Weekly Drabble #127: Teeth (Patreon)

This week's prompt is 'smile' from EBB, so we have a story about protecting smiles! What could be better? Especially if you're a five-hundred pound predator species.

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Teeth:

“Doctor, your nine o’clock is here,” Cherry said, her voice shaking.

Dr. Yuu Halls nodded. “Understood.” Right on time, but then he hadn’t expected anything else.

He came out to the waiting room. No one else was here, so it was just Cherry behind her desk, bug-eyed and staring. She was new. His other secretary, Eileen, was an older woman coming up on retirement and she’d switched to part-time for her health. Cherry was fresh from university and Halls considered himself lucky to get her. He’d had two other replacement administrative assistants quit already. His dental hygienist normally handled this part, doing the cleaning and prep work before he saw patients, but Jilene refused to do it with these clients. At least not without Halls in the room.

He held out his hand. “Welcome, welcome. I’m glad you were able to come in on such short notice.”

Two pairs of eyes on either side of a long, triangular head, two with vertical pupils and two with horizontal, looked back at him. A large hand engulfed Yuu’s own. Four fingers, two thumbs. It was cool and scaled. “It is no trouble,” a soft, rumbling voice answered.

“Just a routine cleaning and check-up, right? Nothing bothering you all that much?”

“No.”

“Good, let’s get you seated and we can start. Just follow me. We’re in the corner room.”

Heavy, plodding footfalls followed Hall. “So this is your first visit to a dentist?” Halls asked conversationally.

“Yes,” his patient answered. He was young, with resplendent tiger-patterned scales, jags of white, orange and black. He wore a cloak of deep blue, more like a horse blanket than the human style of apparel. All four of his eyes took in his surroundings, his forearms held under his chest as the raptor-like alien followed Hall into the office. Instead of the usual chair for human patients, there was a cushioned cradle for Halls’s Siir-Ellk visitors, so they could lie on it with forearms and legs to either side, their large, fang-filled mouths held up by a chin rest. 

The Siir-Ellk were adjusting to life on Earth. Earth was adjusting to them as well, ever since their refugee ship, bearing nearly fifty million aliens that had more in common with Utahraptors than the many humanoid aliens mankind had envisioned, slammed down in the Mojave desert. 

“Just take a seat right there,” Yuu told his patient, Born Without the Yoke, one of the relative handful of Siir-Ellk born on their ship on their desperate flight to freedom. The young male, easily four hundred pounds, probably closer to five, settled himself on the seat. All four eyes watched Hall and Jilene. “That’s good,” he encouraged the alien. Born Without the Yoke’s head was the size of Yuu’s torso and was filled with rows of sharp, serrated teeth, each one like a dagger made for the express purpose of cutting through flesh. Relations between Siir-Ellk and humanity were… complicated, especially since the former looked to the latter like primeval hunters from tens of millions of years ago, and the latter looked to the former like their traditional prey species.

Yuu’s first Siir-Ellk patient had been Hatched Under Stars, a testy peacock-coloured young woman and she’d spread word of his services among her people in the region. He’d had this room built specifically for his Siir-Ellk patients, and only a lack of other dentists willing to take on these jobs kept him from expanding further. “All right,” he said as he put on his mask and headlamp, looking at Jilene to give her a reassuring nod. “Open wide…”