Fiction / Wisdom Teeth
with bloody gauze falling out of his mouth, stumbling fucked up from anesthesia.
Wisdom Teeth (fiction) was originally published in Puerto del Sol Issue 59.1, Spring 2024. This piece was a winner of the AWP Intro Journals Award, which was validating as fuck, especially since it’s a t4t (failed) romance. For full disclosure, the prize was publication, and $100. You can’t make a living writing short stories.
Wisdom Teeth is the companion piece to Breeders, forthcoming in Room Magazine, Canada’s oldest feminist literary journal, June 2025. Wisdom Teeth is about falling in love with the wrong person, the trouble with five year plans, deep cleaning on painkillers, and how if you watch enough Bob Ross videos, eventually he’ll say something dirty.
Wisdom Teeth
I liked Oscar, my roommate Patsy’s new boyfriend. He made her happy. I didn’t mind that Oscar stayed over at our apartment all the time, even when I woke up to their loud sex after Patsy’s bartending shift, or when Patsy brought him home with bloody gauze falling out of his mouth, stumbling fucked up from anesthesia. He’d just gotten his wisdom teeth out and the punk house he lived in was too frenetic and filthy for convalescence.
Patsy had a family reunion in California, plane tickets for a five-day trip purchased by her parents before she even got together with Oscar. She asked me to stay with him for the first twenty-four hours and be around for the next few days, to make sure he ate pureed food and took the right meds at the right times. It was no skin off my ass: I was trying to make a go of it as a freelancer, writing web copy and editing photos for an online vitamin and supplement retailer until AI advanced enough to make my work obsolete. I was home a lot.
“Hale’s gonna take good care of you, baby,” Patsy said to Oscar as he lolled on our futon holding frozen peas and corn wrapped in dishtowels on either side of his face.
“Uh huh,” he said.
Patsy kissed him on the forehead and led me to our kitchen to point out, again, the instant cream of rice, the tomato bisque, the shelf-stable apple sauce cups, the Vicodin and the antibiotics and the anti-nausea pills.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “We got this.”
“I owe you one.”
“No way,” I said. “I like Oscar.” Patsy picked up her suitcase and split.
I sat on the other end of the futon where Oscar was watching a home improvement show on TV. “It’s going way too fast,” he said through a mouthful of cotton. He shut his eyes. I watched the show closely. He was right. Every time the camera shot went down a hallway to a different room, it sped up. I changed the channel to a nature show. Oscar got up to spit out his gauze and swallow his painkiller. I got up to make sure he took it with applesauce.
His face was still numb, and he laughed at himself when the applesauce spilled out of his mouth and onto his faded black western shirt with pearl snaps and ripped-off sleeves. He usually wore black band t-shirts and black Carhartts. It was disarming to see him in track pants. I kind of loved it.
No pullovers could be worn during the procedure, he told me, and nothing underneath, in case of emergency. He said he never would have gotten his teeth out before he had top surgery because he wouldn’t have taken off his binder.
“Which was worse?” I asked.
“This,” he said, without hesitation. “I feel way gross.”
“That’ll kick in and you’ll feel fine.”
Oscar raised the applesauce cup as if for a toast. I fist bumped it gently.
Patsy and Oscar were getting serious, maybe even falling in love. Patsy dyed her hair black and started wearing vintage polyester dresses in day-glo floral patterns, floor-length but cut off ragged above her knees. Oscar was shorter than her, with crooked teeth and trendy grandpa glasses. He brought her herbal nosegays with lavender and lemon balm from his garden, raw organic chocolates from the food co-op, eggs laid by the hens in his backyard. I’d recently liberated myself from an entanglement with a newly-out long-haired butch who did that kind of stuff, but did it wrong: bouquets from the grocery store florist, carnations dyed unnatural colors, like a stepdad gives a kid after a tap dance recital. It was embarrassing. But if I met someone like Oscar, I might become the kind of swoony jerk who found candy and flowers romantic. For the time being, I was enjoying spreading my limbs to the far corners of my own bed, answering to no one but Patsy regarding my whereabouts, supporting local businesses (mostly bars) with the generous credit limits on multiple credit cards. I was resolutely single.
