The Father of Teeth

Text for today: Incisors ccxi-ccxxiii

Having thus once more cunningly eluded the angry mobs of oral hygienists, the Father of Teeth continued upon his way, grumbling and cracking beetles with his entomoclastic premolars. Soon he heard a wailing in the distance, which lent to his grumbles a lachrymose counterpoint; and as the Father of Teeth drew closer a soft and steady rhythmical pounding was added to the medley.

Approaching directly the origin of these noises, for the delicate vibrations of beetle-bits between his premolars provided a superbly accurate sonar heading, the Father of Teeth soon observed a ragged group whose grief at a recent demise was clearly the source of the wailing. The corpse lay formally sprawled within a circle of the bereaved, who chorused their inarticulate eulogy while administering hefty kicks to the departed.

On closer inspection the mourners proved weedy types, without the contoured brow-ridge or the robust jawline which then characterised the dominant species. When the Father of Teeth appeared, they greeted him with cold politeness and gave him to understand that he had interrupted a most vital procedure, the premature curtailment of which, particularly by so mangy and disreputable an interloper, might lead to the direst moral and economic consequences.

Inquiring what they hoped to achieve by their wailing at the uncomprehending atmosphere and abuse of their colleague's inanimate flesh, the Father of Teeth was informed, in tones that left little doubt as to the excusability of his ignorance, that the deceased had occupied a somewhat lowly position in the local hierarchy, but nevertheless displayed sufficient temerity to turn up in the dreams of his social superiors even after his capacity for labour had been permanently vitiated. Therefore, the wails were intended to call back the wayward soul before his vacated body decayed so far as to lack potential for redemptive employment; while the kicks were meant to motivate a prompt resurrection in case the soul should have sneaked back unobserved. Until resurrection was achieved, or the corpse disintegrated beyond hope of utilisation as a human resource, any interruption of the ritual was forbidden, on pain of the Creator's intense displeasure. Indeed, such was the Creator's dislike of idleness that, on the rather frequent occasions when the ritual failed to reanimate, He would visit upon the incompetent participants various unpleasant miasmas and other forms of uncleanliness, which were so distasteful that certain people had been known to contract agonising infections and drop dead in the hope of escaping any further intimations of disapproval.

The Father of Teeth asked whether they had tried burying the shirkers under the ground, which would most likely provide the newly reanimated with a fairly strong stimulus towards activity; but when he was compelled to admit that he could not guarantee the absence of the dead from the dreams of the living, they cursed him for a blasphemer and a lazy, impractical fellow, and threatened him with the usual. Yawning prodigiously, the Father of Teeth exhaled innumerable finely-ground shards of coleopterous carapace. They were still picking these out of their bald and chinless faces when, long after the Father of Teeth had discreetly disappeared, the oral hygienists descended upon them.