Scraps, Scribbles: November 2010

Mort's wife had bought them a matching set of electronic toothbrushes in a last ditch effort to save the marriage, as if a mutual dedication to dental hygiene could stave off the inevitable. Mort suspected such vicissitudes were empty gestures at best, so he was unsurprised, if still mildly deflated, when that experiment lasted all of a week before she got bored of it and the situation went the way it was always going to go. She left him for a man with a sailboat, who she claimed still possessed "the Spark of life," a man who had been through three marriages in the last ten years and sailed because it was the only relationship he cared to work for. Mort and his wife had been married forty-seven years the day she walked out on him. In her wake she left a cluttered collection of halves. Half a tea set, half a tray of silverware, half a box of Grape-Nuts. It was just as well.

The electronic toothbrush activated with a push of a button, and every thirty seconds would interrupt its droning hum with a deadened "blip" to signal to the user that it was time to brush a different quadrant of the mouth. It did this four times until a dentist-recommended two minute period had been reached, at which point it shut off automatically. Mort had followed the unfamiliar regiment without question, his eyes opening in mock wonder the first time he had tried it in front of her, as if to say that she had revolutionized their drab nightly routine. He had played his part, he thought, rather convincingly.

But now, in the dingy light of another night alone, he had had enough. He was through with the toothbrush and its dubious claims of better brushing. His back ached from standing in front of the mirror for so long, listening to that ceaseless hum as it reverberated through his creaky skull, waiting for the blips and the echoing silence that would finally come, but only ever at the toothbrush's whim. All his life he had brushed his teeth without mechanical assistance, and for far less than two minutes. His teeth had been just fine for sixty-nine years, or close enough to fine, so who was this new toothbrush to tell him how long he had to brush for?

And so, one night, after the toothbrush had been running for an ample forty-two seconds, he clicked it off, spat, and rinsed. He placed the toothbrush down by the sink where it stood, quiet and docile. He looked in the mirror at the pasty and liver-spotted figure staring back and smiled at him. He thought he detected a new vibrancy in that face, a new depth of color, but then again, it may have been the new lightbulb he had installed above the sink that morning. Mort clicked off the light and went to bed where he slept, as he always had, on the left side, closest to the door. His head sank into the pillow, his hands clasped one another over his chest. He drifted off and dreamt of a meadow he had played in as a boy, where the buzz of cicadas during the summer played a constant accompaniment to his made-up games of fancy, and their song did not leave his head until morning.