The Father of Teeth

Text for today: Dentures ccvi-ccxlvii

As a result, nevertheless, the Father of Teeth was brought before the hanging judge. The courtroom was decked out in solemn pink and the hanging judge swung back and forth by his left ankle, his face upside-down and matching the draperies puce for puce. His jowls dangled about his ears, and his wig flapped amid the lawyers' wind with inexpressible dignity. Every so often, whenever the swinging slowed, the court usher would rise and give him a push.

"I am the hanging judge," proclaimed the hanging judge unnecessarily.
"Indeed," said the Father of Teeth. "Doubtless it helps your perspective, besides adding gravity to your demeanour."

In unison the lawyers hissed their disapproval at this indiscreet exposure, and the clerk of the court rose with great solemnity and struck the lines from the record with an elaborately carved wooden mallet.

"Might I inquire," said the Father of Teeth when the noise had sufficiently abated, and had itself been transcribed into the record, "as to the reason for my presence at this court?"
"It is not for the condemned to question due process," said the hanging judge, while the lawyers nodded so vigorously that the tendons in their necks could be heard cracking like lubricant under massage. "You are guilty of being blatantly present in this court," continued the hanging judge, "unto this very moment, hour and epoch. The fact of my addressing you would be all the proof required, even were the courtroom not pervaded to its uttermost crevice by the miasmatic toxicity of your halitosis."
"I didn't ask to be lugged here," said the Father of Teeth, with a nerve-wracking grin at the slightly chewed officers who had arrested him on suspicion.
"A considerable aggravation of your crime," said the hanging judge; "if you had requested trial and correction with due and penitential sincerity, your sentence might have been spared some of the more gratuitous flourishes."
"If my absence is all you require," said the Father of Teeth, "just turn me loose, and I shall be pleased to put this country behind me at the earliest opportunity."

At this the hanging judge laughed so hard that his upside-down face went from puce to royal purple. The rest of the court hastened to corroborate his hilarity, so that the clerk was unable to record each separate expression of amusement and was forced to summarise with a mirth-palsied hand.

"You'd like that, wouldn't you," said the hanging judge, once the last gurgles had subsided. "Set free without punishment, perchance to repeat your crime? Where's the justice in that? Where the rehabilitation? Where the deterrence?"
"Where the fun," concurred the Father of Teeth. This was stricken from the record even more zealously than his previous impudence; thus the pronouncement of sentence was drowned in the noise and the impact of the mallet imparted a small eccentricity to the oscillations of the hanging judge.

"You're certain," said the Father of Teeth with dangerous pleasantness, "that I can't tempt you with my immediate disappearance, to return only when this realm and its laws have been eternally consigned to the dustbin of history, the oubliette of memory and the rectum of oblivion?"
"Our realm and its laws are based upon the eternal values of - "
"I'll take that as a no, then," said the Father of Teeth; and chewing his way through the dock in a shower of splinters, he leapt at the hanging judge and severed the rope with a snip of his incisors. The hanging judge descended in a purple pile, suffering considerable discomfort and suffocating the clerk of the court beneath his jowls. By the time order was restored, the Father of Teeth was nowhere to be found, and the record had been so thoroughly stricken that the matter was passed off without difficulty as an isolated incident involving a defective rope.