CONTENTS

Open Wide

Author’s Note

Copyright Notice

Acknowledgements & About the Author

Tell me what you thought

Special sneak peek of GAMELAND

a new high tech thriller series

‡   ‡   ‡

Open Wide

by Saul Tanpepper

Open Wide

by Saul Tanpepper

Copyright © 2012 by Saul Tanpepper

All rights reserved.

Published July 2, 2012 by Brinestone Press, San Martin, CA 95046

(1st published Dec 11, 2011 in Shorting the Undead and Other Horrors)

Cover design Brinestone Press Copyright © 2012

Photo of girl by Andreas Gradin (fotolia)

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

LICENSE NOTES

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

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Tanpepper, Saul (2012-07-02). Open Wide

Brinestone Press Kindle Edition

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OPEN WIDE

I remember the day the two of them hooked up, Kerry Anne and Dean. The day we all graduated. I remember the relief I’d felt knowing that she’d turned her attention onto someone else. A terrible weight had finally been lifted from my shoulders. Now that weight was Dean’s to bear. Well, good riddance, and all that. Problem was, despite everything that had happened, I still wanted her.

Badly.

The thought had entered my mind that maybe I should warn Dean about her. After all, he’d once been a friend of mine, back in the day, back before either of us had ever met Kerry Anne and had entertained thoughts of what it would be like to be with a girl like her. But by then we hated each other’s guts. In my opinion, he was lower than low: he was sewage. So the urge passed without me ever acting on it.

Not a day passes now that I don’t stop and wonder how differently things might’ve turned out if I had. For one thing, I wouldn’t be sitting here sipping weak chicken broth instead of slicing into a nice juicy steak.

Our falling out—Dean’s and mine—had nothing to do with our natural tendency to compete against each other. Or maybe it had everything to do with it, I don’t know; it’s not worth trying to understand now. As buddies, we’d always tried to best the other in anything we did. Didn’t matter if it was athletics or academics or anything else, one of us always had to win and the other had to lose. But rather than getting in the way of our friendship, our competitiveness strengthened it. If you considered the sum of our talents, we were pretty evenly split: sports was my forte, academics Dean’s. He was much more social than I ever was, but I was the better looking. We acknowledged these differences, embraced them, reflected on them. We celebrated each other’s victories as much as our own and lamented the losses as one.

But when it came to girls…

Well, let’s just say that, for the first time in our young lives, we’d discovered that we couldn’t agree on which rules to play by. It was that inability to see eye-to-eye that fractured our friendship. Kerry Anne was the wedge between us, as well as the hammer that pounded it in.

We both became aware of her at the same time, way back in the ninth grade. I don’t know if she was new to the school that year or had always there and we just never noticed her before that. The subject never came up in the course of any of the conversations I had with her. There had already been a few minor tiffs between me and Dean, since we were both dating by then. Sometimes I got to a girl before he did; sometimes I got his rebounds. It was through these hand-me-down relationships that we discovered the truth about each other: he learned that I was claiming things that had never happened, and I learned that he was denying things that had.

Somewhere during our junior year is where things started getting a lot more complicated. It’s when our competitiveness stopped being about friendship, and instead became fueled by our growing distaste for one another. We undermined the other by making public accusations of lying and cheating and exaggeration. When it came to sexual conquests—or claims of conquest—Dean would do anything to win, and I would do anything not to lose.

I don’t think any of these things was a conscious strategy on our part—his or mine—we just turned out the way we did, which is to say different from each other. Not that he was necessarily evil or I was necessarily honorable. I just wasn’t very good at being bad, and Dean wasn’t very good at being good.

Then came Kerry Anne into the picture. I don’t remember who was the first to notice her, but as soon as one of us did, so did the other. It was inevitable that she became our next trophy. Problem was, Kerry Anne was nothing like any of the girls either of us had ever met before. She was this perfect little angel who apparently rarely ever dated. And when she did, she never put out. We knew this going in, but rather than discouraging us, it made us want her even more. Each made it his personal crusade to win her; at some point she stopped being just a trophy and instead became our Holy Grail. Three years later, in the fall of our senior year, I won.

Or so I thought at the time.

Nowadays, I’m not even so sure it was ever as simple as winning and losing.

The details of Kerry Anne’s and my short relationship aren’t that important. Nothing much happened, though not for lack of wanting it to happen. I was awkward when it came to being physical, which explains the exaggerations. Anyway, what’s important is that after we split up, Dean swooped in. It was the usual modus operandi, so I shouldn’t have been surprised. Like a blood-sucking mosquito to the purest of light.

That’s not a judgment, just a statement of fact.

I’m sure he believed he could succeed where I had failed—and damn if I hadn’t failed in the most publicly and humiliating way possible. Which is partially why I didn’t give a second thought to warning him: what had happened to me should’ve been warning enough to all the boys in school, but especially Dean, who knew the truth about me.

Besides, it wasn’t like I didn’t have my own problems to deal with by then.

I just want to make one thing clear from the get-go: I tried, clumsily, and that was my downfall, but I never—never—did what was later claimed. Kerry Anne was as incorruptible, as unwavering in her chastity, pure as the driven snow. She still was after we broke up.

Did I worry about what Dean might try to do to her? As depraved as he could be, I knew he couldn’t hold a candle to Kerry Anne’s virtue. I expected nothing less to come out of his relationship with her than what had come out of my own. In fact, I even hoped it.

†   †   †

I tried to forget about them after high school, as if that were even possible. Nothing would have made me happier than to have that part of my life surgically removed from the old memory banks. For a while, I thought I’d been successful.

After kicking around for a little bit in Edgemont, I packed up and moved away. Not too far, just an hour’s drive up State Route Seventeen over to Stepford. My parents were ailing, so I wanted to be close enough by to keep an eye on them, yet far enough away that I’d never have to accidentally run into anyone I knew. It would’ve been too awkward, thinking I’d have to explain myself yet again. Moving away was a conscious decision on my part to put it all behind me.

