A small but sprightly orchestra offstage somewhere struck up a merry tune, and the curtains were pulled back.

“Ohhhhhhhhhh!” gasped everyone.

“It’s the same every time,” whispered Pepper. “I don’t know why they always act so surprised.” Old Flossie leaned in front of What-the-Dickens and rapped Pepper’s knees with a knitting needle to make her hush.

The overture crashed to a close in a rapture of cymbals. A chorus of bees bumbled onstage and took its place on a kind of bleachers made out of old Popsicle sticks. The bees hummed in less-than-perfect thirds.

Next, in strict formation, some male skibbereen marched on with red plastic toothbrushes slung over their shoulders like military firearms. They came to a halt on either side of a podium made of two old wooden spools, now bare of thread. One spool stood atop the other, secured together by a nail driven through their centers.

The music of the bees droned toward a climax. Finally a glorious female skibberee, in a skirt made out of a Sunday newspaper color supplement, paraded onstage. Rapturous applause from all sides. “Why does her dress say ‘Parade’?” asked What-the-Dickens.

“Shhh,” said everyone.

“Greetings, Doctor Ill,” began the silky-voiced hostess. “Greetings to all the loyal residents of Northwest Sector, Division B: our own Undertree Common! My name is Silviana, and I love you with all my heart!” She blew kisses at one and all.

“I love you back!” cried What-the-Dickens, smitten. But when all the skibbereen took up his cry, it wasn’t entirely in mockery, and Silviana pouted and preened and cut capers till the applause died down.

“You don’t talk back to a star!” hissed Pepper. “Just shut up and listen.”

“Oh, sorry,” whispered What-the-Dickens.

Silviana went on. The rustling of newsprint followed her as she drifted from side to side of the stage, displaying to each and every skibberee in the room her personal glamour.

“Every month at the full moon,” sang out Silviana, “we gather to remember our humble origins as skibbereen. We recall our ancestors. We relish our relatives. We refresh our sense of mission. Also we refrain from putting old chewing gum on the undersides of the benches. This means you. Let the Pageant begin!”

“Bravo!” shouted Doctor Ill, so swept away that he slipped sideways on his muzzled mouse. Silviana tossed him a sunburst of a smile as she took her place at the podium.

“Remember, if you will, the dark days of the past,” sang Silviana, as the bees transposed their melody into a minor mode. “Long ago, when the First Fairy accidentally arrived, she was as mysterious and clueless and unmotivated as a common butterfly in some common meadow!”

At this, a few skibbereen came drifting in from offstage. Some were dressed as mouse-brown moths, some as monarch butterflies, orange as Maharajah. Thanks to the skill of a cunning costumier, one of them sported wings cut out of an old dial of plastic laminates originally intended to color the light cast upon an aluminum Christmas tree. Her costume wings were flashy, outsized, and ridiculous. But the magical effect was a winner. “Ooooh!” said everyone, several times in a row.

What-the-Dickens began to applaud the spectacle. He couldn’t help himself. This is the best part of my life so far, he thought.

Silviana started to narrate the natural history of the skibbereen, in a fluting voice that carried clear to the back of the chamber.

“More than a century ago, a poor old lepidopterist — meaning a butterfly scientist, people; pay attention now — lived in the woods with his poor wife, whose name was Edith. One day the husband caught sight of what he thought was an unknown specimen clinging to a cabbage. He declared it a ‘true fritillary.’ Fritillary is the name of a certain sort of spotted butterfly.”

Out from the wings came a skibberee acting the part of the butterfly expert. He wore a caped jacket and a sort of deerstalker hat, very Sherlock Holmes, fashioned out of an upside-down acorn shell. With a great deal of effort, he managed to balance before him a genuine magnifying glass — the real item — sized for human use.

This made his face look huge.

When the scientist looked directly at them through his lens, What-the-Dickens screamed along with the rest of the audience. It was like being spotted by a predator. Skibbereen are never seen! He began to understand the panic of being noticed.

It was kind of fun, and terrible, too, both at once.

The butterfly expert turned away and pretended instead to search for butterflies. Most of them fled in terror, but a single one trembled delicately in place, allowing the inspection to proceed. This was the gaudy one with carnival wings.

Then out came the scientist’s wife, Edith, played by a skibberee lass in an apron cut from a white paper napkin. Somehow, on her tender shoulders she balanced the better part of a plastic face torn from an abandoned toy baby doll. The head was about eight sizes too large for the body that barely managed to hold it upright. The effect was decidedly monstrous. But this, perhaps, is how humans appear to skibbereen.

The eyes of the doll-wife stared glassily ahead as if listening to the narration.

