James Gill
The Haunting of Glenn Earl Horton’s Teeth
When Glenn Earl Horton’s neighbor, Tanya Swain, came home drunk in the early morning hours to find her Jack Russell Terrier in the backyard chewing on Mr. Horton’s false teeth, she had no idea of the struggles he’d been through up to that point. It began when he started losing his teeth shortly after he married Masil Wright, the girl he’d always run into at the well his family shared with the Wrights who lived in the next farmhouse up the road, and by the time she died twenty-eight years later, he was down to a pair of molars, his canines, and a single incisor. He wasn’t an old man, but he had never taken much care with his teeth. And it wasn’t that he didn’t recognize the importance that they played in his life, but when he started working in the coal mine at sixteen, driving mules to pull coal cars up the long slope toward the sunlit world above, the concept of dental hygiene seemed small and insignificant compared to the risk of methane explosion and roof collapse. So he never did anything more than brush his teeth once a day with baking soda, which kept them clean enough, but didn’t keep them from rotting. Finally, at the age of forty-eight, he visited the dentist for the first time since his school days; the doctor’s verdict was to pull the handful of teeth that he still had left and make a set of dentures, but Glenn Earl wouldn’t have it, and he walked out of the dentist’s office with no intention of ever returning for the rest of his life. His family berated and bothered him about the empty spaces in his mouth, started calling him Snaggle, even gave a big jar of peanuts as a birthday gift, hoping he’d get fed up and go back to the dentist, but he never budged on the matter. Then, once again, the significance of his teeth took a backseat when Masil came home from a doctor’s appointment that she’d made because of a head cold with the news that she had ovarian cancer. Countless doctor’s visits, specialists, chemo, and radiation followed; even so, the disease moved through her body quickly, and she was gone within the year. But in her last few days, as she lay in the hospital bed looking much older than her husband, more like his 6 ◆ Crab Orchard Review