Like Pulling Teeth | Emily Glos | Fiction & Nonfiction Contest Winner - Fall 2025

I fought tooth and nail to get my ex convicted. Strike that. Reverse. First nail then tooth. I had chewed my nails raw between the months of court hearings. Like everything else bureaucratic in Mexico, it was a tedious, nonsensical uphill battle. The final judgment? A measly warning and a barely-there restraining order—no distance specified. That’s when I noticed how hard I had been clenching my jaw and the awful pain in my lower right molar. It would come and go, not unlike the stress of dating a control-driven dickhead. With his grip loosened, I wearily booked a dentist appointment for the final round.

Peeling my thighs from the gray plastic chair in the waiting area, I moved to the clinical version of a Lazyboy in the next room. A hygienist in mint-green scrubs handed me the Tron glasses to shield my eyes from the piercing fluorescent light she directed at my face.  “It feels painful and puffy,” I told her with some words I’d picked up. “Un momentito.” I could almost see the gears in her head turning. Maybe my Rs didn’t roll enough, or my tempo was off. The hygienist stuck to saying, “Un momentito,” while using her fingers to indicate the minuscule amount of time until she’d get back to me.

Dr. Adriàn, who I’d seen before, rolled his chair to my side. He was a dentist who took the tools out of my mouth to hear my answers to his questions. It was as if he really believed me when I said I flossed regularly, despite the blood making half-moons below my gums as he poked and prodded.

As a dentist herself, my mother had always said that our teeth naturally start to deteriorate after thirty. I guess at thirty-five I was still living with a somewhat immortal-mind-of-the-youth, when Dr. Adriàn pulled up an x-ray and told me that my molar was infected and had started to eat away at the bone.

“The bone?!” I asked, in case my ears were lying to me. Looking at the image, I focused on the dip in the mandible that should have been hugging my tooth.

“You’ll probably need a root canal,” Dr. Adriàn said before exiting. “I’ll do it next week.” Root canal is a term I’d heard many, many times. A procedure for other people and their mismanaged mouths. Not mine!

R-o-o-t c-a-n-a-l I typed into Google on my phone before even crossing the waiting room, ...removal of the soft center of the tooth … removing the nerve. Hold on. As a massage therapist, I know nerve pain—the worst possible pain—and they want to do what? I was going to have to do a lot of meditation on this. Deep breaths. Maybe even some screams. My mind went straight to blaming the buffoon who’d caused me all this stress in the first place. If only I could have served him with the root canal. Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth—wasn’t that real justice?

“Don’t worry,” the hygienist said as she booked my follow-up. “Here’s something to help.” She pushed a small square of paper with scribbles across the desk to me.

Okay, okay. Okay. For pain? For an existential crisis? I grasped the note like the last thread holding me together as I turned to leave.

***

My tooth pain had been mild to moderate. It mostly bothered me in the morning when I would wake from stressful sleep. And boy did this new information give me stressful sleep. Moderate to severe.

The next thing I knew, Dr. Adriàn was calling. Not his office. It was him.

“The x-ray shows the tooth is broken into three pieces. The root canal won’t hold. It’ll need to be extracted,” he said ever so matter-of-factly. Cold even. Was there a sudden change in his bedside manner? I tried to picture the cracks in the X-ray and held the phone tighter. Remembering the sudden mood changes of my ex, I ended the call. Extracted?

I took the news as if the diagnosis were terminal. Denial. Fear. Grief.

Even after breathwork and bitching, I had barely warmed up to the idea of a root canal. And now—an extraction? A missing tooth? A pirate! Hard no. 

I needed … a sense of control. Not an extraction. I found a new dentist the next week.

***

Anxious for my appointment, I stepped into one of the many pharmacies in town, clutching the prescription. Empty. As I turned to leave, I caught eyes with a woman in marshmallow white, crouched behind the counter over a styrofoam food tray, stuffing something red and greasy into her mouth with fingers of the same colour. 

“Ahhh, disculpame!” She cried, cleaned her fingers with an equally reddened napkin, then giggled and pushed herself up. “Hello. Welcome.”

“Hi. I uh….” I unfolded the scribbled promise of help.

At the same time, she brought out a laminated menu. “What can I help you with today?” She asked. “Xanax? Somatrope? Tramadol?...” She continued naming things I’d never heard of.

I slid over the paper. She slid over her menu—like we were negotiating.

“I really just need whatever this is. I’m on my way to the dentist.”

“Ahhh,” she said as I noticed a dot of red sauce on the breast of her crisp uniform. She reached for a small box on the wall while knocking down a few others. When she came back up, I zeroed in on the red stain again. Was it going to come out? Why do I care? It’s not my stain.

“Here it is.”