I got a job working at one of those home improvement warehouses, stocking at first, then as a sales associate in the bath section, finally as a manager. I liked the hours; I liked the work. I didn’t even mind talking to all the weekend warriors going gung-ho on their do-it-yourself projects. Personally, I’d never been inspired to tackle anything more complicated than painting. After high school I became horrible with my hands. They shake uncontrollably at times. I say it’s why I could never be a brain surgeon, but the truth is, I was never that smart.

I bought a small two-bedroom house on the north side of town, a couple blocks on the right bank of the river. Not the rich side, but not the poor side, either. It was a perfectly average-looking house in a perfectly average-looking neighborhood, modest and comfortable and totally forgettable. I had a vegetable garden in the back—everyone did—which I managed somehow to kill every year. Beans and tomatoes and squash. Oh my.

Turns out I wasn’t the only one with a black thumb in that neighborhood. Maybe there was something in the soil.

Anyway, I couldn’t grow a goddamn thing to save my life. I laugh about it now, all that time and money spent on the stupid thing. Nothing grew—well, except for asparagus. Once they start growing, you can’t kill the fuh…freaking things.

The house was blue when I bought it. Baby blue or—what the hell’s it called, powder blue? Cerulean blue? Anyway, I painted it white—took three coats because I stubbornly refused to prime it first—and trimmed it in pine green. I tended my yard and trees, which were mostly scraggly maple, front and back, but also the one gnarled cherry tree that looked to be about as old as Methuselah and probably was. It was the biggest thing alive in those parts, but you could never eat the cherries as they were rotten before they were ripe. I put out my garbage every Thursday, cleaned my gutters twice a year. Collected my mail and never let the newspaper sit in the driveway for more than a day and a half.

I wasn’t into show is what I’m trying to say. I’d had enough of that scene.

Some people are all about show. I mean, chrissakes, more than half the people you see going into the Depot with their sparkling new Hummers and Escalades ooze the kind of pretense that just makes you want to puke. You can just guess that they’re in over their heads in debt, underwater on their mortgages, drowning in past-due notices. It’s not a judgment, it’s a statement of fact. I could hear it in their voices when they came in asking about heated toilet seats. They’d want to look at the big, expensive porcelain thrones, the ones with the bidets and multiple flush settings. Who in the hell needs a toilet that washes your ass for you and puffs warm air on it to dry? Hell in a hand basket, I say. That’s where we’re going as a society when you expect some machine to wipe your ass for you.

But, of course, they’d eventually talk themselves down from that six grand toilet and drift over to the much more modest, much more affordable, two-hundred-dollar models without all the bells and whistles. I could see it in their eyes as they’d load it up into the back of their SUVs: the shame; the fear that someone they knew might see them with this crappy crapper that they’d bought, as if it made them somehow less respectable. It’s a goddamn toilet, folks. You shit in it, not make love. Or coffee. I don’t know, maybe some people make love on the toilet. Who am I to judge? Chrissake is all I’m saying.

I wasn’t anything like that. Modesty was the name of the game for me. Oh, I kept myself busy with small projects, things I could handle myself. I had a nice little pickup truck—cream-colored—which I bought used. The big projects, like remodeling the back bathroom or replacing the carpet in the living room? I let someone else do that. Like I said, I’m not into the whole D.I.Y. thing. I’m sure I could learn how to do things like that myself, but why bother?

I could go on forever living that way. But, you know, forever is a long fuck…freaking time, ain’t it? And things somehow always end up going into the crapper if you wait long enough, don’t they? Excuse the toilet language. Pun intended, of course. Ha ha. I still get a little worked up about things like that.

My twelfth year in the house, that’s when the bubble burst. I’d just re-fied, too. Even took some equity out to buy myself a few grown-up toys—a boat, sixty-two-inch plasma TV—and to completely landscape the backyard. I’d decided it was finally time to stop punishing myself and to start living again.

The ground where the new sod was supposed to go had just been dug up when the economy took a dump. The market tumbled so far so fast that it made Humpty Dumpty’s fatal fall look like a playful romp in a jump house. Ten times worse than the Great Recession that happened when I was in school, back in the decade after the turn of the century.

In weeks, my property lost half its value; the bleeding slowed, eventually, but it never stopped. It was like—blink—suddenly I was up to my neck in debt.

I held on, though, if you can believe that. Wasn’t easy. Things were tight. For about four more years I held on. I had the rest of the equity money—not much, but some—plus some savings. And the folks tried to help out. They died a couple years ago still owing on their own house, right around the time the bank started sending me notices on mine. Fourteen months they sent them damn notices; fourteen months I ignored them. What else could I do?

I ignored the foreclosure notices, too.

Then I got a thirty-day eviction notice. By then I was a pro at denying reality. I came home from work one day to find the locks had been changed.

I think it was in that moment more than any other that preceded it—more even than what happened between me and Kerry Anne and my parents dying broke and brokenhearted—that did it for me. As I stood there on the front porch of my nice little white and green house that now belonged to some giant multinational bank, I realized that no matter how much you try to play by the rules, sometimes the game you’re playing requires a different set of them.

But that’s not what this story is about. It’s not even about good things going bad.

It’s about good things going utterly to hell.

Things hadn’t quite gotten to that point for me yet, though they were quickly heading in that direction. I still had my truck and my job. In other words, a place to sleep and a way to make a living so that I could buy the necessities. But then I lost the latter soon afterward. Customers started complaining about me. All misunderstandings. I think what happened was someone found out about me and the crap hand I’d been dealt back in high school, and pretty soon word got around.

Despite what I may have said happened back when we were dating, it didn’t. And despite Kerry Anne twisting it around, she was still as unsullied as the day I first met her. I just want to make that clear.

There had been an investigation, naturally. Appearances and all that crap. I was one of those high profile personalities during my senior year, captain of the football team—the Amazing Number Four, as my teammates called me—an all-star quarterback with NFL prospects, even though I was still only seventeen. So much talent and potential that college scouts had my cell phone number programmed into their speed dial by the time I was in my junior varsity year. Half my social media contacts were in one way or another connected to college or pro sports organizations or commercial sponsors.

