The Tooth Fairy's Last Deployment
IF A PERSON is going to do a job, they might as well do it properly. That had been the Tooth Fairy's principle, or at least what the Tooth Fairy aspired to, through all these teeth and years. Professional standards! But is the Tooth Fairy even a person? Hush, not yet, we'll get around to that. First, there was the tooth.
The tooth was on a rumpled paper towel, on the eleven-year-old's desk. Newly lost that evening (there'd been some complaining about how long the bleeding went on), rinsed off, and plopped down there, out in the open. So it's easy for the Tooth Fairy, he said.
What he meant was that he had lowered his estimation of the Tooth Fairy's capabilities. He didn't want to give the Tooth Fairy a chance to disappoint him, after the last incident, and so he was testing the limits of minimum engagement with the process. I got him to at least put the tooth in a little brown paper envelope on the desk, like we'd generally used for Tooth Fairy transactions.
Generally! In the beginning, when the first teeth start coming into the first child's mouth, and then when they start falling out again, it seems like it will be easy to keep track of it all. After a while, though, it gets confusing. There are teeth that only come in once, you know, so it's not really as if they're swapping in one full set for another. Then the second kid joins the picture, gaining and losing teeth on a whole separate cycle. Standards and procedures start slipping.
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