The Whole Tooth

Mark Maldonado lay in his bed, his slumber disturbed by a particularly unsettling dream. He dreamt he was a tall oak tree, and he was being tormented by an insistent woodpecker who tapped against his skull with maddening regularity.

In the peculiar way of dreams, he began to realize that the tapping was not a product of his fitful slumber, but rather was actually happening to him in the waking world. His mind slowly swam up towards consciousness, and he found himself staring in disbelief at the stranger who stood before his bed.

The man was large and beefy, a cigar clamped between his teeth. He exhaled, expelling a hazy blue cloud of smoke into the room. He was dressed in a faded pink white tutu, and in his meaty hand he held a small wand. He leaned down and used it to rap Mark on the forehead once more. "Rise and shine, Mac," he said. "We've got business, you and I."

Mark blinked in confusion. "Who the hell are you?" he asked.

The man grinned broadly. "Name's Sunshine, and I'm a Tooth Fairy," he said. "I'm here to collect what you owe us."

"Wait a minute, wait a minute, hang on a second," said Mark. His head was swimming. "You're the Tooth Fairy? You have to be kidding. How did you get in here?"

Sunshine sighed heavily and leaned in close to Mark's face. The smell of smoke poured off of the man. "Pay attention, Skippy," he said. "I'm not THE Tooth Fairy, I'm A Tooth Fairy. There's a bunch of us. I resolve overdue accounts. See, the tooth business has a very low profit margin, and so we need to audit our books very thoroughly. Naturally, with so many clients it takes us a while to catch up to the deadbeats, but we always find 'em. And that's when I go to work." He smiled coldly. "I happen to work in collections."

Mark had decided that he was still asleep and this was merely another of his vividly demented dreams. Still, he was curious, and so he happily went with it, anxious to find out what his mind had conjured up this time.

"Okay,' he said. "You're here to collect. But I think you've made a slight mistake. I left you folks a tooth for every nickel you ever gave me."

"That you did, Skeezix, you definitely did." Sunshine sat on the edge of the bed, his cold gray eyes never leaving Mark's face. "Trouble is, they weren't all yours. Did you honestly expect us to believe that you lost 47 baby teeth? You've obviously been cashing in on teeth that weren't yours. DNA tests showed that two of 'em were from a horse."

Mark said nothing. They had him dead to rights. "So what exactly do you want from me?"

"We want the dough we paid you. You committed fraud, Charley, and we expect you to make restitution." Sunshine pulled an invoice out of his tutu. Mark wondered where exactly it had been hidden, and decided he really didn't want to know. Sunshine continued. "According to the boys in accounting, when we take the overpayments and apply standard interest compounded over 30 years, you owe us $1,712.53."

Mark decided that the game had gone on long enough. He folded his arms across his chest. He spoke, a smug grin on his face. "And what exactly are you going to do if I refuse to pay?"

"Well,' said Sunshine, "then I'd have to put this cute little wand away and get my business model. You'd like it. It's made by the fine folks who gave us the Louisville Slugger."

Mark's smiled faded. "Would you take a check?" he asked meekly.

Sunshine laughed. "Who do I look like, the Easter Bunny? Cash or charge only."

Mark reached over to his nightstand and grabbed his wallet. He thumbed through the plastic windows and pulled out his MasterCard. Wordlessly, he handed it over to the large fairy. Sunshine reached into his tutu again and pulled a laptop computer from within. "You got a telephone jack near here?" he asked.

Mark gestured to the dresser, and Sunshine rose and crossed over to it. He hunched down in search of the jack, plugged his phone line in and powered up the computer. In a few moments, he had completed the transaction and closed the books on Mark's account. He tossed the credit card back onto Mark's bed and began to pack his things.

"This really ain't that unusual, you know," he said. "Nowadays, everybody's getting more careful with their bookkeeping. None of us can afford a scandal, ya know." With that, Sunshine tapped his forehead with the wand and vanished in a cloud of fairy dust. Mark wondered if his vacuum would be able to clean it up.

He pulled the covers back over his body and tried to return to sleep. The fairy's words played over in his mind. He wondered who else might be auditing his childhood.

Much later that night, after he had gone back to sleep, he was awakened by a fat man dressed in red who wanted to discuss a Schwinn racing bike and Mark's behavior in the year 1968.