I denied the allegations, denied my own claims. Didn’t make for a very reliable defendant, did it? People chose to believe Kerry Anne, who’d stuck to one version of the story and never wavered from it. Did I mention she had a reputation as an angel? It served her well.

At first I was benched from practice, from games. I knew it was going to happen, so it didn’t come as any surprise. Can’t have the star quarterback playing under a cloud of suspicion, right? Doesn’t look good for the school.

I was, however, totally blindsided when they yanked me off the squad. Then they arrested me. Suddenly everyone was against me. I was tried and convicted by the only court that means anything anymore: the internet. People I once thought were my friends posted lies about me. I was essentially guilty before proven innocent.

I probably would’ve been convicted by the law courts, too, if my parents hadn’t stepped in and agreed to settle at the last possible moment. Damn near killed them, the trial, the vitriol people expressed at us out in public. Actually, it did kill Mom and Dad, it just took their bodies a few years to catch on.

I tried going back to playing ball afterward, I really did. And there was no reason the school could come up with to deny me. But my heart wasn’t in it. My game was off. All too quickly, the scouts stopped calling, stopped taking my calls.

Winter came and went. Then spring. Then we graduated. That’s when Kerry Anne hooked up with Dean and I finally felt like I could get on with my life.

I should have warned him.

After getting fired, I was able to scrape together a few odd jobs, enough to provide me with food and gas to keep me from starving to death and freezing on the coldest of nights. Two of those months were the coldest on record, if you can believe that after all the global warming we’ve been having. The heater finally crapped out one night with the thermometer frozen in the teens below zero. My earlobes got frostbite. They still itch like hell sometimes, though not as much as my bottom gums do. I bought a little Sterno stove and set it up on the floor of the passenger side to warm up the cab. Nearly asphyxiated myself. Not very bright, eh? If the plastic over the broken window hadn’t blown in, I guess I would’ve died. The irony of it is, I probably owe it to some asshole juvenile delinquent for smashing it in the first place thinking he might find something worth hocking for coke money.

After I got out of the hospital, I finally broke down and went to one of those shelters. You can talk about pride and shit all you want, but for me those things had long since gone out the broken window. All I had left was my name, and even that wasn’t worth a hunk of moldy bread.

So you can imagine my surprise when I ran into Dean there, at the shelter. And he wasn’t down on his luck, either. He was actually helping out. Here was a guy I’d thought was a scourge on the world, unredeemable, a stain on humanity. And he’s doing charity work, for freaking chrissake! It just about blew my mind. But that wasn’t the half of it.

“It was Kerry Anne,” he said. “Remember her?”

He must’ve misinterpreted the blank stare I gave him. I mean, I’d tried to forget her—tried to forget them—right? But how do you forget the worst thing to ever happen to you and the person responsible for it?

“From high school?” he added, unhelpfully.

I gave him an impatient wave. “So she converted you, eh?”

He laughed and nodded. “Made me see my faults.”

I almost laughed with him. The old Dean, who never gave a shit about anyone, serving soup to lowlifes. It was perfect. I mean, sure, I hated that I was one of those lowlifes, but there was something so…so karmic about the whole thing. The guy who used to be able to talk his way out of doing anything for anyone else had been reduced to this. Even the slight lisp he’d picked up was perfect.

I didn’t try to stop the bitterness from filling me. I felt like I was entitled.

“We’re still married,” he added.

I think my jaw must’ve fallen about forty stories.

“You and Kerry?” I said, incredulous. “Happily married?” I couldn’t see it. I didn’t want to see it.

“Like I said, she showed me the error of my ways.”

He told me he worked a few days a week at the juvy center helping out troubled youths, showing them how to fix cars. I told him I thought he’d gone on to law school—just a bit of news I’d caught in the wind some years after graduation, on one of my trips back to see my folks—and he shrugged and said that he had. He’d even opened up his own law practice. “We do a lot of pro bono work.”

I didn’t know what to make of that. This wasn’t the same Dean I’d known and hated for all these. And I wanted to still hate him, but I found it wasn’t so easy anymore, even when I took into account that he’d apparently succeeded with Kerry Anne, whereas I hadn’t. I say apparently because I could see it in his eyes, something suspicious, something forced. And looking around then, I could tell that he felt out of place there at the shelter, despite all his do-good talk. It wasn’t in-your-face obvious, but I could tell that the other helpers avoided him.

“Children?” I asked.

He seemed startled, then quickly dismissed it with a shake of his head, saying, “We can’t.” And I knew this was a sensitive subject for him. Maybe he was impotent or maybe Kerry Anne was infertile. Either way, it wasn’t a subject to joke about, even given the unusual circumstances we found ourselves in.

“We manage,” he continued, “Ker and I. It’s tough sometimes, you know. This charity work doesn’t pay the bill collectors, of course, but it has to be done.”

“What?” I said. I’d been drifting.

“We all have debts to pay, right?”

I hesitated, then nodded. Was he referring to my own troubles years back? Was he saying I hadn’t paid them in full?

“God knows I have debts to pay,” he murmured, almost to himself.

He looked up suddenly and his own demeanor changed, brightened. “So, what are you doing here, Kurt? I thought you went off to play football or something in college. I figured you’d be playing pro by now. You have to excuse me, but I don’t follow sports. Kerry Anne, you know. She was never much into that.”

“You never had much aptitude for it, either,” I said, and we both laughed. It felt familiar and good.

I told him what I’d been doing for the past fifteen years. I told him everything, actually. I don’t know why. Maybe I was lonely and nostalgic for the old friendship. Maybe I’d picked up something in the way he spoke or sat, a clue that things weren’t exactly as he presented them. Anyway, it all just spilled out of me, like a disease I needed to be cleansed of. Or maybe it was hope. Seeing him was like a revelation that even the worst of us can still somehow find a way to make it to the light, to do good and all that crap.

