There was one molar in the center of the bottom of his right foot.

Every other step, a distinct click could be heard as the tooth struck the wooden floor. Oddly, there was no pain associated with the tooth. It appeared in his sleep with nary a trace of irritation. He lived his daily life with the new growth, wandering the halls of the ward like a ghost until breakfast, then lunch, then television, then dinner. His indifference kept him in a thick mental haze that made him forget how to brush his teeth and wake up in the middle of the night to urinate in the closet. In the Alzheimers ward, the staff was usually the opposite of thorough in their investigations of residents, and the tooth remained for several weeks until it fell out in the bath. Is that a tooth? one caretaker asked the other, who was helping bathe Herman. Its a molar. Oh my God. Where did that come from? Is it from him? Theres no blood anywhere. I have no idea. The tooth was saved in a Ziploc bag and placed on the counter in the medical supply room, where it remained for months as staff dealt with more pressing issues.

*****
Hermans wife had returned from the grocery store as the sun was setting through the clouds and oranges and reds filled the horizon. Their home, an old Victorian with many rooms, offered a prime view of the sunset from its upper balcony, and that is where Herman sat in his Adirondack chair with a whiskey. He felt the handle of the hammer. It had weight to it, and had come with the house, found in the basement. It was, indeed, a hammer, thought Herman. There is no object that could better fit the

definition of a hammer, as it did not even have a screw puller on the opposite side of the head. It was simply an iron blunt on the end of an iron handle wrapped in leather. It was built with the idea it mind that it would hammer, and do nothing else. His plan was to approach his wife from the back, aiming just below lamboidal suture where the spine attached to the skull. The separation of these two would result in a near-instant death. He knew this due to his brief tenure in medical school, which he failed out of in two years. He went to work in a lawyers office filing paperwork and eventually earned a law degree himself. This is how he afforded the Victorian. At first he missed the suture, knocking his wife unconscious with a blow high up on the back of her head as she placed arugula in the refrigerator. The blood was immediate and spilled copiously, and he hit her twice more before her limbs stopped twitching, and he remembered a grasshopper he had killed the day before. He left his wifes body in the deep, dark bog in the next county over. It took a good three hours to clean the staining blood out of the wooden floor, and Herman kept taking off and putting on his glasses as he worked with the chemicals, almost always forgetting that he had placed the glasses on the counter and searching the house every twenty minutes or so until he remembered. His arthritic knees hurt, but he kept going, cleaning the blood less to get rid of evidence and more because he liked the house neat.

*****
Herman had had a dark childhood marked by trauma, which worsened an already homicidal personality. He burned ants and stared fascinatedly at decapitated mice in traps. At age eight he found a one-week old puppy in a ditch down the street

from his house, and his first thought was all of the wonderful ways he could torture it. Unlike most children, who would beg their parents for a chance to keep a puppy, Herman excitedly destroyed the animal after a small internal debate about getting caught. He did, however, get caught after his father found the puppys body. He was beaten severely, but in the same manner he had always been, and the punishment did not quite stand out from the ones he got when he broke the oven or stole the neighbor boys bike. He was always very interested in the human body. This is why, by the time he was a teenager, his goal was medical school. The issue was that he simply could not study at anything but his own pace, hence his eventual failing grades. During his time in school, however, he loved gross lab. In gross lab, you dissected cadavers. Precisely cutting through muscle and bone was highly enjoyable to Herman, despite the fact that it did not cause suffering. He admired the beauty of the human body, its little mechanisms and large systems of organs. The mouth was especially fascinating. Through the mouth, one gained nutrition and spoke to other humans, two things Herman had always had trouble doing. From a young age his teeth had been rotting out of his mouth. His neglectful parents did not make him brush nor take him to the dentist, and he was constantly in pain when eating. Herman also stuttered, another issue that remained unaddressed during his childhood, and was a constant issue in school. I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I n-need m-my lunch he said to the older fifth grader, who had his

brown bag lunch crumpled in one hand. Say it and Ill give it to you: I need my lunch. I-I-I n-need my lunch. Herman watched as the boy tossed his lunch on the roof of the cafeteria.

*****
He met his wife at thirty. She was the type destined to be a housewife, someone who did not want to go to college and wanted to have many children. Herman did not want children. He had always had an air about him, not that of a potential murderer, but of someone just a bit off-center. Anything to further push this reputation away from him was welcome. They married one June on Cape Cod. They honeymooned in a ramshackle house on the shore. They did not speak very much, but were paired like two birds who would mate for life. What Sharon, the wife, did not know, was that Herman was virtually sterile. He had started using the chemicals at age seventeen. Stolen from a doctors office, the medroxyprogesterone acetate stemmed his urges to have sex with nearly everything, which he had previously desired (everything). This desire was the only thing he really felt, and he didnt like it, even though he didnt have anything to compare the numbness to. He saw other people laughing and crying and realized he never did it, and from those observations stemmed his desire to modify and normalize his own lack of feeling and frequently abnormal behavior. The only thing he didnt stop was the killing, because he simply couldnt, it was a need beyond food or water. Primal, was what it was.

Herman had a theory that, had he been born in a different time, perhaps on the primeval savannah in a group of hunters, his savagery would be praised, his cutthroat nature would bring profit. For now, however, he killed dogs and cats and felt the feeling he imagined he would have killing a mammoth or another warrior.

