The Giant's Tooth by Bruce Coville

Author:Bruce Coville
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: fantasy, short story, fairy tales, giants
Publisher: Bruce Coville

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The outer coating of the tooth was hard but brittle, and broke away fairly easily. After about four feet of this, the material changed to something dense and yellow, tougher to work with the pick.

It took five days—which is to say, five of the times between when they slept—to reach this inner material. Two days before that, the hole had been big enough that Edgar could crawl completely inside. Though it was big enough for him to fit in comfortably—if you consider being curled in a tight ball comfortable—Meagan did not make him move there immediately, as he had once feared she would. This pleased him, and not merely for the obvious reasons. They had grown more easy in their companionship as the work on Edgar’s home had continued, and he had come to think of her not merely as someone sharing a disaster, but as a genuine, if somewhat irascible, friend.

Finally the time came when the excavation in the tooth was big enough for Edgar to take up his home in it. He moved his things—that is, the two or three items Meagan had given him, as well as a pitchfork (the single thing he had managed to snag on his own)—to his new abode.

After a day, he was surprised to find Meagan knocking at the edge of the hole he had made.

“I missed you,” she growled. Then she showed him a bottle of wine she had recovered from a wagon the giant had swallowed several months earlier and which she had been saving for a special event.

He invited her in and they had a small party, sitting in the darkness and discussing what he should do next to make his tooth more homey.

The following day, they ran a rope from Meagan’s home, through the gap between it and the next tooth, and then along the outer wall of the teeth to Edgar’s door, which made it easier for them to visit each other whenever they wanted.

While he continued work on his new dwelling, Meagan taught him how to snatch things from the tide of food and rubble that poured down the giant’s throat three times a day. When she “went fishing”, as she called it, she first secured a safety rope about her waist, anchoring the other end of the rope to one of the chairs inside the tooth. Normally she pulled things in with the help of a long pole that had a hook on one end. But if something particularly good came rushing past that was too far out on the tongue for her to snag simply by leaning for it, she would fling her whole body onto the surface of the tongue, then use the rope to haul herself back.

Once they saw an old man go past, but he was all the way in the center of the mouth, and they were not able to reach him despite their best efforts.

His cry of despair as he disappeared down the giant’s gullet echoed in Edgar’s dreams for many nights afterward.

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