I confessed that I’d never expected him and Kerry Anne to last. I even told him I felt a little jealous. By then, of course, the renewed connection had dulled my anger—not all of it, but enough so that it no longer controlled me. All that was left was mostly this sense of remorse, of missed opportunities.

“I admit, Kurt,” he said, breathing deeply, “it hasn’t been easy. You know what I was like back then.” I nodded. “First thing Kerry Anne told me when we started seeing each other was that I would have to change.” He clicked his teeth—another annoying little nervous habit he seemed to have picked up. “In fact, she made it a condition.”

“Made what a condition?”

But he didn’t answer. “You got a raw deal, Kurt. I’m sorry about that.”

“So, she told you what happened? The whole thing? The truth?” And when he nodded I felt myself get angry all over again. I mean, I’d suspected he knew, but here he was admitting it himself. “So you knew it was all a lie! Why didn’t you say something at the time?”

“Would you have?”

I snapped my mouth closed.

He shrugged. “Besides, Kurt, it was all settled. I thought you’d be…I thought you’d recover. You always did.”

I chewed on that for a moment. The past is the past, I told myself. But I couldn’t keep the spite from my voice. “So she threatened to—what?—ruin you if you so much as tried anything with her?”

He looked away, then back. He started to laugh.

After a moment, I began to laugh, too. I said, “Well, you turned out all right, so that counts for something. Good old Kerry Anne.”

“Yeah, good old Kerry Anne.”

“I’m glad for you both.”

“Listen,” he told me, and I knew by the way he said it that he was wanting to change the subject. “Why don’t you bring your car by? I’ll have the kids fix it right up, free of charge.”

“You’d do that? No hard feelings? I mean, after what happened between us and Kerry Anne and…”

He laid a hand on my shoulder and said, “It’s in the past, man. And I’m sure Kerry Anne wouldn’t forgive me for not offering.”

I could see that. So it really wasn’t Dean making the offer, it was Kerry Anne. And that’s when I knew: he was afraid of her! But then he surprised me by giving me twenty bucks out of his own pocket. “For gas,” he said. “And…whatever.” And I knew that was at least from him, and I was touched by the gesture. I promised I would come back.

“I’ll share another bowl with you before I have to go,” he said, urging a second helping of soup into my hands. We sat together in silence, he half-heartedly sipping his broth while I chewed on the stringy bits of chicken. Neither of us said anything. Each of us was lost in his own thoughts.

Before we were done, he got a call on his cell, and I could tell by the look on his face, even before he’d pulled the phone out of his pocket, that it was Kerry Anne.

“I gotta take this, Kurt. Sit tight; I’ll be right back.”

He hurried off to one side of the shelter, far enough away that I could hear his voice but not make out any of the words. He glanced over once or twice before finishing the call and returning.

“That was—”

“Kerry Anne,” I said, once more unable to keep the bitterness from my voice. “Yeah, I figured. Did you tell her I said hi?”

He took a deep breath and shrugged. “Listen, before I go…” He mumbled something and I had to ask him to repeat it. “It’s your breath, Kurt.” He was obviously embarrassed to bring it up, probably as embarrassed as I was hearing how bad he thought it was. I knew it was bad, but you never want to hear those kinds of things out loud, not from friends or former friends; not even from former enemies. Strangers can criticize you and it usually won’t mean shit, but when it’s someone you shared a big part of your life with, then…

“When’s the last time you brushed?”

I told him toothpaste was a luxury I couldn’t afford.

He reached into his wallet, and for a second I thought he was going to hand me another twenty. Instead, he pulled out a small rectangle of paper. “Here’s the number to my dentist.”

I glanced quickly at it—KM DENTISTRY, LLC—before stuffing it into my back pocket.

“They take a lot of charity cases.” Except he didn’t use the word charity. He called it civic service, but I could tell he meant charity. “They’re just around the corner, in the Carcher Building. At least let them take a look inside. Let them do a cleaning. They’ll tell you if there are any problems you need to have fixed.”

I was pretty sure there wouldn’t be any problems and said so. I’d always had really good teeth, healthy gums, never any cavities. The bad breath was just because I hadn’t brushed in a while. Hadn’t been eating very well, either, if we’re being totally honest about it.

He had to have heard the irritation in my voice, but he ignored it. He patted me on the shoulder, gave me a wink, and told me to go and get the cleaning. After he left, I almost felt like crying.

I stayed a few nights at the shelter and left when the weather warmed up again, but I didn’t cross paths with Dean after that. To be honest, I was glad about it. Something about seeing him, talking with him, had made me uncomfortable. The more I reflected on it, the stronger the feeling grew.

After I returned to my truck, I spent those twenty dollars on food and, I’m ashamed to say, a bottle of cheap whiskey. The money got me enough ramen and cheese to last a couple weeks. I collected spring rainwater in the tarp spread out across the bed of the truck, used it to boil the noodles for soup, chased it with the alcohol, which did a fair job of also keeping me warm.

I probably never would have taken Dean up on his suggestion of seeing the dentist if I hadn’t bitten down on a piece of gravel and chipped a molar. After the initial pain, the thing seemed fine, except when I drank something cold or hot. After a few days though, it started feeling like someone was digging around inside my mouth with a blowtorch. It was this constant ache, night and day, and I finally had to concede that it was something I could no longer ignore.

Even so, I held off calling the number on that card. The idea of accepting that kind of charity seemed somehow indecent. It wasn’t like getting a bowl of soup when you were so hungry that your hands would shake like aspen leaves in a wind storm and your shoes were practically falling off your feet from being so loose. I’d always thought of dental work as one of those optional healthcare benefits, probably because I’d never had problems with my teeth before.

But that wasn’t the only reason I’d resisted taking Dean’s offer. That weird uneasy feeling I’d had since seeing him that day at the shelter? Well, it stuck to me like a bad odor coming from the bottom of my shoe, and it seemed to get worse whenever I thought about seeing the dentist. I couldn’t put my finger on it exactly, but deep down I knew something wasn’t quite right. Call it a gut instinct. Call it the old competitive distrust coming back. Call it shame or embarrassment or even spite. But whatever it was, the pain finally got to the point where none of it mattered anymore. Besides, it wasn’t like I had pressing engagements to attend to elsewhere.