Last time I’d gone out with my drinking buddy Ronnie, I was carrying on about how fabulous it was to be free from the performance of coupledom when she asked me, “What’s your five year plan?”
Ronnie was our self-identified mom-friend. She wasn’t a mom, but she carried a large, dirty canvas tote bag which held multiple phone chargers, pads and tampons, gluten-free granola bars, scent-free hand lotion, hundreds of ponytail holders. She was the kind of person who had a home printer. With ink.
The scruffy bike punk she was sleeping with tugged gently on one of her long braids and kissed her earlobe. “Babe, no one wants to talk about that,” he said. “Those kinds of questions stress people out.” He wouldn’t let her call him her boyfriend.
“I’m just curious. I want to know if Hale’s thinking of their future.” Ronnie said she’d been thinking of her future, and she might go to Harvard.
“What do you want to study?” I asked.
“I don’t know yet,” Ronnie said, her gaze softening to the back of the bar. Ronnie was a certified nutritionist and worked in the cafeteria of an assisted living facility. She was in one of her regular career crises and wanted to pull someone down with her.
“I might take up falconry,” I said, just making shit up.
“Where can you do that?” The bike punk was excited. “I want to do that.”
Ronnie wanted to know if Patsy had a five year plan.
“I don’t think so. Maybe she’ll marry Oscar and they’ll get a rescue dog and a Subaru.”
“What kind of dog?” the bike punk asked.
Ronnie asked me what I would do if Patsy moved in with Oscar.
“Oh god, I don’t know.” I spun out a little. I hadn’t considered it until then. Patsy and I had shared three different apartments over nine years since we graduated from college. If I’d had a five year plan then, I would have gotten together a portfolio to apply for an MFA in studio arts, moved to Portland, started a collective gallery space.
The apartment we lived in now was our favorite. We’d learned how to keep house together; we had basically grown up together. I couldn’t think of anyone else I’d want to live with, and I couldn’t afford the apartment alone.
“They should get a pit bull,” the bike punk said. “They’re really sweet, but people are afraid to adopt them because of their bad reputation.”
“Hale, I think you need an exit plan,” Ronnie said. “Just in case.”
I didn’t want an exit plan. I didn’t want Patsy to move away with Oscar. I didn’t want them to break up, either. I liked him being around. Sure, sometimes he left a few stray hairs in the sink after shaving in our bathroom, but he always washed dishes, even when he cooked, and was good about wiping the kitchen counters afterward. Maybe our household could absorb him. The per-person rent would go down.
When Oscar took his nighttime painkiller after dinner—we’d shared the tomato bisque—he said I should have one of the Vicodin. The oral surgeon had not been stingy, despite increased suspicion of pill mills. I wanted to pay him ten bucks for it, but he refused, and fished out one of the anti-nausea tablets for me, too. I told him I’d buy him a beer once his mouth healed. His cheeks were puffy and a greenish bruise settled along his jaw. I brought him another Ziplock bag of ice cubes Patsy made before she left, a clean dishtowel.
Assuming that the drugs would have us nodding off, I queued up some Bob Ross videos. Halfway through the second episode, Oscar went to the kitchen. I heard him rustling around. As the rudimentary television graphics for the paint palette colors scrolled on the third episode, I realized he hadn’t come back.
“What’s going on?” I asked from the doorway. He had removed everything from our herb and spice cupboard, and a couple of drawers were open.
“You know what would make so much more sense?” He didn’t wait for a response. He said we should lay all the little jars on their sides in a drawer, so we could see what we had. He pointed to the one that held scissors, twist ties, expired coupons, fast food salt packets.
It was a good idea. I started emptying the drawer, and we kept going until we had reorganized and deep cleaned the whole kitchen. That was the first night.
