My Deskmate Kept a Jar of Teeth and the Boss Loved Him

Every open-plan office has a smell, a hum, a guy. Ours had Warren, and Warren had a jar of teeth.

I noticed it my second week, when I still thought I was seeing things. It was a jam jar, the kind with the little fruit still printed on the lid, and it sat next to his keyboard between a family photo and a stress ball shaped like the earth. Inside were teeth. Human teeth. Maybe thirty of them, some with fillings, one with a tiny gold cap that caught the light in a way I came to dread.

I told myself they were fake. Novelty teeth. Some kind of dental sample. For about a month I built an entire comfortable fiction around that jar, because the alternative was that I sat two feet from a man who collected teeth and nobody had ever said anything.

Then Warren, who was otherwise a completely normal-seeming person with a lanyard full of conference badges, saw me looking and said, cheerfully, "Those are mine. And a few of my kids'. And my dad's, God rest him." And he went back to his spreadsheet like he had told me the weather.

I want to be fair to Warren. He was pleasant. He remembered birthdays. He brought in homemade banana bread that was, frustratingly, excellent. He never once did anything threatening. He just had, on his desk, in a shared professional environment, a jar of the teeth of three generations of his own family, and he liked to give it a little shake sometimes while he was on the phone, a soft dry rattle that I can still hear if I let myself.

I lasted eleven months. What broke me was a client visit. Someone important was touring the floor and I watched, in slow motion, as they leaned in to admire Warren's "cute little jar" and Warren said the words "those are teeth" and the client laughed the laugh of a person who has not yet understood. I decided that day I would say something to management, because surely, surely, this was not fine.