Corpse Teeth

I never knew that teeth could decay completely down to small, greenish brown nubs without actually falling out. She had the most remarkably hideous teeth I had ever seen. Around the office, we all referred to her as “Corpse Teeth” - behind her back, of course. She drank three cups of coffee a day, at the very least, and also smoked constantly. As you can imagine, she had the most fragrant breath I’d ever smelled. It was a bouquet of stale cigarettes, coffee, and gingivitis. If you caught her on the right day, you might get a hint of whiskey as well. Forty-five years old and looking every day of 60. I suppose that chain smoking, barely restrained alcoholism, and rampant drug abuse will do that to you. A bipolar personality, a fondness for skipping out on work, and a penchant for lying only added to her list of attractive qualities. She had red hair, cut like Farah Fawcett. To compliment her own hair, she wore a great deal of her cats’ hairs too. Unfortunately, she wasn’t morbidly obese, as that would have completed the ensemble too perfectly. No, she was just kind of chubby, definitely overweight but not obese. She employed the “…and lastly, remove one piece of jewelry” approach when composing her identity, as perfection is so boring.

Eventually she decided to have the front four teeth removed and replaced by a bridge. A fantastic idea! Of course, this was done without announcing the plan to anyone around her beforehand. But, the efficient and effective nature of office gossip quickly circulated this information. She was absent from work for about one and a half weeks for this surgery. When she returned, her angular brown and green teeth had been replaced by big, straight, white ones. Awesome! Can you compliment somebody on that? “Hey there! Look who doesn’t have a mouth full of broken glass and dirt anymore!” But alas, it only took two weeks before they were beige from all of the coffee and lack of cleaning. I suppose you can’t change who you are.

Corpse Teeth (also known as the “Horse-Toothed-Bitch,” affectionately, of course) did have one exceptional quality. The most fascinating detail about her character was her daughter. She had an 18 or 19 year old daughter who was not to be believed. I never learned her name but her daughter was gorgeous! She had great, full breasts, a tiny waist, nice hips, delicate facial features, and long, straight, thick, red, hair. Every aspect of her appearance encouraged procreation. I’ll never understand where in the hell those genes came from. It will always be a mystery how something so gorgeous came from something so cancerous. Corpse Teeth had pictures of her all over her desk. She was proud, and rightfully so. Being newly divorced, resembling a corpse, reeking of stale cigarettes and coffee, having the personality of a badger, displaying constant embarrassing professional ineptness, and most recently, achieving toothlessness certainly aren’t personal attributes upon which you want to dwell. If a few well-placed pictures of her beautiful daughter can distract from the cumbersome weight of her own wreckage, more power to her.

One day, Corpse Teeth quit. Three months later, as we were all losing our jobs and our little company was going belly-up, it came to light that she had been not only sabotaging our success, but had also been stealing clients away from our company. She had been fucking up her own job on purpose and slandering our company so she could take the clients for her own. Remarkably, as a result of the indifference and ineptitude of our company’s owner, no lawsuits were ever filed. We were all amazed. Many of us were angry. She sank our battleship! Corpse Teeth had won. I didn’t feel that a lawsuit was necessary - it would have been redundant. The burden of her existence was sufficient punishment. Inevitably, she will fail with her new company. It was a tangled mess of semi-literate, malignant underachievers, all fighting over a failing idea. I was just fortunate enough to be there for a year to watch the collapse. Regardless, her daughter was stunning.