Roots - Eileen Wiedbrauk
How old was I when they pulled the first one? Old enough to know that teeth are teeth. That when they fall out they look precisely as they did before only with now bloody red socket. So when they handed me the tiny plastic treasure chest—neon orange, I didn’t choose the color—what laid inside was a monstrosity, a malfunction: a tooth as teeth should be with long spiky point sent to kill me. There were more—each with spike, each boxed and returned to me. That was the pain, they said, why these teeth hurt more than the others. The ones that I joyfully wiggled with my fingers and worried with my tongue. Toying with them just enough to ache but not enough to hurt. Teeth that I would have gladly gone on tapping and poking until they fell out in a bite of beef; instead my mother dragged me before my father, told me to hold still, put his fingers in my mouth, pulled until the tooth gave with a pop of pain. I preferred the dentists with pliers and needles—the brutal pinch of numbing agent inserted into the gum—to fingers. At least these people, these strangers, I did not trust, did not care for. When they removed teeth, it hurt because it was before its time, that people, that teeth, aren’t supposed to leave until there’s nothing left to hold them to the place they’ve come from.
Root
noun
1. a part of the body of a plant that develops, anchoring the plant and absorbing nutriment and moisture.
2. the embedded or basal portion of a hair, tooth, nail, nerve, etc.
3. the source or origin of a thing: The love of money is the root of all evil.
4. an offshoot or scion.
5. Mathematics: a quantity that, when multiplied by itself a certain number of times, produces a given quantity
6. Grammar.: a morpheme that underlies an inflectional or derivational paradigm
7. roots: the personal relationships, affinity for a locale, habits, and the like, that make a country, region, city, or town one's true home: He lived in Tulsa for a few years, but never established any roots there.
8. Music: the lowest tone of a chord when arranged as a series of thirds; the fundamental.
9. Machinery: (in a screw or other threaded object) the narrow inner surface between threads. Compare crest (def. 18), flank (def. 7).
–verb (used without object)
10. to become fixed or established.
–verb (used with object)
11. to pull, tear, or dig up by the roots (often fol. by up or out); to extirpate; exterminate; remove completely (often fol. by up or out): to root out crime.
1. a part of the body of a plant that develops, anchoring the plant and absorbing nutriment and moisture.
2. the embedded or basal portion of a hair, tooth, nail, nerve, etc.
3. the source or origin of a thing: The love of money is the root of all evil.
4. an offshoot or scion.
5. Mathematics: a quantity that, when multiplied by itself a certain number of times, produces a given quantity
6. Grammar.: a morpheme that underlies an inflectional or derivational paradigm
7. roots: the personal relationships, affinity for a locale, habits, and the like, that make a country, region, city, or town one's true home: He lived in Tulsa for a few years, but never established any roots there.
8. Music: the lowest tone of a chord when arranged as a series of thirds; the fundamental.
9. Machinery: (in a screw or other threaded object) the narrow inner surface between threads. Compare crest (def. 18), flank (def. 7).
–verb (used without object)
10. to become fixed or established.
–verb (used with object)
11. to pull, tear, or dig up by the roots (often fol. by up or out); to extirpate; exterminate; remove completely (often fol. by up or out): to root out crime.
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