I stopped first at the soup kitchen, hoping to find Dean there. I wanted to ask him some questions, which I should’ve the first time, but I was told he hadn’t been there in a couple weeks. Maybe if he had been, things would have turned out differently. For me, anyway. I don’t know. Him? I think I knew that ship had already sailed.

Anyway, I soon found myself standing in the lobby of the Carcher Building, all glass and steel around me and the fragrant aroma of fresh baked sweets drifting out from the coffee shop. My stomach was empty, growling bitterly at the cruelty of it; my chipped molar throbbed so badly that I couldn’t even swallow the soup I’d been offered just an hour earlier.

I found KM DENTISTRY, LLC on the directory and proceeded up to the fourth floor.

When the elevator doors opened, I was so shocked at how nice the place was that at first I thought I had gotten off on the wrong floor. Then I started to wonder how a place like this could do so well taking charity cases. I must’ve had the wrong dental office. But the receptionist—Mary, I think her name was, or Mindy—was real nice and she told me they’d been expecting me. I don’t know how they could have, but I brushed it out of my mind, figuring it for something they said to set people’s minds at ease, people like me. She said they could fit me in right then if I had the time.

If I had the time? I had all the time in the world, and a tooth that was threatening to cut it short if I had to wait much longer.

I suppose if she’d made the appointment for later in the week, or even later that same day, I might’ve chickened out and never gone back. Maybe. There were ways to get painkillers on the street. I’d never resorted to them, but it’s like I said: things were quickly going from bad to worse, and I strongly suspected hell was just over the horizon.

I often think about all that as I sit here warming my hands on my bowl of soup I shouldn’t complain. At least I can enjoy the measly bits of meat in it.

As it was, I didn’t even have a chance to think twice before they were ushering me into a seat in the back office, one of those flashy nice examination rooms with the ultraclean, starkly bright, stainless steel equipment. They started right in with taking my x-rays.

I was told to relax while the doctor—that’s what they called the dentist, which seemed a bit pretentious—took a look at the pictures.

So I was lying there with this twenty pound lead vest on me because they’d forgotten to take it off and admiring this nice poster taped to the ceiling—a basketful of kittens spilling out of it—when I heard the door open and someone come in.

There was the usual sound of shuffling of papers, then: “Kurt?” I stretched my neck back to see, but the owner of that voice was standing just out of my line of sight. “Kurt Harris, is that you? Son of a gun, it really is you!”

She was dressed in a white lab coat, and even though she was wearing a blue surgical mask, I didn’t need to see her face to recognize her.

“Kerry Anne.”

Truth be told, I wasn’t really all that surprised. KM Dentistry. Kerry Anne’s last name had been Malvern. Deep down I’d already figured it out, and so that would explain the uneasiness I’d been feeling the past few weeks. As far as being ashamed that she was seeing me like this, there was a little of that. But, Dean would’ve told her about me being down on my luck; showing up didn’t do anything but prove what she already would have known.

I did, however, derive some pleasure knowing she hadn’t taken Dean’s name when they’d married.

“So, you’re a dentist now?” I said. Duh.

She smiled forgivingly. “I saw the name on the file, Kurt, but I didn’t, you know, make the connection until I saw you. I see so many cases a day that I sometimes just go on autopilot after a while.”

“Dean didn’t tell you I’d be coming in?”

Her face tightened, but didn’t answer. Instead, she wiggled a pair of fingers at the top of her head, changing the subject. “You’re…”

“Yeah,” I said, “I got my father’s baldness.”

She immediately winced. She must’ve realized bringing my parents up would cause some resentment on my part. I’d forgiven her years ago, but she wouldn’t know that. “Sorry to hear about them,” she mumbled. “They didn’t…”

Deserve it?

No, I didn’t either, but I didn’t say what I was thinking.

I had every reason to be bitter, but for some reason I can’t explain, seeing her, just being in her presence, made me forget it. Maybe it was the genuine warmth in her smile, at least what I could see of it in her eyes.

“I went back to the shelter this morning,” I said, “but they told me Dean hadn’t been there in a while.”

She stopped, and the temperature in the room seemed to drop a few degrees.

“He…sometimes forgets.”

It seemed like a strange thing to say, and I sensed that there were issues between them that Dean hadn’t stated outright when we’d talked. I had, nevertheless, picked up on them, and now I was convinced I was right. Not everything was as primrose perfect in their little world as Dean had made it seem.

She excused herself and moved out of sight for a moment. I could hear her behind me, collecting instruments, washing her hands. When she returned it was minus the lab coat and suddenly, despite all my defenses, despite whatever bitterness I should’ve held for her all these years, I found myself falling for her once again. I wanted her. Dear god, I wanted her badly.

Was I crazy to think such a thing?

She was still very attractive. Maybe even more than when I’d last seen her. And this wasn’t just because I was seeing her through the eyes of a man who no longer possessed any hope or prospects or dignity, but as a man who had finally grown out of his uncontrolled teenage passions and awkwardness. I could now appreciate beauty with an objective eye, as something to be admired. Kerry Anne had grown into a beautiful woman.

Back in high school she’d had this impenetrable aura of girlish innocence about her. She had been attractive back then, but she’d dressed plainly, wasn’t flashy. All that was gone now. Now she exuded sensuality. Her thin white blouse stretched tight across her breasts, and in that chilly, air conditioned room, there was no doubt in my mind that there was anything innocent about her anymore.

She turned her back for a brief moment. I admired.

Stop, I scolded myself. I told myself to behave, to stop looking. The last place I needed to go with Kerry Anne was the one place that had torn my life apart the first time. And yet, there was this deep-seeded urge to—

What? Win her back?

