The Father of Teeth

Text for today: Incisors cxlix-clxxii

Long beforehand, however, the Father of Teeth was wandering the sewers when he encountered the three or four hundred survivors from humanity's most recent festival of rights defended and lessons learned. They screeched for his aid, for the tunnels were blocked by a vast greyish-white agglomeration of plastic and chemically-treated pulp, which prevented their hunting rats in any direction except north, south or east. As a result, they had nothing to eat except a particularly uncooperative species of mutant albino algae and were slowly starving to death.

The Father of Teeth hinted that the rat population might possibly have attained nutritious levels in one or more of the directions where hunting was taboo; but the people covered their eyes and savagely masticated their neighbours at even the subtlest allusion to the forbidden points of the compass. So the Father of Teeth went to work on the greyish-white agglomeration, which obstructed the sewer for a distance of several miles and tasted even more repulsive than the mutant albino algae. Months of steady chewing were required before the Father of Teeth could carve out a tunnel wide enough to crawl through; and by the time he had done so, of course, the highly-evolved descendants of the rats were crawling through in the other direction. At this point the Father of Teeth thought it prudent to absent himself towards one of the forbidden points of the compass; for which he was rewarded with the execrations of the human race and various malodorous tokens of ingratitude.

Some few millennia elapsed before the Father of Teeth passed that way again, to find that the descendants of the rats' descendants had degenerated so far as to bear a passing resemblance to human beings. They chased him away for having wrongly-shaped incisors, and for many years afterward issued apocalyptic warnings to their children against speaking to dirty old men.