*****
He never wanted to forget his wife, but she needed to be done away with. He hunted, but never brought home any meat, for he shot the animals in non-lethal areas and tortured them to the point where they were no longer edible. In the beginning of their marriage Herman did an excellent job of maintaining a sunny disposition with no traces of homicidal tendencies. However, she had begun to see hints of violence in his behavior at a time that coincided with the disintegration of their marriage for other, more common reasons. After the murder, he called the police and reported his wifes disappearance. A pillar of the community due to the reputation of his law firm, Herman was questioned for only an hour before being let go. The search for his wife took three weeks. The bog, too deep and thick to dig through, was ignored in the search, and by then the acidic nature of the bog water would have helped to decompose the majority of the corpse. The aftermath was short and sweet. Herman was sent cakes and casseroles and held a memorial service. A year later his wife, who had always been rather mousey and inactive in the community, was largely forgotten and life went on as it always had.

*****

Herman passed away due to a severe bout of pneumonia about six months after he woke up with the click-clacking tooth. His wifes tooth, sitting on the counter of the supply room, was finally discovered by the coroner who came to check his final vital signs. The staff presented it to him as a sort of novelty, telling its story while giggling at points, curious in a way that showed little sympathy for Hermans previous condition. Dr. Alhelm recognized it as not just a molar, but a female molar, thanks to a study he had read in the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology the month before (Modern human molar enamel thickness and enameldentine junction shape [T.M. Smith et. al.]). The thickness of the enamel on this molar, as well as the size of its dentine surface, indicates that it is most likely generated by a female said Dr. Alhelm. It seemed to come out of a man! exclaimed a nurse, How could this be a female molar? Well have to see, said the coroner, and he put the molar in his coat pocket.

*****
Taking the molar out of the bag, the coroner set it on the lab table. The first step would be to match dental records to the tooth, but the missing piece of the puzzle was exactly what set of records to pull and compare. He had had an incident with Herman long ago. They had grown up in the same small town and went to school together, and each had returned to practice in their respective fields after they finished graduate school. It was during a long summer between the ninth and tenth grades that the coroner actually began to know Herman.

You crack the necks like this. said the 15-year-old Herman, as he picked up a chicken, grabbed it by the head, and made a whipping motion that internally separated the spine. The two teenagers were being paid five cents to kill each bird and decapitate and de-foot-and-claw each body. It was the perfect job for Herman, because he could get his thrills legally and even be compensated, but the joy he took in the practice was sickening to Alhelm. Herman smiled and hummed during the work, snapping the spines quickly, efficiently, rhythmically. Herman was disturbing, not the killing, and would spark vivid memories and a certain amount of mental trauma in any healthy observer. This resulted in Dr. Alhelms immediate suspicious behavior upon seeing Herman dead in the ward. Despite the story that the Alzheimers nurses told him, Dr. Alhelm ran the tooth against the dental records of every missing person cold case in the last ten years, and sure enough, a woman named June Werson came up as a match. With a very slight amount of investigation he found out June was Hermans late wife.

*****
Her name is June and she does not appall me. said Herman, at age twenty-nine. What do you mean she does not appall me? said the psychoanalyst. She has something that I want so I do not want to hurt her. I know of your urges, Herman. I do not know whether or not you act on them, but I do know I have previously labeled you a psychopath, the psychoanalyst. Yes. I know. This is a breakthrough. You have had a feeling, even if it is foreign, even if you do not know it. Herman, I believe your intellectual and emotional growth has been stunted to

the point where you cant identify feelings, even what a feeling is. But I believe you have had one.

*****
He had held her hand on Cape Cod. While they did not speak, for Herman could not communicate the small trickle of a feeling he had, he was able to show it somewhat through small things. She cooked him dinner, and accepted his excuses for not making love. When he admitted he could not have children, they attempted to adopt, which occupied them for many years. June eventually accepted that children were not in their future, and focused on housework and crafts. Herman guessed she had wanted children so badly because she had so few friends. Children would not be simple company, but they would be love, and this realization prompted his second recognizable emotion, which was sadness. June started to fade away at age fifty-five. Herman observed that she was depressed constantly, she laid in her bedroom with the shades drawn for weeks at a time, coming out on rare occasions to eat. She was wasting away. She attempted suicide twice, and was successful the third time. Once was with pills, an extra-strong dose of morphine obtained from a doctors office. The second was breathing carbon monoxide in the closed garage. The third was when she asked Herman to do it. She not fault him for his tendencies, as he was somewhat victimized by his own nature. Herman, when asked, knew he had to do it. He had always believed things had the right to die, and he was not particularly sentimental about it, which would help him

complete the act. He did not know that seed of an emotion he had, the one that made him hold her hand, would only grow with her death, and he would feel something after all. In his own way, he would remember her, and the significance would stem his fear.

*****
After putting away the hammer Herman cut two stacked, parallel two-point-five inch lines in the center of his foot, heel to toe. He slowly hollowed out a quarter inch deep ditch under the flap of skin he had created, and inserted the molar he had cut from his wifes gums, patching the lines with surgical glue. The wound, with careful care, took about four and a half weeks to heal. Five years later, at sixty-five, Hermans Alzheimers was severe enough to warrant his commitment to a home.