by Abbie Doll
She woke up to a mountain range in her mouth.
Such an awe-inspiring sight caught her by surprise, despite the numbing weight of her still-present drowsiness. She stood there gawking at her reflection, bewildered by the distinctly Himalayan scene sprouting from her mandible crust. A series of jagged, panicky exhalations fogged up the glass, while her minty-mist breath worked to sculpt a pleasant-yet-bleak bathroom atmosphere. The air felt thinner somehow, and the landscape of her mind felt just as clouded, just as inaccessible as the sky-piercing peaks she saw there in the mirror.
She curled her icy lips, testing a tentative grin with her new granite chompers, but an avalanche came spilling out—this explosion of foam with a blooming cloud of dust and debris ghost-gliding down her chin with alarming rapidity. It was still drool-esque, just sped up and snowier somehow. The aftermath left her lips numb and pallid, well on their way to that lifeless sheen, that essence-less look.
Very tentatively, she began to inspect the damage, began to tickle her tongue across the treacherous ridges occupying the space her teeth once stood, but the wormlike appendage latched itself onto the ice—got trapped in place, glued. Rigid.
Stuck.
She yanked at it, pulled at it, but this was a tug-of-war its root would not win.
Instead, she reverted to studying her newfangled reflection. It was like looking at a copy of National Geographic; this magnificent, beautiful terrain right there for her own personal amusement and appreciation. But it was otherworldly, too.
Eerie, even.
It occurred to her that all the bits of plaque that were clinging to her once-mighty molars might as well be corpses buried in the gaps now—stiff bodies lodged deep within unreachable crevices—brave-but-bold explorers long forgotten.
And if her mouth now housed this inexplicable topography, what other lovely-but-deadly natural wonders was her body concealing? The chilly possibilities made her shudder. Were her intestines now gigantic caves to spelunk, her veins rushing rivers to raft, her gut a godlike volcano about to blow?
Abbie Doll is a writer residing in Columbus, OH, with an MFA from Lindenwood University and is a fiction editor at Identity Theory. Her work has been featured or is forthcoming in Door Is a Jar Magazine, Full House Literary, and The Bitchin’ Kitsch, among others. Connect on socials @AbbieDollWrites.
Hawaii Pacific Review 