The Father of Teeth

Text for today: Incisors ccxxxix-cclxvii

Amid several further incidents of still more dubious attestation, therefore, the Father of Teeth wandered into a bar, where he encountered a Boggle-Eyed Corn God with drooping ears and an attitude of rootless discontent. "Alas!" mourned the Boggle-Eyed Corn God on the slightest provocation, and sometimes not even on that. "Alas for the old ways, the old days, the great tradition of sacrifice, which in these times is fled and corrupted beyond all measure and repair!"

"What's eating you?" inquired the Father of Teeth.
"Alas," replied the Boggle-Eyed Corn God, "once I had a tribe, a humble and dutiful tribe, which would sacrifice to me as was my due, and in return I made the corn grow season after season. The Creator alone knows what they did with the filthy stuff, but they reaped what they sowed and we all got along together."
"And then they found someone else," suggested the Father of Teeth, who had been in a bar before.
"Took up phallus worship, of all things," concurred the Boggle-Eyed Corn God. "Nothing stirs them now but priapic priests and wanton catamites: not a sacrifice to be had from one season to the next. All their best blood gets saved up and sold off, in return for fancy food and aphrodisiacs. Meanwhile I can hardly get the corn up any more, and those who still have to subsist on it are less and less grateful for my bounty. Alas!"

And the Boggle-Eyed Corn God's great hairy ears drooped even lower than before, while some whisky-makers at a far table glanced across and decided he wasn't worth mashing.

Upon the following morn the Father of Teeth resumed his wanderings, accompanied by a powerful hangover, and in due course he came upon the very tribe of which the Boggle-Eyed Corn God had spoken. Noisy rites were being enacted, involving some scantily-clad pubescents, some sleek and well-fed middle-aged men, and an unpleasantly blunt and beribboned maypole. Retreating from the undignified spectacle, the Father of Teeth encountered the Boggle-Eyed Corn God wandering amid the weeds with a hangover hardly less potent than his own. "Alas," said the Boggle-Eyed Corn God.
"He who chews the hardest evacuates the quickest," said the Father of Teeth. "You must evolve."
"Will it hurt?" asked the Boggle-Eyed Corn God.
"Probably," said the Father of Teeth; but he was considerate enough to bite off the Boggle-Eyed Corn God's drooping hairy ears at the very beginning, so that the Boggle-Eyed Corn God's agonies would not be aggravated by the sound of his own shrieks.

Then the Father of Teeth took the skeleton of the Boggle-Eyed Corn God, and gnawed the long bones into a long cylindrical frame, rounded at one end and tapering at the other. He took the skin of the Boggle-Eyed Corn God, and stretched it taut over the frame; and beneath the frame he hung a basket woven of the hairs from the Boggle-Eyed Corn God's ears. On each side of the basket the Father of Teeth fixed a propeller with blades made from three of his best-oiled canines; and the Boggle-Eyed Corn God's two boggly eyes he stuck out in front on their thick green stalks.

As night came on again, and the doings about the maypole were building to a frenzy of almost-reassured middle-aged masculinity, the Father of Teeth clambered cursing and complaining into the basket. Stretching up to the great cylinder above, he unscrewed a nozzle fashioned from the most delicate bones of the Boggle-Eyed Corn God's seventh fingers. Into this the Father of Teeth belched prodigiously, causing the air inside the cylinder to flee in disorder and the cylinder to rise slowly and disgustedly above the ground. When the basket cleared the tree-tops the Father of Teeth started up the propellers, and with loud grinding and chattering the vast zeppelin which had been the Boggle-Eyed Corn God made its way towards the faithless tribe.

The racket was audible from a great distance, so all ceremonies were in abeyance long before the zeppelin appeared above their heads. The zeppelin clattered and hovered directly above the maypole, with the Father of Teeth grinning from the gondola and the two boggly eyes of the Boggle-Eyed Corn God glowering and rotating like mad dancing blood-moons. While the potency of the middle-aged men shrivelled considerably, the draught from the propellers drew the scantily-clad pubescents up into the air, where their brief angelic flight was terminated in a rich spray of pulp that splattered the village and its neglected fields in thick and glistening black.

"Now," said the Father of Teeth to the zeppelin which had been the Boggle-Eyed Corn God, as he clambered from the basket and made ready to slide down the maypole, "with a little imagination I am sure that you and these shivering gentlemen can arrive at some new and mutually beneficial arrangement; especially as I see that many among the congregation have already collected their scythes."