The last inch of toothpaste

Habitat: the sealed end of the tube, in the crimped fold nobody remembers folding, reached after some three or four weeks of rolling, squeezing, and eventually flattening with the heel of a hand. Measured precisely, the habitat holds eleven to fourteen millimeters of usable paste, compressed into a ridge that will not come forward no matter how the tube is angled toward the brush. The household divides, reliably, into two behaviors. One member cuts the tube open along its seam with kitchen scissors and scrapes the interior clean, a practice that is admirably thorough and mildly upsetting to witness before coffee. The other simply buys a new tube and discards the old one, inch intact, sacrificing four or five further brushings for the sake of not dealing with it. Neither approach is wrong. The reclaimed paste performs identically to the fresh, chemically indistinguishable, which leaves an unresolved question about why the abandonment happens at all. The tube is not empty. It only looks empty from the outside, rolled thin and crackling, and the gap between appearance and content is the sort of thing that goes unwritten because it is too small and too constant to get around to. For now: eleven to fourteen millimeters, unclaimed, in most bathrooms in the country, at any given moment.

Doreen Fitch