Blink

life, but it’s good to start doing it now so when you’re old like me and your body starts betraying you, it’s become habit. The latest research shows an increased risk of heart disease and stroke and some cancers in people who have gum disease.” In response, Amy gave him a thumbs-up. It was the same thumbs-up that she, like most of his teenage patients, gave every time the topic of flossing came up. It was their polite way of shutting him up. After all, teenagers and your adults didn’t have time for something as silly and sometimes painful as flossing considering their busy social lives.

  Everything looked generally good in there: a little plaque, a little tartar, a little bleeding, a little stain, but that was all normal after six months, even in someone who brushed regularly. The only thing that bothered him at all wasn’t even anything dental related.

  It was that damn tongue-ring.

  Amy hadn’t possessed a tongue ring six months earlier. He would have remembered if she did. It must have been a recent acquisition. But it wasn’t the existence of a tongue ring itself that bothered Brian; he had seen his fair share of them over the past couple years as their popularity exploded in the young population, a generation that seemed determined to mutilate and disfigure themselves into oblivion as a way to express their individuality. (Brian always found it quite ironic that the patients with the most tattoos and piercings seemed to be the most fearful of needles). No, it wasn’t the presence of the ring that bothered him. It was the presence of this particular tongue ring.

  Most of the rings he had seen up to now- actually, all of the rings he had seen up until now- were either a small silver stud or a colorful acrylic ball. But Amy’s… it was about the size of a marble, considerably larger than any he had ever laid his eyes on, and nestled in a significant depression towards the front of her tongue. The design was much more ornate than anything he had ever seen before. The orb was a deep crimson in color, streaked throughout with a network of fine silver and black threads, and bisected down the middle with a long black slit that looked similar to a snake’s pupil. It looked like an eye plucked from the face of a demon, adding a certain ugliness to an otherwise beautiful mouth. Despite its outlandish design, though, it didn’t look cheap or cartoonish; in fact, the amount of detail incorporated into the eye made it look damn real. And damn unnerving.

  And if the design of the eye wasn’t creepy enough, the fact that it seemed to watch Brian as he worked made him feel uneasy.

  Now Dr. Brian Mallory considered himself a very sane, very grounded man, not given over easily to fantasy or conspiracy. He knew there was a very rational reason for why that eye seemed to follow him. It could have been a simple trick of the light and how it reflected off the crimson orb. It could have been purely coincidence, Amy moving and resting her tongue in such a way that the pupil of the eye always seemed to linger on him. Hell, the eye itself could have been an independent sphere within a thin plastic shell, always rolling around as the tongue moved. There were half a dozen logical explanations.

  But none of them felt right to Brian.

  He stepped on the pedal, once again raising Amy to a sitting position.

  “Am I done?” she asked.

  “Almost,” Brian said. “Just want to look at your x-rays once more, then take a final look inside your mouth.”

  “You know you won’t find anything,” Amy said, smiling that wonderful, infectious smile.

  “Probably. But I want to be thorough. There’s a first time for everything.” He examined the x-rays on the computer screen for thirty seconds or so, found nothing suspicious hiding in the black, white and gray images, then reclined the chair a final time.

  With his patient once again supine, Brian asked Amy to open her mouth. He went around the upper arch first, utilizing his mirror and explorer to examine the teeth. He lingered a little longer on the backs of her front teeth (the degree of enamel pitting was the same as it had been for the past five years, meaning she hadn’t slipped back into that disgusting, dangerous habit of vomiting up most, if not all, of her food), then moved to the bottom arch, where he likewise examined each surface of every tooth. Satisfied that she still remained cavity-free, he was about to lift her up for the final time when his gaze fell once again on that tongue ring.

  That eye was looking at him. He swore it was. Amy’s tongue was perfectly flat, perfectly still, yet that slitted, reptilian pupil seemed to be staring directly at him when it should have been pointed straight up, at the roof of her mouth.

  Brian didn’t know where the sudden idea came from. He knew on some primal, instinctive level that what he was about to do was in fact a very bad idea. But he found himself doing it anyway, as if his hands were ignoring his brain’s urgent prodding to cease this foolish activity. Silently, he flipped the mouth mirror over in his right hand, stabilized Amy’s jaw with his left, positioned the butt-end of the mirror over the tongue ring, and gently tapped.

