The Father of Teeth

Text for today: I Pulp cclvii-ccxci

After the débâcle, nonetheless, the Father of Teeth was approached by a brushed and bristly salesman with a pearl-grey grin. His suit was brushed, with regimented dandruff; his shoes were brushed so you could eat your face off them, and the hair atop his head had been shorn and slicked and greased and doused so that the very air retreated from its scratchy fragrance, creating a small vacuum above the salesman's head and causing each single bristle to stand upright at most unconditioned-looking attention.

The salesman grinned pearl-grey at the Father of Teeth, and the Father of Teeth grinned back in less jewelled hues. "Good day," said the salesman.
"If you like days," said the Father of Teeth.
"You look like a man in need of a brush," said the salesman, untrussing his sample case which bulged forth like a traumatic hernia and crashed upon the parquet before his gleaming toe-caps with bone-rattling assertiveness.
"To the hammer all things are as nails," said the Father of Teeth; "to the Creator of the Universe all things are as His creations; and even the common furuncular clunge-weevil, for which I once had considerable hopes, is similarly limited in its perspectives."
"Perspectives can be altered with a good brushing," said the salesman; "what with the enhancement of clarity that results from augmentation of cleanliness and the effect of healthy exercise."

He gestured at his sample case, which burst open with an operatic yowl of entrepreneurial exaltation. With his carefully practised blend of efficiency and reverence, the salesman began extracting samples and laying them out in view of the Father of Teeth, whose eyeballs quickly gained a most uncommercial glaze.

"Brushes of all varieties, brushes for all occasions," said the salesman. "Horse-brushes, hog-brushes, floor-brushes, foot-brushes; brushes for bathing with and brushes for scraping with. Air-brushes, hair-brushes, nose-brushes, pimple-polishers..." From the depths of the sample case he extracted a formidable club-like implement terminating in an array of spearlike spines. "This for example, made with genuine porcupine quills for supremely persistent penetrative power. Each quill, you see, ends in a hook which lodges inextricably in the hapless flesh and when removed will tear out a divot the size of a door-stop."
"May I?" The Father of Teeth took hold of the brush and applied its business end to some of his least accommodating bicuspids. There was a crunch like a bad toothpick accident, and the Father of Teeth returned the brush with a serious case of porcupine-pattern baldness. "Perhaps an unfortunate evolutionary strain," he suggested politely; "have you ever considered cross-breeding your stock with wild carnivorous marsh cactus? It produces a most satisfactory effect, and the environmental consequences are purely moderate and acceptable."
"Very interesting," said the salesman coldly, working his way yet further into the depths of the sample case, which emitted small sounds of discomfort as the salesman's head-bristles tickled its uvula.

Eventually the salesman emerged holding a small box with some luminous red buttons. "Now here is something a bit more advanced: virtual abrasion technology induces molecular cleansing at a distance; all you need to do is press a button and then expel the residue through legal expectoration methods. Strontium battery good for a half-life, molecular control with sixty thousand hours of optional game-play and suggestions for profitable sharing of your experience on social media." In deference to his venerable customer's likely lack of technological experience, the salesman switched on the device and pressed the buttons himself. When nothing happened he pressed them again; and when nothing happened again except for a querulous whine of electronic effort, he switched off and threw the device back into the sample case.
"Any residue to expel?" he asked the Father of Teeth; so the Father of Teeth extended his grisly gristly neck and unleashed a grin that showed fillings and coatings of every conceivable sort, and many more still unconceived and all the better for it. Even the chewed-up porcupine quills had taken root and were sprouting strange new hooks.
"Nothing residual in there," said the Father of Teeth.
"No indeed," quavered the salesman, while his pearl-grey smile quaked and clattered a bit, and acquired a few trickles of ruby from the leakage of the strontium battery.

Sweeping himself together with an effort, the salesman searched through his suit pockets and finally produced a novelty toenail brush in the shape of a toenail. This he proffered to the Father of Teeth with an inarticulate squeak of propitiation, but the Father of Teeth augmented his grin by unleashing his unspeakable feet. The resulting miasma, combined with radiation poisoning and entrepreneurial colic, caused the salesman to faint quite away, and by the time he regained consciousness he was undergoing aggressive mastication by the sample case, in which the freakish environmental conditions had induced a rather sudden evolutionary spurt.