She tugged her mask down over her chin, shaking her head but smiling. The pleasure there was genuine, if not a little wistful. Was that remorse I sensed, regret at how things had turned out between us? Maybe if we’d known each other years later than we did, had waited, then everything would’ve been…better.

Maybe if Dean had been the one to win her years before, he’d be the one sitting in this chair and I’d be the one married to her now.

“You’re looking a bit scraggly,” she said. She touched the stubble on my cheek, sending a rush of white hot mercury flowing through my veins. I closed my eyes for a moment, then snapped them open again. I didn’t want her to see the effect she was having on me.

She leaned over me to adjust the light and whatever grip I had on rational thought was immediately defeated, swamped by the rush of my desire for her. Had it been lying inside of me, dormant all these years? Is that why I had moved away from Edgemont, to bury it? Had I come back hoping to see it resurrected?

Had I bitten down on that stone on purpose?

Of course not.

Still…

Her teeth were dazzlingly white, like fresh fallen snow, and her eyes held such warmth that they could’ve melted arctic ice. I wondered distractedly who did her teeth for her—obviously not herself—and that thought reminded me of the old riddle about the town with the two barbers, one with the crappy haircut and the messy shop, and the other barber with the nice cut with the sparkling clean shop, and who would you pick to go to if you needed a cut? Obviously, you’d pick the one with the messy shop.

And there I was wondering if Kerry Anne was a crappy dentist because she had such perfect teeth—somewhere inside my head, there came a bray of laughter at the preposterousness of such a conclusion—when she said, “You were always the most handsome boy in school. You’re still handsome, underneath all that.”

Was she toying with me? Or was it just her typical bedside manner? Bedside? I wanted her in bed, not beside it. I wanted her luscious lips, the reddest I’d seen in a long time, on my mouth. I wanted to touch her perfect skin. I wanted to peel away that spotless white blouse.

Once more I became aware of my own sad state, my poor, dirty clothes, my rankness. I sighed dejectedly. “You’re not so bad looking yourself,” I said, laughing perhaps a bit too loudly.

“Behave, Kurt.”

But she was laughing, too. And suddenly I felt myself relax.

I’d long ago come to terms with the fact that I’d made mistakes in high school. I’d paid my dues, maybe even more than my dues. But the world gives you a pass on some things even as it makes it up on others. Maybe she’d realized over the years that she’d made some mistakes herself. Maybe she was trying to make up for them now. We’d both been foolish children back then, naïve, meddling in affairs we had no business in.

And here I was, letting myself get ever closer to that dangerous precipice once again.

Was I a fool? Maybe. And yet I couldn’t help myself.

She busied herself to one side with a tray of instruments, arranging the mirrors and probes nervously, laughing perhaps a bit too gaily. “Do you remember Mr. Dregs?” she asked. “That day he asked you to go up to the board?”

The old school memories had been trickling back into my head ever since I’d seen Dean a couple weeks earlier, like he’d popped the cork off a wine bottle to let it breathe. But now the bottle had been knocked over; the wine was gushing out.

“Yeah, I remember,” I said. Funny, that she’d pick that memory to talk about. “You came to my rescue.” I wanted to ask her why she’d done what she had. What had I done to attract her attention? Her mercy. And then, later, what had I done to warrant her acrimony?

She’d been scared. She was so innocent, such an angel…

I wanted to change the subject. “You can’t imagine how surprised I was when I heard you were still with Dean.”

I thought I caught a smug look in her eyes before she pulled her mask back up. She settled onto her stool and drew herself close to me.

“He’s changed, you know. He was… He had some unattractive traits.”

I was a little surprised that she’d so readily admit this. Especially to me, since she had to know by now that I had never been as bad as he had.

I told myself to drop it. No sense to dredging it all up again.

“Did he tell you why he changed, Kurt?”

I frowned and shook my head. Why seemed like the wrong question, so I answered with the how: “I gathered you had something to do with it.”

The corners of her eyes crinkled. “Well, of course.”

I laughed uncomfortably at that.

“Nobody’s totally bad,” she concluded. “Just like nobody’s totally good, either, right?”

“What do you mean?” Was she finally admitting to what she’d done to me all those years ago? Was she acknowledging that the virtuous little girl everyone thought she’d been hadn’t been quite so good after all?

“Never mind. I’m just rambling.” She leaned down, her face close to mine, and for a second I thought she was going to kiss me. In that moment I could remember exactly the way she’d tasted, all those years ago, the feel of her lips on mine, the softness of her tongue. “Open wide, Kurt. Let’s have a look.”

The old feelings came again—desire, anger, confusion—but soon one feeling overrode them all, something more primitive, more alive. And there it was: fifteen years of pent up desire; fifteen years of suppressing it. But, of course, there was nothing to be done about it. I was helpless. There would be no release from it.

I concentrated on her face, the mask and her eyes that looked with apparent concern at what she thought she might find inside my mouth. I knew my breath was rancid, and the insides of my cheeks were tattered by my habit of chewing on them. She showed no disgust, no embarrassment, nothing. And for that, at least, I was grateful.

But now, I almost wish she had shown some offense. It would’ve made it so much easier to ignore the way she hovered over me. Maybe it would’ve stopped what happened next, I don’t know. But she was so close that I could smell her animal scent, the raw musk of her skin underneath the stronger smell of the soap and the perfume she was wearing. I closed my eyes. I told myself unless I pushed those feelings away, it would only lead to more pain.

“Keep your mouth open,” she said, distractedly. Her fingers probed inside of me, nudging, pulling, widening. It wasn’t exactly the most comfortable thing, not in the least, but it wasn’t painful either. Not yet.

“Wider.”

I forced my mouth to open even wider, but kept my eyes closed. I wouldn’t stare and get caught staring. But not looking didn’t stop me from seeing. It didn’t stop me from getting more and more worked up.

I tried to force other thoughts into my head, of the home I’d lost, of my parents, of the NFL career I’d never had a chance to experience. Instead, what fell into the well of my mind was the day I’d asked her to go out with me: fall, senior year, history class.

