The Curmudgeon

YOU'LL COME FOR THE CURSES. YOU'LL STAY FOR THE MUDGEONRY.

Sunday, October 18, 2020

The Father of Teeth

Text for today: I Bicuspid clxiii-clxxii

In an entirely unrelated incident, however, the Father of Teeth came upon yet other ruins, where ragged denizens scrambled to hide as he approached. Twice gangs of thugs tried to introduce him to the district strongman, and once a band of children tried to overpower him for eroto-cannibalistic purposes, and the Father of Teeth had to macerate many an ulcerated cavity before they became discouraged.

Almost every upright wall was painted or daubed or scrawled with a design or motif consisting of a circle with two dots and a curve inside. Before these smiling symbols the people would leave offerings of food or, when they couldn't find food, would pick out their healthiest child and cut its throat.

"Why are you doing that, madam?" the Father of Teeth inquired of one devotedly sawing mother as her least hydrocephalic son's blood rouged a smile of stone.
"To nourish my optimism, of course," the woman replied. "Do you not see the vile conditions under which we live, and does pure reason not inform you that optimism is indispensable? But surely, O benighted and unenlightened stranger, with a grin like that on your face you must have sacrificed enough to nourish your own optimism within measurable distance of near-sufficiency?"
"I have no optimism," said the Father of Teeth; at which the woman let fall her recent sacrifice, bared her own not inconsiderable gums and tried to stab the Father of Teeth in the eye.
"Fiend of blasphemous ingratitude," she shrieked, "how dare you profane our blessed vista with your pessimistic presence?"

Slapping away the rusty blade, which was wielded in a hand so devoid of meat as to make detachment, ingestion and incorporation into the cell structure of the Father of Teeth a fundamentally un-economic proposition, the blasphemer proceeded upon his thankless way. Near the centre of the ruins he came upon a tower, which contained no ivory because the elephants were long extinct, but which was covered all over with smiles, like a fertility fetish with an approving pox. The front door was blocked by a large mound, from which tiny red ants streamed busily in great numbers. "Now there, my optimistic friend," said a voice, "is the model of a functioning society."

Raising heavenward his bloodshot orbs, the Father of Teeth descried a little fat man leaning out of a window on the tower's top floor. "A place for everyone, and everyone in his place," the little fat man called down blithely. "Each born to his allotted function, which function he discharges without question for the maximum efficiency of the whole, and God save the Queen. With this enlightening example before our very eyes, are the grounds for our optimism not unimpeachable in the extreme?"
"Whatever their function, these creatures are mostly female," said the Father of Teeth, "and I fear that distance is lending your view a little more enchantment than the market will bear." Reaching up with his seventh most snaggled gnashers he dragged the little fat man bodily through the window. This was a protracted and untidy business, for the window had been made rather narrow in order to preserve the little fat man from pessimistic influences. At last, nevertheless, the Father of Teeth's seventh most snaggled gnashers got him through for the most part, and the Father of Teeth deposited him with precision and some incidental disarrangement of the vertebrae upon the mound by his front door. Here the red ants efficiently proceeded to dedicate him, bit by bit and bite by bite, to the greatest good of the greatest number.

In two hours the little fat man had no eyes, but enough of him remained to scream for further information as to his present circumstances and likely prospects.
"Every day and in every way," said the Father of Teeth, "you are getting better and better."

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