Please Tell Me He's Not Going to Stop It

The server at the juice shop had only flashed her teeth as a means of being polite. There was no need for elaboration, on his part, but nevertheless, there it came. He spilled his guts to her on the topic of dentistry.

"It only dawned on me last night, you know?" he said through the straw of his fresh squeezed orange juice. She was like an insect, hypnotized by the growths of the swamp, seduced into his story by the inevitability of the impending sticky frog's tongue. "I need to stop brushing my teeth. I mean, there's no point in it."

She looked back at him like the stuffed woolly mammoth that he was, in the glass cube over at the Museum of Natural History (and except that he wasn't as cute). History, being the operative word. But he did not falter, no.

"It's become too much of a habit," he said, still slurping down that orangey goodness. "I mean, it's all falling into place. Sinking down into me, you know? I mean -- all those times your moma told you to 'brush your teeth every day'. It wasn't a true fear of dental hygiene. It was because she was scared to death that they're putting bugs in the teeth!"

There was a mocha orange frappe that someone was waiting for in the line down there, but she felt some strange sense of obligation to hear this crazy person out. Sort of how the people -- the real humans -- always have to pause whenever a species of life dies off.

He looked back at her from the straw. "I uh. I don't have any more," he said. "That was it. That was the revelation I had this morning."

"Your revelation was that you don't have to brush your teeth?" she said. He nodded back quietly.

She stared for a little longer, then gave him permission to leave. He did so, very politely, as he always does, without any real fuss. And it was just as he had exited the building when Thomas Robert Yardsley Jr. decided to hold up the juice shop for some hard cash.

Everyone was like, "Goddamit. Fuck you Tarantino."