She was sitting across the aisle, one seat up. I’d pretty much given up all hope of ever getting her to go out with me, and yet I couldn’t keep my eyes off her.

Stop it, my thirty-two-year-old self begged. But my mind was once more the mind of a seventeen-year-old.

I’d been imagining the way her thighs must feel, imagining running my hands on them. Her skin, so soft and white.

Please!

I was a hot-blooded teenaged boy, for chrissake! It was natural to have such thoughts. Show me a seventeen-year-old boy who doesn’t have those kinds of fantasies and I’ll show you a seventeen-year-old boy who’s a goddamn liar.

I don’t know how long I’d been sitting there fantasizing about her like that before I realized the whole class was looking at me and Mr. Dregs was calling me to come up to the front to write something down on the board. I was, simply put, in no state to oblige. If I had tried to stand up, I would’ve done some serious damage to myself. Might even have poked someone’s eye out.

“What are you laughing about?” Kerry Anne asked, pushing a dental probe into the space between my teeth and gums.

“Hah-hee,” I apologized. Well, at least I could joke about it.

She went back to her examination. I went back to that memory.

Mr. Dregs refused to cut me any slack; he called on me again. And once again, I didn’t move.

“Something the matter, Kurt?” I swear, he had an evil, knowing smirk on his face. He knew what was happening! At least, that’s how I was remembering it then.

I remembered entering a panicked state, but, goddammit if my erection only got harder. I was dimly aware that my present physical state mirrored that one so long ago, but this time I was almost beyond caring.

Somehow, the young Kerry Anne had sensed I was in desperate need of being rescued. She spoke up then, telling Mr. Dregs that I had hurt my knee in football scrimpage practice. That’s how she’d put it: football scrimpage practice. Mr. Dregs, who’d always seemed to revel in other people’s discomfort, took a moment to consider her remark. Then he moved on, much to the class’s surprise. Much to my relief.

I remember thinking often about that little episode since then, how she’d managed to get me off the hook. But, it’s like I said earlier, Kerry Anne was an angel. Nobody could ever conceive of her lying. Everyone took her word for gospel. That should’ve been a clue, I suppose, to what she really was like. Instead, I saw her deceit as something else: mercy.

Her stool cricked as she shifted, and the quality of the light bleeding through my closed eyelids changed from bright red to dark brown. I opened them without thinking. Kerry Anne was reaching over me for the suction, or the water, or whatever the hell was over there that I couldn’t see because of the blur of her blouse just inches from my nose and then the pink of her skin where the button had come undone—or had she undone it?—and I could see the dark cleft between her breasts, could almost feel their heft as they pushed against the delicate fabric of her bra—ain’t gravity a lovely thing?—and the soft hollow of flesh just at the base of her neck. My nose filled with everything about her: her soap, her shampoo, the underarm deodorant she used. Even a hint of that dark, mysterious place between her legs.

Dear god.

I wanted to die in that chair. I wanted to die so badly it was killing me. But I wanted her all the more for it.

She had to have noticed the state I was in. How could she not? I couldn’t hide it. And there was a blush on her cheeks, even with the mask nearly covering them.

“Spit,” she instructed.

I leaned over, avoiding her eyes, and spit into the basin.

“We’re almost done,” she told me. “This might hurt a little. Maybe a lot.”

I leaned back, shut my eyes again and invited the memories back in. Kill me now, I joked silently. At least I’d die with a hard on.

Once more she began to probe, her thumb against my top teeth, her fingers wrenching open my jaw on the bottom. And all too quickly things did grow painful. I didn’t know what she was doing, but it hurt, badly. I started getting a muscle cramp in my jaw, and my head felt like my heart had taken up residence inside of it. I clung desperately to images of her in my mind, hoping the pain would soon end. Incredibly, I found myself even more aroused. Minutes earlier, I wouldn’t have thought it possible.

She ignored my grunts of discomfort.

She pushed harder, jabbing the cold metal cruelly into places I never knew I had nerve endings in. She located a tender spot on my gum near my fractured tooth and pushed hard against it. My head nearly exploded with pain.

“Aaanch,” I said, wanting her to stop. I’d almost instinctively bit down and would have taken off her fingers, but I managed to stop myself. She only pushed harder.

She abruptly stopped, then stood up.

Now what?

“The good news, Kurt, is that you were lucky you came in.” She was all business. “No, don’t get up. We’re not done.”

I laughed awkwardly. “If that’s the good news, what’s the bad?”

“You’ve got twelve cavities, Kurt. An even dozen.”

“Twelve?” I exclaimed. “But how could that be? I never had cavities before.”

She inhaled deeply, as if considering how to tell me the news. Then she sat back down on her stool and pulled herself over to me.

“Poor nutrition, lack of brushing,” she scolded. She reached over my chest to clip on a bib. Her breast brushed my arm. “Your gums are in horrible shape, too. You haven’t been fucking them enough, have you?”

My eyes snapped to her face. “What?”

“I said you haven’t been flossing them enough. You’ve got so much plaque buildup, it’s a wonder your teeth haven’t turned black.”

“Oh. So…what’s next?”

“That cracked molar will need to come out.”

My hands fluttered at my sides, wanting so much to touch her that she could’ve told me she was going to amputate my ear and I would’ve been fine with it. I willed my hands to stay put.

She leaned down, peering deeply into my eyes. “You need to take better care of yourself, Kurt.”

I don’t know what came over me—well, I do, but it wasn’t planned. I leaned up and kissed her. On the mouth.

She backed away, a look of utter surprise in her eyes.

“I’m sorry, Kerry Anne. I just—”

“I thought you’d changed, Kurt. Now I see you haven’t.”

My heart sank.

Stupid! What a goddamn fucking idiot I am!

“Let’s just get on with then, shall we?”

The wall was back up.

She stood for a moment, as if considering whether or not it was wise to continue. But then she twisted around for a moment before returning with a tray of instruments that she set on my chest. I could feel it seesawing there and I didn’t dare to breathe too heavily, afraid it’d send the whole thing onto the floor. Yet with each shallow breath I took, I could feel it slowly slipping off of me.

