The Father of Teeth

Text for today: Roots dcccxxi-dccclxxxix

It was thus by no means coincidental that after an inordinate length of time the Father of Teeth chewed his way to the surface and emerged in the geometrical centre of a vast pit strewn with startled students. The sky above was blue and bright, the sun was hot and high, and the Father of Teeth glared up at them both in disgust.

"Steady on," said a middle-aged woman in a broad-brimmed hat, who had made her way through the students, and their mats covered in tools and plastic bags and fossilised anatomy, to find out what was causing the hold-up. "You will do your eyes little good," she advised the Father of Teeth, "staring into the sun like that." She glanced down at the aperture from which the Father of Teeth had just emerged in all his chthonic indigestibility, and added, "Especially if you've just come from down there."

Hauling himself from the earth, the Father of Teeth looked about him. The pit, he now saw, was no simple hole but an elaborate excavation on several different levels, which had yielded considerable pickings in fossil fragments and prehistoric plastic. Beyond the pit's edges the landscape was arid and scrubby, like those regions of his scalp from which no head-louse returned.

"The last time I was here," said the Father of Teeth, "or perhaps the time before, this place was considerably more busy."
"This place was once the site of a large settlement," the woman said; "it had an extensive rubbish dump, many of whose contents have survived the ravages of time."
The Father of Teeth picked up a fossil bone, in which globules of plastic were embedded like fossil globules. "You are digging up the past," he said.
"Quite so," agreed the woman. "There is much about the past that is obscure to us, on which we hope to throw some light. When we have shone our light on the great civilisations of the past, we may find illumination for the future of our tribe."
"There is a theory," said the Father of Teeth, "that the sun expels light as the body expels waste, and that the ocular discomforts of a direct gaze are the result, so to speak, of God pissing in your eye."
"Is that why you buried yourself? Reasons of personal hygiene?" The woman was upwind of the Father of Teeth, which doubtless was what enabled her to maintain a straight face until he unleashed his grin.