The Tooth Devil
Chatting with Arianna Shemmer, an amiable six-year-old, I noticed that she was missing a tooth, & asked if the Tooth Fairy had visited. She cheerfully responded that the Tooth Devil had come instead, & that the tooth had still been under her pillow in the morning. The Tooth Fairy came the next night, however, and left a dollar. She explained that the Tooth Devil could intercept the Tooth Fairy, & prevent her from getting the tooth and effecting the exchange of tooth for cash.
Her mother, overhearing the conversation, privately allowed as how she and the child's father had, in the bustle of family life, simply forgotten, and that the Tooth Devil was entirely young Arianna's invention. I was impressed with the child's completion of a classic dualist cosmology: There can be no light without dark, no good without evil. The Tooth Devil makes the Tooth Fairy complete.
(September 17, 2009)
