DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

I took off my sunglasses and reached out to shake my dentist’s hand. He reached out but froze halfway, aghast. “What happened?!” he said, his eyes wide above the paper nose-mask. “Your nose is all red — it looks like somebody hit you!”

“Oh,” I said, “my sunglasses leave red marks. It’s nothing.” I mentally dismissed the alarm that had started adrenaline boiling through my veins.

“No, really!” he continued, as he handed me a mirror, “see how you’re all blue under your eyes, and your nose is red.”

He was right. I looked ghoulish. I felt like a cartoon, looking in a mirror to see some grotesque monster-head peering back at me. I shook my head and felt reality snap back into place — it’s just my face, colors distorted by sun, wind, lack of sleep, and the green fluorescent light in the dentist’s office. If you stare at anything too closely it will begin to look bizarre, an unfamiliar collection of lines and textures. Still, he’d made me self-conscious and unsettled in my own skin, and I wasn’t happy about it.

A couple of minutes later, I bit him.