  He expected to hear the light ting of metal hitting metal. Or the more hollow sound of metal striking plastic. What he expected, though- what any rational man would have expected- was not what happened.

  A moment before the mirror struck home, the tongue ring blinked.

  It blinked.

  Brian’s mirror didn’t strike the eyeball, but instead a black shield, an eyelid, that had unfurled from underneath to close over and protect it.

  Horrified, Brian’s fingers went limp and the mirror slid from his latex-clad grip, bouncing off the corner of Amy’s lip, bouncing off her shoulder, and clattering noisily to the floor. Normally, he would have attempted to save the fallen instrument before it fell to the ground, but every muscle in his body was momentarily paralyzed as he stared, completely and absolutely revolted, at the tongue ring.

  Slowly, the ebony eyelid opened and receded back to where it had come from, into that depression which cradled the eye. That slitted pupil rotated towards him and the disembodied eye seemed to glare imperiously, as if to say who are you to strike me?

  Foot shaking, it took Brian several moments to successfully put enough pressure on the foot pedal to activate it. The chair raised Amy to a sitting position.

  “Am I done,” she asked, turning to look at Brian.

  He simply nodded, his lips trembling slightly but refusing to make any cogent sounds.

  Amy reached up and began to remove the bib around her neck. She handed the alligator clips and damp bib to Brian, who accepted it with slightly shaking hands, then stood up. “Thank you,” she said.

  Brian finally found his voice. “Welcome,” he mumbled.

  Amy turned and began to leave the room, but Brian managed to find his absent voice before she disappeared.

  “I think you’re tongue ring blinked at me,” he said stupidly, realizing how foolish he sounded as the words escaped his mouth.

  Amy stopped, one foot in the hallway, one still in his room. She turned slowly and smiled at Brian, a smile he no longer found charming but instead slightly unsettling. “Yeah, it does that sometimes.”

  Brian responded by sitting there with what he imagined was a dumb look on his face.

  Amy laughed. “Don’t worry, you’ll get used to it.”

  “You think this fad has legs?” Brian asked, hoping against hope it wouldn’t. It was just too creepy, even if the ring itself was quite harmless, just a bizarre little toy. And that’s all it was, wasn’t it? A motorized tongue ring? What else could it be? At that moment, Brian wouldn’t even consider the alternatives.

  “No, not a fad,” she said. “More like an invasion.”

  “Excuse me? Invasion? You mean like the British Invasion during the sixties.”

  She laughed lightly again. She seemed to have the giggles. But it was a condescending laughter, not the innocent laughter of delight. “No, silly,” she said, offering another chuckle, an airy sound that somehow possessed both amused and sinister qualities. “But don’t worry. Once your people have been subjugated, you and others in your pro
fession will be like kings. After all, cleanliness is next to Godliness, and who better to keep the new masters clean and healthy within their homes than you?”

  Brian didn’t know what to say, so he said nothing.

  In response to the silence, Amy spread her lips slightly, allowing her tongue to roll out of her mouth to a length that would have put Gene Simmons to shame. The slippery organ then split into three separate pieces of meat, each strip undulating gently like an obscene tentacle, tasting or smelling or just feeling the air within the office.

  And then they were gone, back into Amy’s mouth, and nothing about the girl appeared odd anymore except for the once sweet smile that now seemed ominous instead of innocent. “I’ll tell mom and dad you said hi,” Amy said. “And I’ll be seeing you again.”

  “Six months,” Brian said quietly.

  “Six months,” she said. “Maybe sooner. And don’t worry, I’ll start flossing. And I mean it this time. The new masters demand it.” With those ominous words hanging in the air, Amy turned and left the room, her skirt swirly gently about her hips as she went.

  Once she was gone from view, Brian felt all of the tenseness drain out of him, and he allowed himself to slump back in his chair. With Amy gone he was finally able to think, but the bizarre thoughts which invaded and swirled around his mind made him feel like he was going