Every practicing dentist in America has, at some point in the last thirty years, ordered the same catalog item: a flat magnet printed with a cartoon tooth wearing sunglasses, or brushing itself with alarming enthusiasm, alongside the practice's name and a phone number in a font last updated during a previous administration. This specimen arrived home in a child's goodie bag after a routine cleaning, was affixed to the refrigerator within the hour by a parent looking for something to hold up a school photo, and has not moved since, not because it was chosen, but because nothing has yet demanded its spot.
The magnet's stated purpose, appointment reminders, was obsolete before it arrived; the practice now sends texts. What remains is purely structural: a two-inch rectangle of flexible ferrite strong enough to pin a single sheet of paper against gravity and, notably, nothing more. Attempts to hold up two papers typically fail. Its cartoon tooth has faded on the side that faces the kitchen window, sun-bleached to a pale outline, while the shaded half retains its original, alarming whiteness, a magnet slowly developing a tan line no one asked it to have. The committee finds it has outlived the dentist, the parent's marriage, and at least two subsequent refrigerators, relocated each time without ceremony, a minor civic institution nobody remembers appointing.