Cavities

Holes in between things, and velvet Roman evenings

The velvet Roman evenings in question.

Everything has felt like a slap lately. I am exhausted and angry that I am exhausted and I am tired of the dichotomy of being sold something in one social media post and being warned in the next of all the things going wrong, including the post just before. Mostly, I am tired, tired, tired, of hearing about how not using generative AI is leaving me behind, or, conversely, that everything I put out, from pictures to words, must be guarded, or it will be stolen. There’s so much genAI seeping into things that I automatically click out of anything I recognize as AI for fear of it seeping into the crannies of my brain, out of alarm that I, in turn, will start to normalize it without meaning to, that I will start to sound like it. Even though it does not have its own sound, just the echoes of the voices of the humans it swallows. I don’t want to sound like something swallowed and regurgitated. I want to sound like me, in all of my fractures and meanderings and em dashes and wrong roads taken (they are, after all, my roads, by definition of the fact I have chosen them).

Everything has felt like it’s washed in gold lately. Instead of rushing I will stop mid-walk to watch the wind curling through the trees. I am in love with the Roman parrots showing their bellies when they fly over my head, and I am enamored with the quiet of meeting someone in the park in the early morning. The tree leaves are silver underneath and I think this is likely more precious than diamonds and I am filled with the glory and poetry and this miracle of a world around us, through us. Lunch at the beach with a friend on the border of a wild sea is a wondrous privilege and while the breeze flips up the corner of the blanket I think, my sound is my own, no matter what. I write like I did when I was a child, scribbling in a notebook, ink out of my pores; it was enough for me then, and it is enough for me now. I do not want the fear, and the fear, and the fear of what happens if the words leave my page and they are gobbled up.

A few months ago while I walked back from the dentist a little piece nudged into my head, and when I got home, mouth still sore (true story), I jotted down Cavities. Last week Shadow and Sax and then Epistemic Literary, two phenomenal, human-driven literary magazines I’m a big fan of, did me the very great honor of publishing it, and now I’m sharing it here, with you. In the case of Epistemic, I also had the honor of Cavities appearing alongside work by friend and fellow writer Candace Kronen, whose erasure piece in testament of righteous rage is a glory to witness.

I celebrate everything I can these days. And like in everything, there’s a sprinkle of Rome mixed into the madness.

Cavities

by Flavia Brunetti

“They’re the dark spots here and here,” my dentist says, pointing to the x-ray on the wall. “I thought you’d only have one, but there are two!”

He says it like I won something, lifts two fingers, as if I’m not going to understand. I do, I want to tell him. I really do understand the concept of multiple empty spaces tucked underneath the enamel, burrowing close to my brain.

“It might be because of the teeth grinding,” he continues. I suddenly remember he was my father’s dentist before mine, and my aunt’s, that in this office he has somehow taken care of generations of our mouths, mine the only one living now. “Even two years ago, your teeth were a different shape. It’s gotten worse, you’re causing damage.”

“Have you seen the world outside?” This I do say out loud, push it out past the always-present initial urge to never make someone else uncomfortable. But then I stop, because the world outside is not my dentist’s fault. There is a TV mounted high on the wall, and I have glanced up at the news reeling out of the ticker twice since I sat down, flinched away both times, forced myself to look back. Why would I be surprised that black holes appear between my teeth?

He doesn’t even seem put off by me. (I wonder if my stoic father or my elegant aunty ever said anything untoward, sitting in this chair.) I take the new night guard he hands me. “The soft one you’ve been using isn’t taking enough of the hit,” he explains. I look at it, the hard plastic in its bright pink box. Another thing molded to save me from myself, something new for my tongue to find its way around in the night, the heavy weight of my jaw in an unnatural hold, all these words that can never come out.

“You’ll get used to it,” he says reassuringly, and I wonder if my brave aunt would have thrown something across the room, but I doubt it. I get up, smile politely. Not his fault.

“That’s what I worry about,” I finally say back, when he has walked me out of his office, and I head down the stairs into a velvet Roman afternoon, just turned evening.

The city in velvet: Arco di Giano in its golden hour, il lungotevere, and her majesty the Colosseo, once night has fallen. (Also I can't believe I have to specify this but since it's been asked, I took these, they're not AI...)