“Lie still.” She held up a nasty-looking wire device. “Open up.”

And then, all at once, I knew I’d really crossed the line this time.

“No.”

“Kurt—”

“No.”

“It’s for your own good.”

“I changed my mind.”

She smiled gently. “Kurt, please. I know what I’m doing.”

Her fingers skittered over my neck, sending goose bumps down to my toes.

But they were goose bumps of terror. And what was worse, I knew it’d be ten times worse if I didn’t oblige her. I opened my mouth.

She clamped the frame over my teeth. My tongue waggled about inside, looking for a place to settle itself.

“Don’t try to talk, Kurt.” She took a wooden cotton swab and dabbed something on my gums.

I needed desperately to swallow, but my throat refused to work with my jaw wired open like that. Saliva was building up in my mouth and I couldn’t swallow it and I was feeling like I was drowning.

“Unghhhh,” I said.

“You know what happens when you have a cavity that doesn’t get sealed off properly the first time? It festers. It forms a hole inside the tooth, underneath the enamel. The infection grows, moves down into the root. Pretty soon it starts to eat away at the bone in your jaw. The rotting inside of you, Kurt, isn’t that deep, yet. But it will get there unless we do something about it.”

“Whu?” I asked.

She drew a syringe of something clear from a vial, flicked it and squirted out the air bubbles. Pain killer. Well, at least I wouldn’t have to suffer too badly.

She noticed me looking at it and nodded. Then she stuck the needle in the side of my neck.

“Owrrghh!” I said, jerking away. When she withdrew it, the syringe was empty.

“Not pain killer. Not for you, Kurt.” Her eyes were dancing some kind of strange evil dance. “Paralytic.”

The numbness spread like fire and ice down my back, down my arms and into my fingertips, down my legs. I couldn’t lift my head, and I couldn’t move my legs.

“Quickest way to get rid of the disease, Kurt, is to remove the offending organ.”

Organ?

She picked up her drill and held it in front of my face, running it until my teeth actually did start hurting. “I’ll let you keep the top ones.”

Why? I wanted to scream at her.

The last thing I heard as I blacked out from the pain was Kerry Anne telling me Dean hadn’t been so lucky. “But then again, his infection was a lot deeper. To the bone, even.”

I wondered then, almost delirious with pain, what she’d done to him.

And then it finally clicked: the look in his face, that day I’d seen him at the soup kitchen, after he’d joined me at the table with his own bowl of strained broth. The way his mouth seemed to collapse into itself. The lisp when he spoke. The odd way his teeth had clicked. It hadn’t registered then, but he’d had no teeth in his mouth.

None whatsoever.

“Wah?” I asked, but I blacked out before she could answer.

But I knew. I didn’t need her to tell me why. It was because she so pure, so chaste. She was a perfect little angel.

And we weren’t.

That’s not a judgment, just a statement of fact.

‡   ‡   ‡

Author’s note

Ah, I love it when good people turn out to be wicked, and wicked people turn out to be…well, still wicked. Here was this guy, had everything going for him—good looking, athletic, articulate—and he goes and makes a stupid mistake and gets what he deserved. Or did he? Sorta feel sorry for him, doncha?

Do you think Kurt deserved what he got in the end? Should he have warned his former pal, Dean? How different do you think things would have been if he had?

Lastly, isn’t it curious that Dean and Kerry Anne never had children?

In his nonfiction book on horror fiction and pop culture in the United States, Danse Macabre, Stephen King wrote: “I recognize terror as the finest emotion…, and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find I cannot terrify him/her, I will try to horrify; and if I find I cannot horrify, I'll go for the gross-out. I'm not proud.”

Well, I am. Why not go for all three at the same time?

‡

Thank you for reading

Open Wide

I strive to write the best stories possible

and would love to know your thoughts on this one.

Did you like it? How did it meet your expectations?

If it didn’t, how might I improve it?

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All my best,

Saul

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Contact me: authorsaultanpepper@gmail.com

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My undying thanks to the devoted staff of Brinestone Press for their keen eye and gentle but firm touch in helping me bring this story to life, for believing every step of the way that I could raise the dead.

To my devoted fans and followers on Twitter (http://twitter.com/saultanpepper), especially the zombie apocalypse junkies. Everything’s better with the #zombie hashtag.

My deepest gratitude goes to my family for their unflagging support. Without them, I would not be able to create worlds with such richness to them.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Saul Tanpepper is a writer of speculative fiction for teens and adults. A former molecular geneticist originally from Upstate New York, he now calls Northern California home.

If you enjoyed Open Wide, please check out the short story collection Shorting the Undead and Other Horrors: A Menagerie of Macabre Mini-fiction, available in digital and print form. Additional titles from this collection also available singly in electronic format. His second collection, Insomnia: Paranormal Tales, Science Fiction, and Horror was published in 2012.

Also check out his dystopian thriller series GAMELAND.

For more information about the author and his writings, please check out his website and Facebook pages:

tanpepperwrites.com
GAMELAND home page

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Author page

GAMELAND

Tanpepper books

Welcome to

GAMELAND!

Get a sneak peek at the new high-tech thriller from the author of The Scenario Egg

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SERIES DESCRIPTION:

Six young gamers, coders and hackers break into Long Island's Gameland, a militarized wasteland once abandoned to the Infected Undead and now reclaimed by Arc Properties, a corporation with government ties and a pioneer in the burgeoning field of reality gaming. But while breaking into The Game turns out to be a lot easier than they could have ever imagined, breaking out is one hell of a killer.

GAMELAND home page

Also check out the prequel to GAMELAND

A geneticist creates an experimental antidote against a synthetic military virus for reanimating the dead. Hoping to avert a global human disaster, he tests it on himself, first administering the zombie virus and allowing the infection to run its course. A series of dramatic voice recordings leaves witnesses little doubt of the experiment's spectacular—and horrific—outcome.

Visit Saul’s Author Page on Amazon.com