In the morning, I went to the coffee shop downstairs, much earlier than usual because Oscar needed something to take his medication with and was tired of applesauce already. Trista, the barista who knew my regular schedule and my regular order, feigned shock.
“Got someone staying over?”
I might have blushed. “Just Oscar. Patsy’s boyfriend. He had his wisdom teeth out.”
Trista nodded, knowingly. “You don’t strike me as the smoothie type.”
I felt funny, like I’d gotten laid or something. But all I’d done was clean the kitchen with my best friend’s boyfriend. I ran back upstairs where he was waiting, upright on the futon, grim with pain.
“No caffeine,” I told him. “I read the pamphlet.”
“Can you bring me a spoon?” he asked.
“Oh right, no straws.” I felt admonished for my elation.
I worked in my room all day, unusually productive, while Oscar zoned out on meds, watched TV, napped. We ran into each other in the kitchen when I got hungry. Oscar was eating hot cereal.
“I have no food,” I said, standing in the open fridge.
“We established that last night.”
“You wanna go to the store with me?”
He said he was down. I asked if he’d taken his pill. He had, and asked if I wanted one.
“Dude, you’re gonna run out.”
“No way. It’s fine.”
I accepted his offer, and took it with one of his applesauce cups.
We walked to the expensive grocery store on the waterfront, the one we weren’t supposed to shop at because the conservative owners wouldn’t let the pharmacy stock Plan B. We passed Olympia’s first condo tower, construction recently finished, and complained about how stupid it was, no one who wanted to live downtown could afford to live there, and it was covering up that nice mural on the side of the New Moon Café, you had to squeeze into the tiny gap between the buildings just to see it. We didn’t know who the artist was, but we were pissed on their behalf.
I bought the ingredients for a pureed butternut squash and carrot soup I liked to make in fall. It was only the beginning of September, but it was something Oscar could eat.
“I can get the one in the carton,” he said. “You don’t have to do that.”
“I want to cook for you.”
We got ice cream from the deli counter and ate it on the pier at a weather-beaten table covered in seagull shit.
“What’s your five year plan?” I asked him, mostly joking. It had occurred to me that Ronnie didn’t actually have a five year plan, herself. She just thought everyone else did.
“I got really bad grades in high school,” Oscar said. “So I didn’t try to get into college or anything. No one in my family could help me pay for it, anyway.” Oscar was a server at an upscale pasta joint, but I knew plenty of people with degrees who worked in the industry, food and beverage service. It surprised me that he didn’t have one, and I felt crappy right away for thinking it meant anything. He could screen print t-shirts and publish zines and build urban chicken coops. He didn’t need a degree to do those things. “Now I’m almost thirty, and I’m going to go back to school for geology.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah!”
“Rocks?”
“Yeah, rocks, and volcanoes, and soil, and fossils, all that.” He told me he was going to go to community college for his prerequisites in the winter and spring, then apply to the University of Puget Sound. He listed the kinds of work he could get with a geology degree. “I wouldn’t do oil, I wouldn’t do fracking, obviously.”
I was stalled out with shock that he had a five year plan. Embarrassed that I didn’t, even though it had been eating at me since Ronnie asked, I came up with one on the spot. Not falconry. I told Oscar I was going to become a dentist. I told him to think of everyone we knew who held online fundraisers when they needed a root canal. I’d keep my overhead cheap and I’d give discounts to artists and people in bands and workers in the industry. Poor dental health could be lethal.
My parents would really dig that. I told Oscar a story about them.
“Hailey, we don’t worry about you,” my dad said to me when I was a teenager. My parents were a little drunk. “Your sister is going to have to get married,” my mom said, with a dismissive wave of her hand. “But you’ll be fine.” My sister was in elementary school at the time. If I’d had a five year plan then, I would have learned how to play the electric guitar I’d begged for, convinced Patsy to pick up the bass, recruited a drummer, and had a record deal before we were twenty-one.
