The Father of Teeth

Text for today: Extractions i-xvii

As night comes on at last, however, the Father of Teeth will stumble into a ditch, the floor of which will rattle with layers of bones and plastic; and beyond the ditch he will come upon a circled crowd, all chanting and muttering in terror. Small children and other animals, not nearly so starved and deformed as most these days, will be struggling in cages of wood and plastic, shunted reverently from hand to hand towards the centre. Here the chanting will be loudest and the muttering most insistent. Each cage will be taken reverently by an acolyte, its occupant hauled forth and closely inspected for impious attributes. Within a ring of standing stones, surrounded by a plastic fence and centred upon a great bonfire, seventeen priests at seventeen altars will be keeping up a steady rhythm of throat-cutting, skull-smashing, dismemberment and vociferous propitiation. At each hacking and clubbing, the crowd will raise its voice and gaze reverently toward the east, while the priests hurl the offering into the fire; and after every sacrifice the horizon will remain obstinately dark. Having witnessed several millennia of human progress, the Father of Teeth will know better than to point out that it is still the middle of the night, and that no amount of blood or burning can make the slightest difference. He will know, too, that in the year whose birth now approaches the floods will come again, to sweep away the trees; and then again the desert, to burn the soil to dust; so that soon enough there will be nothing to fuel a fire, nothing for priests to bleed or bludgeon, and no more crowds. And the gums of the Father of Teeth will be another darkness upon the darkness, and the breath of his halitosis another poison upon the air.