The Father of Teeth

Text for today: Cavities ccvii-ccxviii

It was long before then, however, that the Father of Teeth came upon a giant in the wilderness. The giant lay semi-conscious on his back with an outcrop of rocks for a pillow. His massive proportions were pleasing and his features youthful; but in his side was a red and purple wound the size of a corridor, as if he had been fatally stabbed by some fellow giant.

From a distance the giant seemed plagued with a swarm of insects clustered about the injury; but as the Father of Teeth drew closer he saw that the giant was in fact surrounded by hordes of tiny persons, who tended his wound with brooms and shovels, and had even constructed a sort of scaffolding against the giant's side, from which dozens more tiny persons dangled precariously in harnesses, chanting as they scraped and stabbed.

As the Father of Teeth approached, a gaggle of tiny persons rushed towards him, squeaking and gesticulating; nor were they stilled when the Father of Teeth bared his blackened choppers in a hideous grin of greeting. The tiny persons clustered and crowded about the Father of Teeth as he approached the giant, so that he was forced to deter the more importunate with miasmatic incentives of halitosis.

The giant's wound pulsed and quivered with agony. Tiny persons scraped at the tender edges with their brooms; tiny persons dug away clots of gore which were carefully packed away and carted off; and some of the bolder specimens swung themselves onto the giant's body and performed tiny vigorous dances while jabbering at the sky.

As the Father of Teeth watched, the wound widened further. Sudden agony convulsed the giant; the scaffolding collapsed and tiny persons were thrown and scattered, crushed and smashed, and otherwise greatly inconvenienced. Immediately the dust had cleared, the survivors set about rebuilding the scaffold and recovering their brooms, while an efficiently organised group laid out the broken bodies of the dead, and kicked each corpse hard to ensure there were no shirkers.

A group of tiny persons, who had been precipitated from their place atop the giant's chest and had narrowly missed hitting the Father of Teeth directly in the lower incisors, led him with polite obeisances around the giant's wall-like legs and towering feet to the other side of his body. With gestures and gibbers they petitioned the Father of Teeth to chew the giant a second wound, which would serve as a balance for the first and thus prevent further upset.

However, when the Father of Teeth made bold to intimate, with appropriate grimaces, that perhaps they ought first to find out what the giant thought of the matter, the tiny persons chased him from that place with rough brooms and hard words, and then trudged sullenly back to resume their indispensable ministrations.