth at night until he cracked a molar. The rest of us experienced phantom pains in our gums, as if roots were being pulled.

Then, on a Friday evening, I was alone in my room, sketching a tree branch. A sound came from my closet—a soft, rhythmic click, like a metronome. I opened the door, and there it was: the skull, resting on a stack of old National Geographics. Its jaw hung slightly open, and inside the mouth was a single molar, pristine and white, lying on the tongue like an offering. I backed away, but my hand reached out (I couldn’t stop it) and picked up the tooth. It was warm, and it fit perfectly into the gap of my own molars.

I called a meeting with the others. We gathered in Elena’s room, the skull now back on its velvet pillow, but with a new crack running from the nose to the crown. I told them what I’d found, and Leo confessed he’d felt an urge to place a tooth—one he’d lost years ago—inside the skull’s jaw. We realized we were all connected to it, bound by a shared object that seemed to feed on our fear and teeth.

Desperate, we decided to return the skull to the dentist, but the address Rita had given was a vacant lot. The dentist had died ten years ago, and his practice had been closed. We considered burying it, but each time we tried, the skull reappeared the next day, sometimes in a different place—once in a kitchen cabinet, once in a school locker.

One night, I woke to find the skull on my pillow, its eye sockets glowing faintly, like embers. The glow pulsed, and I felt a tug in my jaw. I opened my mouth, and a tooth loosened, then dropped onto the bed. The skull’s jaw opened wider, and the tooth skittered across the pillow and vanished into its mouth. Then the glow faded. In the morning, I had a gap where my first molar had been, and the skull was smiling—if a skull can smile.

We are still carrying it. None of us can part with it for long, and if we try, we get headaches and a strange, hollow ache in our teeth. The skull has become our keeper, and we have become its collection. The dentist’s fetch, we call it now—a thing that comes when you remember it, and takes what it wants. I don’t know how it ends, only that we are all missing teeth now, and the skull seems heavier each time we hold it, as if counting its gains.