The Father of Teeth

Text for today: Carnassials cxliii-clxvii

As the epidemic continued, however, the work of transporting the dead was bestowed upon inferior citizens, whose sensibilities were insufficiently refined to be offended by close contact with bloated and soulless flesh. Those who died in poverty were placed in the community lime-pits, and their surviving relatives were charged a special dissolution tax to ease the clergy's grief over the loss of revenue on mausoleum space.

The exequies of those who died wealthy were rather more elaborate, with specially scrubbed mourners marching behind the coffin and exuding the mingled odours of sanctity and carbolic soap. Behind them walked the relatives in order of precedence, all clad in funereal puce and urging the Creator of the universe to admit the deceased into paradise while continuing to withhold that privilege from the bereaved. Behind the bereaved, at an appropriately spiritual distance, walked a member of the clergy, his face hidden behind the ritual mask from which, thanks to the rites of purification, the odour of carbolic wafted even more strongly than from the specially scrubbed.

In this instance the mausoleum was a tastefully bladed cupcake of bashed basalt, with battlements frogged and filigreed in reverent magenta. Here the procession halted and the coffin was carried inside, to be placed within the grave hastily dug beneath the luminous pink floorboards. The more illustrious dead were usually shelved until they had rotted sufficiently to be sealed in sacred urns and kept on the mantelpiece and occasionally waved about for curative purposes; but the epidemic had proven itself resistant to traditional medicine and sacrifices were required even from the deceased.

But before the propitiations had been proclaimed or the mysteries mumbled, the inferior citizens fled shrieking from the tomb. The specially scrubbed shook their heads in disapproval, and the clergyman gave vent to a carbolic-scented anathema upon the follies of the ignorant and superstitious. Entering the mausoleum in a state of exalted moral indignation, they found the floorboards taken up and the grave almost neatly dug, with the Father of Teeth sitting on the edge. He was picking his third-yellowest dentures with a splinter of bone and whimsically dangling his unspeakable feet.

"What is the meaning of this outrage?" demanded the clergyman.
"I'm not outraged," said the Father of Teeth.
"You have outraged our culture and community," said the clergyman. "by interfering in the necessary and rightful interment of a respectable citizen."
"I have spared the community a health risk," said the Father of Teeth, "by removing from its midst some highly infectious matter. It's arguably more pious to get rid of such stuff as rapidly as possible, before the fatal miasma it exudes has time to penetrate the holy carbolic."
"I trust the service was to your satisfaction," said the clergyman, after a sudden intake of breath caused no doubt by some unforeseen importunity of the spirit.
"What matters most in such cases," said the Father of Teeth, with a belch that ricocheted around the tomb most sonorously, "is the quality of the dish, not the quality of the waiters."