NERVE

You suffer.

This is what the dentist told Leon Cooke as he worked a piece of gravel out from the boy’s gums. Leon’s hands tightened their grip on the vinyl chair. The pain was distant, a low current holding sway over his face, but the pressure of the dentist’s hands was constant and insistent. The thick fingers pressed themselves into Leon’s ragged gum line, searching out the scraps of stone and dust embedded there by his fall. His mother sat outside in the waiting room, her hands flipping through magazines without pausing on a page. She held a jar with three teeth inside it.

Yes, Leon, you suffer. You suffer because that is how we are born. Screaming, writhing, gasping for air; every cell within us asking for some relief. We are born speaking a dialect of pain, one that we never forget. It crosses languages, cultures, countries—worlds even. The nerve is what unites us all, not the tongue. The tongue is a slow and laborious creature, burdened with too many tasks to create anything worthy of human connection. You understand that, don’t you?

Leon nodded twice before passing out. The dentist washed his hands and watched the blood swirl down the sink. He called for Leon’s mother and tried not to think about his own wife, the dogs she took with her, or the busted furniture from the night before.

Instead, the dentist bit his tongue.

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