The Father of Teeth

Text for today: Gingivitis xci-cviii

When the Father of Teeth came in sight of the walls, the sentries in the towers nevertheless opened up with their machine-guns and the Father of Teeth was forced to catch their projectiles between some of his least calibrated incisors. "Full metal crust; my favourite," pronounced the Father of Teeth; whereupon, horrified at his irreverence towards the monopoly of legitimate violence, they opened the prison gates and let him walk right in, masticating noisily.

The Father of Teeth was still chewing when they brought him before the Governor, who lectured him upon the virtues of hard work and good citizenship, and then ordered him to break rocks for the next twenty years as an improvement to his character and a deterrent to future malefactors. "You must also wear a pattern of arrows," added the Governor, "so that your status as a moral pariah may be the more easily distinguishable by citizens of good character and observant eyesight."
"Do you always humiliate those whose character you wish to rehabilitate?" inquired the Father of Teeth.
"Harshness in punishment is a necessary and effective deterrent to crime," said the Governor.
"Always provided," said the Father of Teeth, "that your potential criminals plan on being caught."
"There is, in any case, no gratuitous humiliation in being a moral pariah," said the Governor coldly, "so long as one has the will to improve. I myself wear the arrows to bed, in compensation for my lustful and licentious nocturnal visions."

The Father of Teeth was dragged from the Governor's office and taken to be processed, and someone hauled a wriggly rubber glove onto one hand with intent to check for contraband; but the Father of Teeth had powers of halitosis which caused the rubber glove to shrink and melt from the very fingers that wore it, and somehow that particular processing procedure became lost in the bureaucracy.

Several armoured and extensively beweaponed persons of good character escorted the Father of Teeth to the yard of rehabilitation, where a thousand men all dressed in the same pattern of arrows were sombrely engaged in self-improvement. The guards led the Father of Teeth to a boulder, where they chained his ankles to a stout metal ring and handed him a large hammer and a blunt chisel.

"Go on then, improve yourself," they said; so the Father of Teeth stopped chewing and started expectorating, and for a full ninety-three seconds the yard of rehabilitation echoed with ricochets. By the time it was over, there was blood and dented kevlar all over the place, but the boulder was undeniably broken. Indeed it was practically gravel, as the guards were quick to deduce from the fact that it was fragmentarily embedded in their faces, rather than crushing their skulls outright as would be the inclination of an intact boulder similarly situated. "You didn't use the chisel," they said, suffused with moral indignation, and the Father of Teeth was unceremoniously precipitated into a cell as black as his own back molars and about as opulently furnished.

That night the Governor in his arrow-patterned silk nightgown awoke from dreams of horrid eroticism, in which the Home Secretary and kevlar colostomy bags featured with undue prominence. Quivering and perspiring with annoyance at whoever was to blame, the Governor scratched furiously at the junction of ribs and paunch, where one of the silk arrows was chafing. Immediately each arrow on the Governor's silk nightgown was transformed into a black and grinding unit of deadly dentition. Some were incisors, which cut and sliced; some were canines, which stabbed and cracked. Possibly worst were the bicuspids at the back, but it was a close-run thing.

In the morning, of course, the black and foetid cell was as empty of the Father of Teeth as a wisdom tooth is empty of folly; which was just as well on the whole, as there was more than enough to do clearing up the mess in the Governor's bedroom.