My parents were right though, my sister did get married, and I’d mostly managed to support myself. Although money was always tight, I rarely borrowed from them. Then again, it was kind of like Patsy and I ran a dual-income no-kids household. Almost like we were married. I couldn’t make it alone.
Oscar was still telling me what geologists do. He could work for the county, the state, the U.S. Geological Survey. Salaries were good. He could totally buy a house by the end of his five year plan. Everyone I knew, including myself, had a secret, shameful dream of home ownership.
I told him he should get a Subaru and a pit bull.
We didn’t stop talking the whole walk back to the apartment, or when I began roasting the squash and carrots. We didn’t stop through dinner. We followed each other to the bathroom and stood outside the door so we wouldn’t have to stop talking. I couldn’t remember ever having a conversation with this kind of self-generating momentum, except maybe with Patsy when we first met in high school and would talk on the phone long into the night. My mom would pick up the other line and tell me to hang up and go to bed, her voice bleary with sleep but stern enough to scare me into compliance.
I was telling Oscar that story while I watched in the mirror as he flushed the holes in his jaw with a syringe of saltwater. “Don’t look, it’s gross,” he said.
He followed me into my room, and climbed into my bed with me. We kept talking, but not about that.
“Are you going to marry Patsy?” I asked. Oscar’s hands were up my shirt. He got a dreamy look on his face, or maybe it was already there, maybe it was the Vicodin.
“Yeah, maybe. Yeah, maybe I’ll ask her.” I wasn’t wearing a bra. He pulled my shirt up to take a peek. “You have great boobs, Hale.” We both had pajama pants on. I moved my knee between his legs, flannel against flannel. “Don’t get top surgery,” he said.
I tried to take his shirt off, but I was afraid of hurting his face in the process. I leaned back so he could do it himself. Sickle-shaped, dark maroon Frankenstein scars underlined his pectorals, puckering near his armpits. His nipples were lumpy and uneven.
“I almost lost that one,” he said, pointing at the weirder of the two. “And now I have this super-sensitive spot down here.” He pointed to a darker, hairy patch of skin, low on his ribs. “My nipple tissue migrated.” I asked if I could touch it. He said yeah, and shivered when I did.
That was the second night.
We spent most of the next day relaxing and giggling in my bed. We watched a dozen episodes of Bob Ross, snow-capped mountains and neon sunsets, friendly streams and happy trees. Fuck geology and dentistry, we were both going to become landscape painters. Bob Ross showed off the squirrel he raised from a baby, and beat the devil out of the brush when he cleaned it.
“The canvas is wet and slick and ready to go, and I hope you are too,” Bob Ross said.
“Did he seriously just say that?”
“He seriously just said that. Do you think he said it on purpose?”
By dusk, the third night, we were stir-crazy. We puzzled over how there was nowhere to go after dark if you weren’t drinking, which we weren’t, per the recommendations on the pill bottle.
On the fourth afternoon, Oscar ran out of painkillers.
“I’m sorry,” I said, stuffing my hands into my pants pockets and rubbing the lining between my fingers. “I shouldn’t have had any.” I wanted Oscar to tell me it wasn’t my fault, but he had his eyes squeezed shut and was making pathetic noises of hurting. “I’ll call the oral surgeon place. Maybe you have the dry socket thing.”
Hiding out in my room on the phone, I asked the nurse if they could refill my boyfriend’s painkiller prescription. I felt as if calling him my boyfriend gave me some authority. The nurse said they could not. He was still in a lot of pain, I told her. She explained that the steroids they gave him during surgery had probably worn off.
“At the same time as he ran out of Vicodin?” The pitch of my voice went straight up.
“Ma’am, he can take up to 800 milligrams of ibuprofen. If he is still at this level of pain in twenty-four hours, have him make an appointment with our office.”
I ended the call, bristling at her calling me ma’am.
Oscar looked like he might cry when I broke the news. He headed for Patsy’s room.
“Do you want to cuddle?” I meant to sound tender, but it came out petulant.
