Don’t Try This At Home, by Ian Hunter

Heard in the limbo of the waiting room

at Accident and Emergency

from the excited tones of two boys

It happened

It really did

That when old Granny Mutchie

was a little girl she was scared

to go to the dentist

on account of the drill

that killed her big sister

but that’s a different story

This one is about the awful

toothache she had

pain throbbing in her jaw

making her cry

when she bit anything

but still she wouldn’t see the dentist

In the end she tied the tooth

to the door handle

Bribing her big brothers

to pull the door shut

as hard as they could

So hard it yanked her skeleton

out of her skin

making them run away screaming

and now she lives beside us

in the rundown house

with the wilderness garden

If you go there on a dare

to ring her doorbell

after an eternity

four boney fingers will pull

back the lace curtain

and her face

will make you scream

that’s what they said

those two boys

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ian Hunter lives in Scotland, and is a member of the British Fantasy Society (and poetry editor for their magazine “Dark Horizons”), as well as being a member of the Glasgow Science Fiction Writers Circle and the Ghost Story Society. He is author of three children’s novels – “The Dark Knight’s Blade”, “Lipstick Lass” and “The Magic Mousehole”, and the guide to the alternative Glasgow they didn’t want you to know about “Fantastic Glasgow”. His poems and stories have appeared in magazines and anthologies in the UK, the USA and Canada.

His website is www.ian-hunter.co.uk, and he is a founding member of the Scottish writer’s collective Read Raw, www.readrawltd.co.uk