THE GREEN TOOTH

He was born with it. A tiny little baby crying all the time and the only thing you could see was the green front tooth. There, at the right upper corner of his mouth. A totally green tooth that looked like sewers sludge and old house's pipes full of humidity. A green tooth that left you speechless and fully terrified. At first everyone came to see the baby for that. 

The living room was full of curious people wanting to see it in person to be certain that it's not some kind of a bad joke. His parents were very much ashamed but they gradually learned to stay silent at the indiscreet glances of terror and repulsion. They even tried to smile unwillingly at the wishes given. Time flied and they tried to negotiate with it in a state of panic. They asked the dentist in agony if what was happening to their baby was normal. He hadn’t faced it before in his entire career.They asked him what it could be done. Let some time pass and we will see. His medical tests looked ok. They took things into their own hands. They carefully tried to clean it. In vain. The doctors didn’t know what to do even when they realized that no other tooth was to grow. So he stuck with that. He turned into that. The boy with the green tooth. That everyone made fun of at school. That everyone was afraid of. That everyone detested for that spooky bad breath of his. For all the things that he was and all the things that he wasn’t. That’s why he quit school after a while and no one noticed his absence. Not even his parents who were now devoted to their new baby that didn’t make them feel neither uncomfortable nor stressful plus it gave them innocent smiles all the time. 

So he decided to go to the doctor on his own. He forced himself not to cry in front of the strict man in the white robe. He asked for his help by widely opening his mouth. He couldn’t keep his tears that fell without restrain on the bare floor. The doctor took off his glasses in almost despair for this helpless creature in front ofhim. He mechanically took his extraction forceps. He laid the boy down to his dental chair and warned him that it would be very painful. The boy stopped crying. He bore the pain. He almost didn’t complain at all. The doctor, all sweaty from the effort, furiously tried to take it out. It resisted for a while and then a whistling sound made him shiver. He stood still when he detected a pair  of insect wings coming out slowly from the tooth’s root ready to fall out. He widely opened his own mouth in surprise. When the tooth finally came out a green grasshopper, soaked in the wounds’ blood popped out with it.

They both stared at it making two unfinished spins on the ceiling. Blood still dripped from its wings. It got out of the window and out of their sight. As he grew older he stopped talking to people and one day he left town. Nobody ever heard anything about him. They might sometimes forget his name which was obvious as they never called him by that but they would always remember him as the boy with the green tooth. To them he never grew old and to some others he never existed.