Something was different inside Pigúiça's mouth. When she touched it with her tongue, her front tooth went tick, tick, swinging back and forth like a cupboard door left open.
“Fofuxo! My tooth is loose!” she shouted, opening her mouth wide so he could see. “What if it falls out? What if it hurts? What if I never have a tooth there ever again?”
Fofuxo came close, took a careful look, and smiled. “That's a baby tooth,” he explained. “It gets wiggly when a new, stronger tooth is growing underneath, getting ready to take its place.”
Pigúiça thought about that. A new tooth, down there, waiting for its turn? It sounded like the line at the slide. But she was still worried.
That afternoon, Fofuxo came up the path carrying an enormous bone in his mouth, as big as a bench. Pigúiça's jaw dropped. It was the most beautiful bone she had ever seen. And she couldn't bite it.
“That's not fair,” she grumbled, plopping down on the path. “With a wiggly tooth, all I can eat is mush.” Fofuxo set the bone down and lay beside her. “Then today, we'll both eat mush.”
And they did. Warm pumpkin mush, each in their own bowl. Fofuxo made such silly this-is-delicious faces that Pigúiça started to laugh.
She laughed so hard, with her mouth wide open, that all of a sudden she felt a teeny, tiny plink. And there in her bowl of mush was her little white tooth, looking right up at her.
“It came out!” she said, surprised. “And it didn't even hurt!” She poked her tongue into the gap. It felt funny. Like a brand new window in her mouth.
Fofuxo told her that on Dogavios, baby teeth are given to the flowers. So the two of them walked to the flower bed by the house, and Pigúiça set her tooth carefully in the middle of the daisies.
“Thank you for keeping it safe,” she said. And the oldest daisy answered in a soft, petal-y voice, “Thank you for bringing it. Take good care of the new one.”
That night, in bed, Pigúiça kept poking her tongue through the little window in her mouth. Sometimes she whistled by accident, wheee, and giggled quietly.
Down inside, in the cozy dark of her gums, the new tooth waited for its turn, in no hurry at all. And Pigúiça wasn't in a hurry either. She closed her mouth, closed her eyes, and fell asleep, dreaming of the giant bone she would bite someday.
