Showing posts with label seed. Show all posts
Showing posts with label seed. Show all posts

Thursday, June 29, 2023

Story 498: Seed of Discontent

The blueberry seed fit quite nicely in the seed-shaped dent worn into the human molar.

“Ahhhhhh,” Seed sighed, settling in.

“Hey!  Hey!  Hey!”  Molar addressed the invasion.  “Who invited you?!”

“Apparently, your Mouth did.”  Seed replied while relaxing farther into the crevice.

“Yeah, well, keep moving, pal!” Molar snapped.  “You’re doing absolutely no good up here – you’re needed in Digestive Tract and then Circulatory System, stat!”

Seed thought this over.  “Hmm, continue on my journey to be torn apart into my basic elements so they can fuel this organism, or stay right here and enjoy the view for days, possibly decades.”

“Ugh!”

“Yep, I think I’ll stay put.  Keep you company and all that.”

“As if!  You’re gonna slowly wear me away into my basic elements, that’s what gonna happen here!”

Seed gasped in horror.  “I would never!  As you can clearly perceive, of the two of us, I’m not the one who rips other beings apart in the service of a gluttonous overlord!”

“Maybe not, but your very presence, nestled deep in my enamel with no escape, is enough to summon the dreaded PLAQUE!”

“The what now?”

A tiny group wearing construction hats and carrying jackhammers and pickaxes appear on cue.

“So,” Lead Plaque asks Seed, “we heard there’s an opening here in Tooth #19?”

“Oh, I suppose so,” Seed replies gingerly.

“All right, fellas, get to work!”  The members of Plaque Crew shimmy under Seed and they all begin swinging pickaxes or aiming jackhammers at the enamel.

“NO-NO-NO!”  Molar focuses on Lead Plaque.  “You: tell your posse to hold up for two minutes!”

The members of Plaque Crew stop.  “This is highly irregular,” Lead Plaque states.

“Sincerest regrets!”  Molar then addresses Seed.  “You: get outta here, now!”

In a huff, Seed replies: “Well, even if I wanted to leave my happy new home, circumstances prevent: I find myself to be completely, and apparently irrevocably, stuck.”

“This is so unfair!” Molar wails.  “My lifetime record of zero cavities is going to be utterly ruined by one seed!”  Switching tactics, Molar places a panic call.  “Brain!  Brain, hear me!  I’m in distress!”

Brain opens a channel to the normally silent appendage: “Oh, hey Tooth #19, what’s up?”

“Brain, I know you’re incredibly busy, and you know I usually don’t bother you with minor infractions, but we have a situation here that is simply too egregious to ignore!”

“Oh?”  Molar sends Brain the sensations of Seed’s presence against its surface.  “Ohhhh.  Let’s take a closer look, shall we?”  Brain maneuvers Body to a reflective surface and opens Mouth.  “Oh yes, this will not do.  Time for pointy objects.”

Molar, Seed, and Plaque Crew watch as Left Hand descends to Molar with a pointy object aimed at Seed.

“AAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!” Seed and Plaque Crew scream in unison.  Seed is prodded multiple times from a variety of angles but there is no upward or outward movement.

“Hate to say it,” Seed says to Molar during a pause in the attack, “but I think this is just burrowing me deeper into the dent.”

“I noticed,” Molar grinds out.

The members of Plaque Crew take up their pickaxes and jackhammers again: “So, we’re going to go ahead and get back to work here if you don’t mind,” Lead Plaque says to Molar.

“I do, actually,” Molar snips back.

“Too bad.”  The members of Plaque Crew begin digging again.

“Hellllp,” Molar quietly wails.

“Sorry,” Seed says somewhat genuinely while settling back in comfort, “looks like I’m here to – WHAT IN THE WORLD?!”

The group watches in fascinated horror as an extremely long and pointy object descends into Mouth and scrapes apart Seed enough for the original pointy object to remove the remains.

On the way out, Seed proclaims: “Remember meeeeeeeee….”

In disgust, Lead Plaque gestures to the rest of the Crew to knock it off and leave.  “Whelp, foiled again; let’s go.”  To Molar: “We’ll be back with the next one.”

“Yeah, yeah.”  Molar then addresses Brain: “Thank you so much, Brain; I thought that thing would be stuck in me forever!”

“Sure, no problem,” Brain says evasively.

“I have to ask: was that an actual knife you used at the end there?”

“….Maybe.”

“Not to sound ungrateful, but isn’t that one of those things everybody recommends not to do?”

“I know, it very much is, but I really didn’t want us to have to go through a whole extra dentist appointment when they’d only be using basically the same basic pointy thing to get rid of it, right?”

“Not exactly on the same scale.”