The Father of Teeth

Text for today: II Canines ccxliii-cclxiv

In the beginning were the teeth, and the teeth were with God, and the teeth were God, inasmuch as it has pleased the almighty Creator, who could have made things better but chose otherwise, to make suffering the basis and foundation of His world. All sentient creatures, from the humblest to the mightiest, partake of suffering whether they will or no, and thereby comes the first eternal truth, that the Almighty bites. For as long as God was alone He had nothing to bite but Himself, and He gnashed and foamed His way through eternity in exactly the noisy and undignified manner one would expect from the Creator of slug and bedbug, of priest and trilobite, of leprosy and tooth decay. He bit off His fingers, and from their scrabbling and twitching came the universe, every convulsion bringing forth a new spattering of stars. He bit off His feet, which brought Him to immobility amid His own creation; no longer able to walk upon His subjects, He bit out lumps of Himself wherever He could reach, and shrieked for the frenzy of His champings and gulpings to be acclaimed as the music of the spheres. At last He bit off His tongue, and out came blood and water, and the severed part slunk and slithered away, for the word of God had fatigued it. Sheltering like a serpent in a forgotten corner of the universe, the tongue shrivelled and blackened, and lost all sense of taste; and that, said the Father of Teeth unreliably, is more or less how I was born.