“I want to be alone,” he said. “I don’t feel good. My mouth hurts like a bitch and I haven’t taken a dump in days.”
“Yeah, I get it,” I said, sadder than I expected to be.
The next morning, Oscar packed to return to his house.
“Are you sure you’ll be OK there alone?” I asked. “You can stay. Patsy will be back tonight. I won’t bother you.”
Oscar seemed annoyed, or maybe just exhausted. I wanted to run him a bath, give him a foot massage, straddle his hips while pressing his shoulders into my pillow.
“Hale, are you going to make me say it?”
“Say what?”
“I love Patsy, OK? Even if we were doing the poly thing, which we aren’t, it would be too weird. You’re her housemate, her best friend. If things were different, maybe we could see what would happen, but you know, it would be like fucking her sister or something,” he said. “I mean sibling, sorry.”
I licked my lips and looked at the floor. I prepared to obsess over how stupid I was to try to get with Oscar, soon, but let my heart break just a little, for now.
“Don’t make it weird,” he said. “We weren’t thinking clearly.”
“Yeah, no, you’re right.” I sighed aloud. “You need help carrying anything? You want to take the rest of that soup?”
“I’m not going to tell Patsy,” he said.
“I’m not out here trying to mess up what I have with her, either. There’s more at stake for me than you.”
Oscar didn’t have a response to that. We regarded each other, the energy of our impasse no more than a shrug.
When Patsy’s plane landed, she went straight to his house, and I didn’t see either of them for a couple days, which was good, because I was weepy over Oscar. I slapped my face in front of the mirror and told myself to shut up. It wasn’t as if I had a chance, anyway, it wasn’t as if I could have a relationship with him even if he and Patsy broke up.
I imagined some other timeline where I met him first, long ago. Where I changed his bandages and emptied his fluid drain tubes when he had top surgery. Where we’d gotten our shit together a lot sooner and he was already a geologist and I was already a dentist, and Patsy would come over for dinner at our house with a bottle of wine and some other partner.
I imagined some other era where Oscar dressed as a man to enlist to fight a war. When he was wounded, I’d be the stoic nurse who kept his secret and melted under his morphine gaze. If I’d had a five year plan, then, we would have come home to America and started a subsistence farm, as female husbands.
I imagined some other reality where Oscar was a cis, gay dude, and I was a trans guy. That was it, that was the whole fantasy. We were subversive all over the place.
I was about to start my period. It was only PMS, I told myself, not lovesickness. Oscar and I hadn’t really done anything. His mouth was too fragile; we hadn’t even kissed. I just liked him.
I opened a browser window to look up dentistry programs, glanced at the prerequisites and closed it. Maybe I could train to be a hygienist through the community college. But then I wouldn’t have control over making care more affordable, the whole point.
Chewing my lower lip and bouncing my knee, I opened another browser tab to look up falconry. There was a place about an hour away that offered volunteer opportunities in raptor rehabilitation. I sent the link to Ronnie’s not-boyfriend.
I needed to get out of the apartment. Texted Ronnie to see if she wanted to get a beer. I was going to give her a hard time about that five year bullshit. It just stressed people out. I watched the dots while she texted back.
Bob Ross would say, “You can do anything you want. This is your world.”
But how could you plan five years ahead? Anything could throw your life off course. Vision boards, goal setting, manifestation, they were all just distractions from the obvious—mortality. I pressed my thumb to the skin outside my lips and felt the bump of each slowly rotting tooth in my jaw.
Anything could happen. Mount Rainier could erupt. Or we could get the “big one,” the earthquake our region was due for. You could be struck by lightning and start writing poetry compulsively. You could answer a personals ad and meet the love of your life. How could you plan five years ahead, even as you changed into a different person with each step? The path would detour until it became unintelligible. How would you know where you were?
It was better, I decided, not to know.
No distractions.
Perpetual shifting, adjusting, transition, revision.
Everything a surprise.