It wasn’t that I simply knocked the old woman’s dentures out with my elbow. At least then, I would have been able to scoop them up with a napkin and hand them back.
What happened is that after they handed me my coffee, I turned and my elbow smacked right into her face, spilling her teeth out onto the floor.
As people shrieked, I hit the ground and began picking them up one by one.
“Oh God,” I muttered. “Oh God…”
“Leave her alone!” someone screamed.
“You’ve done enough,” said someone else, who tried to pull me away.
But I just couldn’t listen. I had to make things right.
“Oh God,” I said as I tried, one by one, to fit her fake teeth back into their correct sockets. “Oh, uh…is this a molar? I asked” “Oh, ummm…Oh God…”
When I finished, it was a disaster. The old woman’s smile was a decrepit graveyard of unevenly spaced stones, jutting out in all directions.
“Here,” I said nervously, as I dumped the remaining teeth into the palm of her hand. “Here. Okay? I have a business meeting. I’m sorry.”
THE END
