Chapter 40: "The Littlest Snaggletooth: A Heartwarming Tale of Korean Dentistry"

And now I present to you the story of the Littlest Snaggletooth:

Once upon a time there was an English teacher who lived in a faraway land. Her students were very cute, but there was one little boy in particular to whom she was especially endeared. He gazed up at her with big brown eyes (well, as big as they can be when one is Asian. Hey, what can you do?) and a face lit with childlike joy and hope that she would grace him with her fair smile (silence, peanut gallery). He was the smartest, tried the hardest, answered the most questions in class, and he lived for the days when the teacher would allow him to play his favorite game. This game was quite popular, and involved the little boy holding a stick figure hostage on a rope and demanding that his classmates guess the English word that he was thinking of, letter by letter. The teacher was often stumped when her students played this game, but this was because her students were bad spellers.

All and all, the boy was charming, sweet and adorable. The teacher grew to favor him above all of the other children in the class. This was not difficult for her, considering that the other children yelled and ran about and traded Pokemon cards and caused her to grow gray hair prematurely.

But there was a dark shadow cast over the little boy's sweet appearance, one which made it difficult for the teacher to even look him in the face. For indeed, the child was horribly snaggletoothed. He had a smile full of little baby teeth, which were one by one freeing themselves as time passed. To his great misfortune, one of his baby front teeth had not yet parted ways with him, and was looking to be in a most miserable state. It was of a dark gray color, decayed, and was turned in such a manner as God had never intended a tooth to be turned. To gaze upon this small child as he spoke was to gaze upon one with a booger in their nose or a bit of foliage trapped under the gum, or perhaps one with a crossed or lazy eye.

The teacher was not sure why this boy's tooth was still hanging around after so many months, but it would've been rude to ask, so she let it be and pretended (badly) not to notice.

Then one day when the teacher came to class, the little boy smiled at her as usual, and the tooth was gone! The gap that replaced it was the most beautiful absence of tooth that the teacher had ever seen, and she did rejoice for days afterward. And all was well once again in that faraway land, and the Littlest Snaggletooth was snaggletoothed no more.

The End.