So four days ago I went to the dentist for a routine teeth cleaning and ended up in the chair of an endodontist, a root canal specialist. Yeah. On my way over to the specialist a scene from the film Little Shop of Horrors popped into my mind. You know the scene where Orin, the sadistic dentist, is working on the masochistic dental patient played by Bill Murray. Visiting the dentist is a nerve-wracking event for me, even when the appointment is just for a yearly teeth cleaning, and dental visits always remind me of the Bill Murray character. However, I’m not a masochist but a big chicken when it comes to visiting the dentist. I have to take a sedative or somehow psych myself up but that endeavor always ends in failure. My anxiety level starts to rise the moment I make the appointment. 

 

       But I should have suspected something bad was in store for me when I came upon a discarded, black five-toe running shoe lying under a spikey desert plant just a bit off the sidewalk that led to the door of the dentist’s office. At first I thought it was a tarantula, being that it was all black and sitting all bent up in the shade of the plant. That jerked me to a quick stop. On closer inspection–I didn’t approach it, just stared at it with my distance glasses on–I saw that it was one of those five-toe running shoes. Are they called minimalist running shoes? I don’t know how long it had been there but it was totally sun-fried and the toes parts were curled making it look like a hideous claw. I thought of the short story The Monkey’s Claw by W.W. Jacobs. You know I’m into writing about the supernatural, right? I’m also a bit superstitious. 

 

       But I got to thinking about that dumb curled up shoe as the endodontist  worked on my tooth. I have to distract myself while I’m in the chair, so I think about topics I could write about or things I could include in my stores. After the initial numbing shot the procedure is generally painless but I still sit in the chair stiff as a plank of wood. “Are you okay,Gloria?” I’m a terrible dental patient. Anyway, I indulge in fantasy and ask questions. This time the questions centered on that dried up shoe. How did it get there. Who lost it? Was it lost? Or did some lame-ass litterbug just toss it there? I doubt that since the desert landscape is raked and well-kept, so well-kept that I thought maybe it was a scare tactic or something like Candid Camera. Yup, I had to crane my neck around to check for cameras.

 

       So I was thinking, what if it was really a cursed human claw in disguise and that if you happened to come upon it, stared at it for a while, or worse yet, handled it, would it forever cling like a shadow to you? Follow you everywhere? An evil cursed thing that pops up in the mirror when you put your make-up on, or towel yourself dry after a shower? Or you wake up with it on the pillow next to you? I told my daughter about this. She laughed, and then joked, “So… would it be using its toes to drum out “Centerfield” (my favorite Fogerty song) while it waited for you to wake up?”

 

     Ha ha ha. Not even funny!

 

       That’s how I came up with the blood-spot demon in Shadow Hunter 1. I saw drops of blood on a sidewalk. Okay, it was my blood but that’s what occupied my thoughts as I had a filling replaced several years back.

 

       Imagination! It’s great, isn’t it? Dental visits? Well…….