The Father of Teeth

Text for today: I Caries clix-clxxiv

After various and multifarious inconveniences, therefore, the Father of Teeth found himself arbitrarily deposited in a town where not a single door opened in the same way as the next. Some were shutters that folded, rattling and squealing, until they jammed halfway up or halfway down; others were like blunted guillotine blades that were raised and lowered on a string, and could crack a skull when slammed. Some were fixed at the bottom and had to be walked over quickly, before they snapped shut and catapulted the Father of Teeth over the horizon; others were fixed at the top and came close to decapitating him. The majority, which doled out entrance and exit to the poor, were simple openings through which the wind and rain blew, the sun faded rhomboids onto the floor, and privacy was not to be had.

Much annoyed by all these arbitrary apertures which, like many security arrangements, swung and lunged from all sides or else were never there when needed, the Father of Teeth took up residence in a humble hovel with no doors at all. Here each ghastly thing he did with his dentition was visible for all to see; and after a week of chewing and viewing, the townspeople nailed a board across the only exit and set fire to the hovel.

Emerging amid an explosion of splinters, which permanently cured several wide-eyed persons of voyeurism, the Father of Teeth addressed the august personage who had led the mob to his lodging and who had provided exhortation and guidance for the democratic enforcement of public decency: "The doors in this place are so universally devoid of convenience," said the Father of Teeth, "that this nailed and flavourless impediment of yours would seem little more than the logical conclusion. Yet I cannot help wondering why you have not yet adopted the principle of the hinge, a technological advancement which helpfully combines the principle of privacy with the privilege of free access."
"Foolish and blasphemous stranger," replied the august personage, "the principle of the hinge has long been known in our community, but the diabolic device itself was expelled, expunged and exorcised many years ago on grounds of gross immorality. For does not the whole principle of the hinge depend upon the placing of rods into cavities, and upon the subsequent repetitive yet voluptuous movement of said rods in their oily and darkened spaces? Set against the cleansing from our town of such a taint of sinfulness, what matters the sacrifice of our privacy, when the Creator in any case sees all?"
"If the Creator sees all," said the Father of Teeth, "then He also sees the torments of the innocent and the tortures of the helpless; which demonstrates rather conclusively that seeing is not the same as caring. But I take it that your question was rhetorical."
"There are no innocents born upon this carnal plane of being," confirmed the august personage; "for we are all the product of that same filthy and sinful act, which I blush and shudder to mention in the presence of the uncastrated: the placing of rods into cavities for purposes of lubricated, squeaky and occasionally swinging motions. Our more subtle philosophers have even detected, in this bestial and loathsome reproductive process, a transparent metaphor for the evil of the hinge."

So the Father of Teeth uncoupled his mandibles and extended his maw to a chaste, yawning void. At full stretch he resembled Ginnungagap framed by a fence of splintery stakes. The jaw of the august personage dropped so far that it dislocated; and upon examination by the local philosophers it was found to be a hinge in itself, which led to consequences of the utmost indignity.