The Father of Teeth

Text for today: Carnassials ccxxiii-ccxxxvii

Unfortunately, however, the Father of Teeth promptly encountered an optimist, whose conversation was so uplifting that when opportunity presented itself the Father of Teeth hired an eighteen-wheeler with which to run him over. Smirking brokenly, the optimist was taken to an intensive care unit where various tubes were inserted into him and various machines beeped and sighed; for the optimist had been in the habit of justifying his optimism by noting the Creator's provision of such healing contrivances, while tactfully skimming over the question of Who had ensured their necessity.

When the Father of Teeth turned up far outside visiting times, with a wreath of flowers and a rattling bag full of shiny detachable dentition, the optimist still had not recovered his accustomed vivacity. The Father of Teeth sat in the waiting room, eating the flowers and idly scraping away the epidermis of the hospital's commercial administrator, until the duty receptionist intimated that the resulting noise levels might inconvenience the more sensitive patients. Nevertheless, after chewing his way through some tedious bureaucratic formalities, whose shrieks demonstrated a voluble disregard for patient welfare, the Father of Teeth was permitted access to the optimist's chamber, on condition that he proceed with discretion and that he not bite anything expensive.

"Of course there is nothing wrong with optimism in itself," the Father of Teeth assured the recumbent meat. "Still, one must always take care to be optimistic about the right things." Then, inserting his seventeenth least contaminated fangs, he chewed a tunnel through one of the dents in the optimist's cranium, squeezed himself in and started precision-gnawing the neural connections.

Later, having opened the optimist's thorax and sawn off the top of his cranium, the pathologist was doubtless much improved to discover the masticated and macerated cerebral matter which spelled out the words EVERY DAY AND IN EVERY WAY I AM GETTING BETTER AND BETTER in the hospital's most tasteful corporate typeface. Indeed, the pathologist's assistant was so encouraged by the sight that he laughed all through the next three nights and was left with a life-long twitch.