“Adderall? What? No, this is for the dentist. I need this prescription.” Did I misspeak? Like the time I misconjugated a verb and ended up asking a guy if he wanted babies instead of a drink. 

She switched the boxes: “I mean this one. Many people take this for the dentist to help them relax.”

Valium. I was suspicious. Was she even a pharmacist? My eyes shifted from her red stain, definitely not coming out, to the box. I handed over a bill and when she didn’t return any change, I popped a pill in my mouth—one step closer to control—washing it down with my berry smoothie. The pharmacist inhaled sharply. I inhaled sharply. She looked at me wide-eyed. “Lo tomó completo.” I crunched a seed between my teeth. I didn’t bring a toothbrush!

I hopped into a cab and gave him directions at the very m o m e n t  I  s t a r t e d  t o

 f e e l   a  

b i t  s l o w e r.

“Ijusttookapill.”

I kept talking to the driver in slow motion. About what? I don’t know. I was vaguely aware that I was unravelling. Truth be told, I could have given him my credit card details and passwords and let him know I lived all alone in Mexico. Or, that it would be a few days before anyone would come looking for me. All this passed through my mind as I continued on, my body folding into itself in the back seat.

I paid the taxi driver, at least I must have, and stepped into the dental office—my body a loose marionette without strings. My brain just as nervous—if not more—now that I was a mushy invalid. I introduced myself as ‘On Drugs’.

Dr. Gaston began: “Here, sit.” He motioned to the chair and I tried not to flop down, but I did.

“Let me explain to you some options for your tooth … ” as he spoke, my head lolled to see my feet awkwardly splayed at the bottom of the chair. I crossed them so they looked more normal, but they still felt foreign.

“Why don’t we clean out the infection and see what’s there.”

I rolled my head back towards him. “Clean it?” Of course! It seemed so obvious. Why didn’t the other dentist clean it out before planning a demolition and fueling up the wrecking ball? I wanted to keep all my teeth!

Dr. Gaston quietly got to work. The infected tooth had become a sitcom rerun and Dr Gaston was handing me the remote.

***

Three months later, the pain returned. It was clear the tooth and infection were a package deal. I walked through the frosted glass door of the humble dental office, confident and well-dressed. Sober.

Dr. Gaston’s waiting room had two chairs and a healthy-looking plant. No receptionist, just soft music and the high-pitched ZZZZZIPs of his drill. After his previous patient walked out, he came to greet me with his superstar smile.

He welcomed me into the treatment room, asking if I was ready to lose the tooth, if I wanted to continue the small steps of deep cleans, or a slower process of a natural root canal. “We would then open the tooth every two to three weeks …”

“Ha! That sounds like a relationship,” I interrupted. “Take it out. I’ve had enough.”

Dr. Gaston accepted my decision with a smile.

My decision.

I laid back in the chair in my cream-coloured jumper. “I guess I shouldn’t have worn white! Is there something you can put over me? Like a blanket?”

He bibbed me with the waffle-textured napkin and clipped the chain around my neck. As he filled a syringe with Novocaine, I closed my eyes and braced myself. Despite being covered in tattoos, needles just aren’t my thing.

He was talking me through what he was doing, when I felt the pressure on my other tooth.

My eyes bulged. “WAIT!” But it really sounded like, “WAAAUH!”

He stopped immediately and took the instruments out of my mouth. “Should we freeze it some more?”

“You’re on the wrong tooth!”

Dr. Gaston smiled. “I am on the right tooth,” he reassured me. “It’s just the pressure you feel.”

The moment itself sounded like milk being poured into a dry bowl of Rice Crispy’s; snap, crackle, pop, and the tooth was out.

He held it in front of us under the light. One piece, unbroken. A deep sense of relief washed over me. It was finally over. I looked down expecting to see a massacre-level of blood on myself and the floor. There was nothing but a red dot, to the right of the bib, absorbing into the fabric of my jumper. I thought back to the pharmacist and wondered how she fared with her stain.

Dr. Gaston’s eyes narrowed as he rotated the tooth between his pliers, examining its form like it had started speaking. “That’s so strange. I’ve never seen anything like this before.”

I took in the solid prong-like extensions coming from each root. Maybe it was trying to grow—to hold on like I had—to reach the bone, a home decayed from its toxic environment.

“And look how strong.” Dr. Gaston pointed to the lines running through the tooth. “Even with that much stress, she didn’t break.” I knew he was referring to the molar, but it felt like he said it for me.

Dr. Gaston gave me the tooth and I keep it in a cube-shaped resin. A reminder that I took back control of my life. Much like this story, it's a piece of my history. Only now, painless.

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Emily Glos is a Canadian artist living and working in Mexico.