Yesterday was yet another dental visit. I go three times a year because . . . apparently, because that's how many times my insane insurance company will pay for me to go without charging me anything. Naturally, Jessica, my hygienist, immediately stuck a car jack in my mouth and started energetically cranking away.

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHH!" I screamed as my jawbone snapped like a dry branch. It would have hung loosely, bouncing off my throat but for the incredible tension still being exerted by the car jack. "You're such a wuss," said Jessica, and she punched me playfully in the testicles. Tears streamed down my face as Jessica produced a jar of angry, writhing black larvae. "Uvula leeches," she murmured. "Just what Daddy needs." I sat helplessly, pinioned to the chair in a complicated arrangement of electrified cables as she rechecked the car jack, and judiciously ratcheted it another notch. I saw my reflection in her small glasses as she leaned over me; I looked like Munch's The Scream, and I desperately looked around for art thieves who might, however briefly, steal me away from this horrible tableau, but alas. Fuck you, Interpol.

Jessica, unfazed by my weak thrashings, set about hammering cedar planks into my gums, further incapacitating me. "The leeches like the smell of cedar," she explained, and dumped the jar of invertebrates into my maw. They promptly attached themselves to my palate and the back of my throat and began a frenzy of blood-feeding; this anemone-like feeling activated my gag reflex, and I vomited explosively all over my lap, earning me a stern look from Jessica. "That's not cricket," she said disapprovingly, and promptly stuck crickets in my ears. Where the fuck does she find this stuff? Jessica has a way with symbolic gestures.

Jessica finally had a look inside my mouth, prodding here and there with rusty hooks that she retrieved as needed from a nearby toilet. "Did you burn your mouth recently?" she asked. "YAAHH!" I screamed. "YEEE-YAAA!" I was trying to say, "Yes, pizza!" but the car jack and the blood loss from the feasting parasites mangled my diction. It was as if Jessica hadn't heard me anyway. "I see flaps of flesh. Here and here and here." Each "here" was punctuated by a rough jab to the hard palate with an unbent coat hanger.

I gave myself over to misery with a throat full of bilious bloodworms and fragments of iron. As if reading my thoughts, Jessica calmly remarked, "Amazon is having a sale," and then, startlingly, she pulled up her skirt and defecated into my mouth.

"We're in the home stretch now!" she trilled, and clouted me over the head with a length of re-bar; I fell limply to the floor. "We're almost done." She pulled out a silver coach's whistle and put it in her mouth and produced a shrill, quavering tone. I heard a sound like distant thunder, and then, still lying on the floor, trying to clear my befouled mouth, six hundred Kenyan runners stampeded over my head, trampling my skull with their Nike sneakers.

"IT'S THE NEWEST THING!" I heard Jessica call to me over the din and head trauma. "KENYAN MARATHON RUNNERS HAVE COMPLETELY REVOLUTIONIZED THE DENTAL INDUSTRY!" The Kenyans were very polite, and many of them muttered apologies to me as they stepped on my face. N'Degemendo in particular was kind and threw a mint at my head. It bounced off my brow and landed before my right eye; it smelled like Christmas and freedom. Jessica swiftly picked it up and threw it into the garbage. "That's bad for your teeth," she explained.

Finally, I was all done. Jessica undid the complicated arrangement of now-depowered cables that had been binding me, and then ushered me out of the office. "See you in January!" she sang.

"All right, " I replied glumly. It's a good thing none of this is out of my pocket, I thought blackly. As long as insurance is paying.

"Do you need parking validation?" asked the receptionist politely as I made for the door. "Naw," I said. "I walked."

"All righty, then!" she replied mildly. "Don't forget to get fucked, stupid!"

"Thanks," I said. "See you in a few months."