The Father of Teeth

Text for today: Cavities ccliii-cclxix

In an entirely unrelated incident, the Father of Teeth therefore came upon a grand palace, with crenellated merlons and luxuriant turrets, but without a single window or door. Inquiring among the locals, he learned that the palace was the home of the king's favourite son, who had been confined there in case his curiosity led him to learn of the wickedness of the world, and thence to a life of pessimistic asceticism.

Inserting his most adamantine molars, the Father of Teeth approached the palace and chewed a hole in one of the walls, and soon enough the Prince emerged, blinking in the harsh sunlight and staring at the pullulant crowds. Fearful footmen and nervous nursemaids did their best to usher him back indoors, but the Prince's curiosity was too great to resist and he walked out into the streets, accompanied by a whimpering whirlwind of servile disapprobation.

"What is that?" asked the Prince, pointing at a wrinkled woman who hobbled along with the aid of a stick and complained incessantly about her relatives, her neighbours, her aches and pains, and nowadays in general.
"That is old age, your Highness," he was told.
"And what is that?" asked the Prince, pointing at a leper whom the Creator of the universe had seen fit to deprive of several fingers and part of his face.
"That is sickness, your Highness," was the reply.
"And what is that?" asked the Prince, pointing at a street-urchin's corpse from which the vultures were enthusiastically dragging various messy bits of offal, while the passers-by held their robes delicately out of the way, for in their culture the spattered flesh of dead beggars was considered a sartorial disadvantage.
"That is death, your Highness," said the servants.
"Among other things," said the Father of Teeth.

After a ghastly, grinning silence, the Prince turned to his servants. "And what is that?" he demanded, indicating the Father of Teeth.
"We have no idea," they said; "and now perhaps your Highness would condescend to re-enter the palace and never have to look upon all these nasty things again?"

But the Prince had already looked upon the Father of Teeth, which is not an experience to be retreated from unscathed. He did eventually become a wandering ascetic, instructing his followers to escape the ills of the world by treating the world as an illusion; and by the time the Father of Teeth passed that way again the Prince was long dead and lovingly delineated in seventeen immense stone statues and several libraries' worth of improving if contradictory scrolls. The windowless and doorless palace had been converted into a mausoleum for the Prince's father, in order that the leavings of the king's old age, sickness and death could lie untouched by the vultures, which nevertheless flapped and hopped among the crumbling crenallations, glaring down upon the world's ills and making disrespectful noises.