TODAY, the morning air smelled like the waiting room in Dr. Smiley’s Dentistry. There was no reason to have memories predating breakfast rattling in her mind, so she popped a cough drop in her mouth and let the cherry and menthol-flavored saliva forget those memories for her. Her throat needed no relief. Vitra craved that flavor to avoid the cruel sneer on the receptionist’s face when her mother mentioned cavities. It might have not been a sneer, maybe just a friendly smile misinterpreted—but her mother—nobody was asking her mother to say her appointment reason out loud for the entire office to hear.
Vitra pictured the shine of rubies in sunlight, illuminated with the same shine of the cartoon cherries on her cough drop packet. It was better than trying to guess how many of her friends suspected cavities in her mouth. Bright reds and smooth facets were easier on the eyes than her smile. She would sooner memorize all the convoluted chemical names on the cough drop’s ingredient list than wonder how noticeable the slight yellowness on her teeth is when she talks.
Yet, the miseries weighed heavily in her brain like her amygdala had swelled up. Her internal monologue betrayed nothing about the shame rotting in her mouth, and still, the burden of it was yanking her underground as if it was all she could soliloquy. Vitra stared out the smudged bus window and tasted her cough drop with every single taste bud on her tongue before it dissipated.
Then, she had no trouble replacing the bitter aftertaste of the first cough drop’s disappearance with the cold and sweet introduction of a second one. It was hard reminding her mother to buy the cherry ones and not the honey ones her mother preferred. Just a pack. The rest could be honey, but at least one please had to be cherry.
“I don’t like cherry,” Mommy said.
“But it’s for me,” Vitra clarified, once more.
“I don’t like cherry,” Mommy said.
Vitra used to like cherry, until the thirty-first cough drop left a bitterness that was just a degree warmer than the heat of her mouth, a bitterness that couldn’t be replaced by a thirty-second cough drop because her mother only got just a pack of the cherry ones. The rest were the honey ones her mother preferred.
Now, the air was sweltering golden yellow. Bees were buzzing in a corner above the front porch, in a radius that extended too far close to the doorbell. Even the promise of air conditioning wasn’t a tempting enough luxury to assure Vitra that she would survive the reverberation of her first doorbell attempt. It would take many more for her mother to remember she had cochleas, maybe even more than how many cough drops it took Vitra to forget Dr. Smiley’s receptionist.
Vitra could find another flavor of cough drops to like at the liquor store. She didn’t need to go home.