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Ed Goes to the Dentist
Ned Mudd
what might be a path out of the woods. It appeared he was dragging something or someone with him, could hear them breathing next to his ear.
He came around a limb, ran for what looked to be a clearing. He spied the ghostly shape of a bear in the trail and swung a fist. There was a sud­den unexpected shriek from the animal and then Ed was standing in an some sort of eerie field.
"Holy shit," he muttered. He noted that the entire left side of his face
Ed was sitting in a dentist's chair. A girl in a white lab coat had a long tube stuck in one corner of his mouth. The tube made a weird sucking sound that reminded Ed of something he'd like to talk the girl into doing.
"Ok?" a voice said.
Ed couldn't see the man on the other end of the voice. The man held a metal drill and was standing behind a row of bright lights.
Ed mumbled a garbled syllable and tried to nod, causing the dentist to grin and reactivate his drilling equipment. Somewhere in the back of his
was made out of rubber.
"Ed!" a man shouted. "Get back
in here this minute or I'm calling
the Police!"
It was the man with the chain saw.
Ed lunged onto a logging road
and flagged down a pick up truck.
"Out of the truck!" Ed shouted to
the man behind the wheel.
Whoever Ed had dragged
through the forest was still at­
tached to his arm, so he pushed
them into the truck. Then he was
in the driver's seat, engaging the
vehicle's gears, hearing the tires
squeal as the truck sped off into
the unknown.
Ed was beginning to feel re­
freshed; an alertness crept into his
field of view, not unlike the effect
of sobering up after a long drunk.
It was a sensation he was all too
familiar with.
He noticed there was a song
playing on the truck's radio. A
lonely voice was singing, "I'm sick
and tired of being sick and tired."
"What you need is a drink," Ed
told the radio.
Something giggled in the pas­
senger seat.
Ed concentrated with all his
might. He was driving a truck
down Country Club Road. There
was a girl in the opposite seat. He
mind, Ed recognized that he was under the influence of nitrous ox­
ide. It occurred to him that laugh­
ing gas was probably a lot more
fun outside the sterile walls of a
dentist's office.
Ed imagined that the surface of
his diseased tooth was a grove of
old growth trees and the drill was
a giant chain saw. He concluded
that the dentist was in actuality
a demented logger, hell bent on
clear-cutting everything with bark
on it.
The dentist leaned forward,
causing a shadow to glide across
Ed's closed eyelids. The shadow
reminded Ed that he was deep
inside a National Forest and was
being attacked by a hostile lum­
berjack.
"Doesn't this bastard ever get
enough?" Ed asked himself. But
the frantic sounds inside his jaw
obscured the answer. He felt the
inside of his cranium rattling.
The screeching sound was jam­
ming Ed's brain waves. He tried
putting space between himself
and the chain saw's implacable
path of destruction, but found the
task little more than futile. A distant
inner voice suddenly whispered
-fight or flight.
Ed reached out and grabbed
the logger by the throat. The for­
est suddenly became a place of
thought she might be wearing a white lab jacket.
"Sick and tired of being sick and tired," went the radio.
Ed looked over at the girl and gave her his best sheepish grin. "I don't guess things worked out too good at the dentist's office," he said.
"I don't think anybody ever liked the gas as much as you," the girl laughed.
Ed steered the truck down a long row of fancy houses, past shimmering green lawns on one side and a golf course on the other.
"Reckon it's me needs that drink," Ed said.
"Isn't kidnapping a felony?" the girl said, pushing back her hair. Even in the lab coat, Ed thought the girl looked extremely delectable.
"Not guilty by reason of insanity," Ed smiled as he turned the radio up.
Ned Mudd lives in Stinkingham...er... Birmingham, Alabama nedmudd@me.com
repose. He thought he heard someone yelling in the distance. From what he could tell, they were calling his name, perhaps in a foreign language.
As the sucking noise vanished, Ed heard a girl's voice murmur in the background. He found it odd that such a soothing frequency could be out here in the middle of nowhere.
A fierce sun burned Ed's eyes as he focused on the logger that he now held by the throat.
"You son of a bitch," Ed told the man, "one more tree falls and I'm going to shove that saw where it belongs." Ed meant business and appeared to have the upper hand.
The man being strangled was trying desperately to dislodge himself. Ed sensed other people in the area, possibly coming to the logger's de­fense.
There was only one thing to do - run!
Ed darted through the dense forest in a crouch. Every few steps he ducked behind a log, surveyed his options. If he tried hard, he could see
 




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