The Father of Teeth

Text for today: I Canines lviii-lxi

Arguably as a direct result, however, the Father of Teeth wandered into an austere district and down a cheerless street, where he came upon a stern temple staffed by unadorned priests and crowned with disapproving gargoyles. From every corner echoed noises of whips on flesh and orgiastic yelps, but even these failed to make the place very inviting.

A priest guided the Father of Teeth to a bare chamber with undecorated walls and uncurtained windows and an unbrightened ceiling and an uncarpeted floor on which there was an ancient-looking stain. Counselling the Father of Teeth that his soul would benefit by the display, the priest opened an unfestooned cupboard and brought forth an uncompromising whip with seven cords, each terminating in a spiny metal incentiviser. With this the priest proceeded to belabour the stain on the floor, which responded to its chastisement with creditable equanimity.

After a few minutes the priest paused, wiping his brow with a sandpaper handkerchief and panting post-orgasmically. He urged the Father of Teeth to confess his spiritual improvement, but the Father of Teeth responded only with a hint that he knew more efficient ways to remove stains from floors.

"Remove the stain!" exclaimed the priest. "What blasphemy is this? Do you not know that this stain constitutes the worldly remains of our blessed saint, whose mortification of her flesh was so thorough that she dissolved at last into that puddle of virtue of which this stain constitutes the sole and holy remnant?"

Kneeling, the Father of Teeth poked at the stain with a hideous forefinger and then reverently rubbed the forefinger across several of his more gruesome gums. "I fear you are deceived," he said; "this stain's organic content is quite negligible."
"Negligible?" gibbered the priest.
"It seems to be mostly mineral water," said the Father of Teeth, "with trace elements of radioactive sewage from ancient times. The Creator of the universe has presumably placed an underground spring somewhere beneath the foundations of this temple, for reasons best known to Himself." The priest had begun to twitch, and the Father of Teeth found himself abruptly needed elsewhere.

Nevertheless, decades later when he returned to the stern temple in the cheerless street of the austere district, he found that the saint's sacred and tastefully blood-spattered image had miraculously imprinted itself upon the labels of bottles filled with restorative drinking water, which were consumed throughout the city though sold exclusively in the temple precincts. The water was said to cure all pains and morbidities, provided only that the drinker maintained the requisite degree of faith; and those who blasphemed the saint's memory by failing to recover were invited to purify themselves by submitting to the priest with the whip, and sacrificing a small portion of their own flesh to feed the stain's ever-growing appetite for meat.