12 False Teeth

PART TWELVE: False Teeth: We are not all what we seem to be. Fangtasia in Blue. How the Spider Lost His False Teeth and …(Later: how the carp got fangs).

The Dragonfly had arrived like a bolt from the blue bellowing his war cry. Now he stopped short in mid air burning rubber and leaving marks in the atmosphere as he skidded on the oxygen molecules and screeched to a halt with a shudder and a clack of his wings, pausing awkwardly in hover mode.

The Gadfly had been screaming. Now suddenly he seemed to capitulate. He threw up his arms and went limp, releasing his grip on the reed stem and began to fall.

-I have you, thought the Dragonfly. He ended his hover and lunged. It was a fatal miscalculation. As he did so the tip of one wing sliced through the outer strand of the Spider’s web and he lost his balance.

The diaphanous edge of the wing had scarcely touched the sticky thread but it was enough to bring half of the Dragonfly to an abrupt stop. The other half maintained its velocity with the result that his moving parts continued to arc through the air in a breathtaking semi-circle until he pancaked flat across the full width of the Spider’s web. There he remained stuck fast in a visual cacophony of trampled banquet and shredded silk ribbons.

For a moment the Dragonfly simply reclined, shocked, spread-eagled, winded and in disbelief, not quite sure what had happened. He rested awkwardly rather like an inept practitioner of the quadruple trampoline somersault who, in front of an invited audience, has managed to execute nothing more than a breathtaking belly flop. He was lost for words. Then he began to struggle.

The Spider however was upon him before you could say ‘jam donut or venomous injection?’ He flung all eight legs about him and opened his jaws as wide as a German coal scuttle to reveal a ferocious armoury of fangs all as beautifully enamelled and white as the tusks of the great trumpeting walrus.

With a cry of triumph the Spider snapped his jaws shut and bit deep into the Dragonfly’s soft underbelly. At this point it must be pointed out that, learned and well-read as the Spider appeared to be, and excelling at this moment as an impersonator of a drunken cowboy on a mechanical bucking bronco, there must have been certain gaps relating to structure in his appreciation of the physiognomy of members of the odonate clan. The Dragonfly did not have a soft underbelly. In the fraternity of the softly underbellied he was definitely a non-member. The Dragonfly was a hard man all over.

It is quite possible that he might have had an Achilles heel somewhere else, but it was certainly not in his abdominal area, and at this point there was no time for the Spider to investigate feet or for that matter any other part of his victim's anatomy.

As the Spider bit down there was a loud metallic click that sounded like a pair of nail clippers working on the outside of a tank. Or it could have been the sound of the beautifully enamelled and white tusks of the great trumpeting walrus coming into contact either with the side of a bus, a reinforced concrete wall or one of the Great Imponderables of the Universe.

This unusual tone was followed a moment or two later by a deep and reverberating plop.

Far below in the green pool the forgotten carp had not forgotten himself. There was a swirl of water and a snap and a strange gulping rattling sound, followed by what might even have been described as a loud burp. And then there was silence.