Someone Hand Me The Extractors...

He looked at the tooth in his hand and shuddered. He couldn’t believe it had come to this. Such lengths he now went to, just to stay above the poverty line. There has to be more to it than this, he thought, this can’t be what I have become.

***

Finishing ‘school’ had been a major achievement in his life. Various family members had tried – and failed, all for various reasons; too difficult, too demanding, too disgusting. He, too, had almost pulled out after the second-to-last course. There was something not quite right about putting your hands in someone’s mouth. But he got through it alright, and graduated with extremely good marks and his diploma to go on the wall at home.

Following grad school, he had been employed in multiple locations around the world; Texas, Beijing, Melbourne and Paris, to name a few. But he found the work dull and mundane, even though he made quite a decent living from it. Then came the big squeeze. All of the employees were forced to make a quota every week, which at first hadn’t been too demanding but with the amount of employees that were involved in the company, things slowly became a bit tougher. Keeping ahead of the game was getting harder by the week.

Worse was unfortunately to follow. He got into a nasty fight with a fellow employee over the last job in Venice, which lead to his arrest and imprisonment. He was promptly shown the door by his boss, claiming that the company didn’t need that kind of publicity and that he had signed a pre-employment document stating that he agreed that the company had the right to dismissal on grounds of felony crimes. His days with the corporation were over.

Since his release from prison, he had not been able to find steady work as the only job he was qualified for was run by only one company, and he had no chance of being accepted by them again. So he did the only thing he knew how – he went independent; a mercenary, if you will. But even that wasn’t entirely profitable. He found some extra work in the poorer parts of European towns, where his previous workmates wouldn’t dare to tread, but these jobs soon dried up. He was only left with one option: take what wasn’t his to take.

So, here he found himself, standing in the rain on a balmy evening in the middle of Madrid, staring at the tooth in his palm. It was a good tooth; a strong tooth, as it had turned out. But for renegade tooth fairies, every single molar and incisor is up for grabs.


(This piece came from a Friday Flash Fiction starter sentence that wasn't used, so I thought I would give it a go. Hope you liked it.)