I recently went in for my bi-annual teeth cleaning. It was only my second time at this office—I’d switched due to the embarrassing state of health insurance/care in this country—and I was happy to confirm that my new dental hygienist was as good as I thought upon my first visit. The last one that I had was frankly awful. It seemed like it was her mission to provide me with pain. I’ve never had my gums bleed while brushing, but that happened after both prior visits at the old office.
Anyway, so there I was listening to my hygienist talk and thinking about how this doesn’t hurt so bad, but I still don’t like it, when an idea struck:
What if there were a course in dental school dedicated solely to making effective small talk, particularly of the one-sided variety?
I chuckled.
“What?” my hygienist asked.
“Gugglig,” I responded.
She went back to work, and suddenly it hit me: this would make for a pretty funny short story! What if someone went to dental school and found that most of the first semester was spent on small talk? Very quickly, my mind settled on the best man to tell that story:
Jay Wilcox.
I’ve told multiple people in my real, non-Substack life that they should subscribe to Jay. He posts three super short stories each week, they are almost always a hilarious pick-me-up, and the time commitment is like 1-2 minutes per post. What’s there to lose?
Despite this, I’ve failed as a Jay Wilcox Evangelical, so I decided to take the nuclear option. By the time I was running my tongue over my gums and setting up my next teeth cleaning appointment for the spring, I had a writing prompt fully written in my head and a plan to weasel a Jay Wilcox story right into your eager inbox, whether you wanted it or not.
Without further ado, I present my prompt and the brilliant imagination of Jay Wilcox. (Jay Wilcox!)
Prompt: You went to school to become a dental hygienist. The tooth cleaning part was easy, they said, and would be covered via at-home textbook self-study. Now, after an entire semester of lectures and activities around effective small talk, your end-of-term exam consists of a tray of foreign-looking instruments, a fellow student in a chair, and an arsenal of fairly one-sided conversation topics.
Dr. Crentist, your advisor, watches through the examination window, hazel eyes flicking to the tray of baubles and prongs as if to provide some sort of hint—as if to say, Go on, pick up the purple one. The “tools,” for lack of a better word, resemble nothing you’ve seen in class. In fact, they remind you of the vintage Happy-Meal prizes your grandmother used to keep in their wrappers in her sunroom so they’d “appreciate in value.”
You clear your throat. “So,” you say, “what brings you in today?”
The student groans. He’s heard this question before. You can do better.
“You sick of all this rain?”
A disinterested grunt.
Dr. Crentist marks a demerit on his clipboard, and in a panic, you remember the Lighthearted Responses subsection of chapter four. “Yeah, I hear that!” you say, before making another pass at the tools, which are no less bewildering than before.
Unfortunately, your lighthearted response only disinterests the student further, for now he is on his phone playing what appears to be some sort of Candy Crush. You glance to the examination window—a plea, a prayer—and can totally tell Crentist is frowning through his dental-grade N95 mask.
This isn’t why you chose dentistry. You wanted to follow in the footsteps of your forebears, mastering fluoride and the art of the rinse. If you’d known “The Dialogue of Dentistry” would be this big a chunk of the curriculum, you would have chosen a different part-time unaccredited medical training annex.
You offer the student your best tiny paper cup of Listerine.
Nope. He turns away in the chair, retreating into his phone.
How about another hit from the air-sucker tube thing?
No, he rejects that, too.
You think back to chapter four once more—the deep cuts, the footnotes. Conversation topics so one-sided he’ll have no choice but to engage! “You know, my dad’s originally from Altoona,” you say.
Nothing.
You flash him a textbook-approved wink, but still nothing.
Well, shoot. You gaze at the so-called “tools” and remember Meemaw’s Happy-Meal prizes—her treasures, she called them—and you yearn for a time before this career path, before any path, when the world was still a big box of unwrapped potential. As you look upon your student, in his Steelers jersey and Timberlands, you think of two plastic McNugget figurines, so close and yet separated by the plastic membranes dividing them. Perhaps nostalgia can pierce the veil between two souls. “Have you ever been to Altoona?” you ask.
He makes a noise you don’t understand.
“There’s a great Chili’s,” you continue. “I mean, it’s pretty good, if you’re into that kind of thing.”
You attempt to pick up your first tool, a maneuver rendered impossible by your flop sweat. Your struggle seems to elicit a laugh from the student—finally, a connection—and to show that you appreciate this fleeting communion, you give him a playful jab on the shoulder, the kind of contact Jabroni & Simms describe at length in the penultimate chapter of Dentiquette: The Fine Art of Hygienic Engagement. Unfortunately, your jab is a bit too playful. He swallows the dental dam.
While emergency surgery is normally outside your purview as a first-year student hygienist, you nonetheless prepare a sterilized surgical Grimace.
Given that the first step to any successful surgery is polite conversation, you remember your training—and then abandon it, your brain evolving in real time toward a more perfect facsimile of the Ancient Knowledge, that sacred shibboleth from the hygienists of yore. You look to the examination window, where you could swear Dr. Crentist meets you with an approving nod. An understanding that curative chit-chat transcends both time and tome.
All right. Time to bring out the big guns. “My dad had beagles, and he raised the beagles, and one of them was named Roger.”
No response.
“This was in Altoona,” you add, before inserting the Grimace.
Hahaha, my faith in Jay was not misplaced! I hope you enjoyed this as much as I did. If you want bite-sized bits of comedic genius like this multiple times a week, make sure you subscribe to his newsletter below!
 | A guest post by
|