Silviana continued. “The scientist had a problem with his overbite. His diction was lousy. His tongue curled and spittle lashed everywhere. Did his wife, Edith, hear him say ‘true fritillary’?”

“No,” the audience clamored.

“Did she hear ‘tooth fertility’?”

“No.”

“Did she hear ‘true virility’?”

“No!” shrieked the audience. They seemed familiar with this exchange, and were eager to respond.

“What,” said Silviana stagily, “did she think he said?”

The audience roared. “Tooth fairy! Tooth fairy!”

“I have no doubt!” agreed Silviana, and continued. “Over tea that afternoon the wife took up her pen, and she scribbled a story.”

Edith Monster-Babyface now swept up from the floor a jay’s feather, brilliantly blue and black, and she mimed dipping it in an imaginary bottle of ink and writing words across the floor. “The wife called her story ‘Tooth Fairy Magic.’ It was all about how a sweet little tooth fairy collects baby teeth and pays for them in cold hard cash, something of which the family was in short supply.”

“Imagine!” the skibbereen said with a laugh. “A tooth fairy! Ha-ha!”

“The wife read her story aloud to her lepidopterist husband. He said, ‘Edith, you’ll turn our children mushy in the head with such nonsense!’ The children, however, clapped with glee.”

From the opposite wing, extras playing the couple’s children plowed onto the stage and sat down around Edith Monster-Babyface. They swayed back and forth in time as if in thrall to her rapturous tale.

The butterfly thing that was neither a true fritillary nor a tooth fairy struck a pose in the middle of the stage. Eventually stagehands, remembering their cue, pushed out from the wings a box of kitchen matches standing on its end. It had been painted over with a clockface, though the numbers were all helter-skelter. (1:00 a.m., 2:00 p.m., 6:45, 4:00 b.m., 9:15½, 8:70; 7:00 p.m.; 90.9 FM; 26:10, and back around to 1:00 a.m.)

“And when Edith read her story,” said Silviana, “the lone skibberee, the First Fairy, the foundress of our species, listened to it. From whatever realm of faerie she had accidentally blundered, she had to make herself up anew in this new world. So she listened hard. And she began to evolve, because stories work their magic that way. They build conviction and erode conviction in equal measure.”

The gaudily winged creature went and stood behind the clock, as if listening, while Edith Monster-Babyface mimed reading her tooth fairy story with many broad and sentimental effects.

“In time,” continued Silviana, “Edith sold the story to a children’s magazine called Saint Nicholas. Thomas Nast, who first drew Santa Claus to look the way he does today, illustrated the piece. He pictured the Tooth Fairy as a simpery airborne dance-hall girl, conducting a campaign of dental hygiene with her sidekick, an androgynous flying toothbrush named Tickles.”

Here Silviana herself cut a few figures, looking inane and attractive. She danced in tandem with a skibberee who had a toothbrush tied on his back. The bristly head of it, painted with a pair of goo-goo eyes, towered above her. The audience nearly wet itself with delight.

“Slowly, the notion of a tooth fairy took hold. Tickles the flying toothbrush, however, proved less popular, and he was quickly retired.” The toothbrush walked offstage in a huff, and Silviana returned to her podium.

“In human legend, the Tooth Fairy possesses a very low-grade magic. But its inspiration — our ancestress — the creature considered by the scientist to be a new specimen of spotted butterfly — was, magically speaking, rather talented, too.”

Skibbereen the room over were withdrawing handkerchiefs from their pockets and blowing their noses. This was the good part.

“You see, the figure skulking behind the clock had been known in the hidden other world as a skibberee. Through no fault of her own, this nameless skibberee, the First Fairy, the mother of us all, happened to mutate, in that lighthearted, civilization-threatening way that species do. The mutation caused her to lose her protective coloring — her invisibility — and to be lodged, without hope of return, in the tide of human affairs, otherwise known as Our World.”

Silviana flung her arms out wide to emphasize Our World.

“The world at large; and it is large.”

Huge applause for the world at large.

“Newly shipwrecked in our dangerous world, the mutated skibberee had few instincts on which to draw. She was scared, naïve, and suggestible. When she heard the story of the Tooth Fairy, she believed it was all about her.”

The butterfly-skibberee behind the clock stepped out into the spotlight and clapped her hands to suggest sudden revelation.

“The lone skibberee paid as much attention as her raw nervous system could manage. Having arrived from the Magical Beyond while in a state of pregnancy, she produced an egg sac. In just a few generations, what remained of her original skibberee proclivities had been reshaped by the species’ self-determination as Tooth Fairies.

“And so, ladies and gentlefriends, was our kind established. Our job was spelled out for us. Our civilization chose to fulfill its mission: to work hard and to thrive. Aided by our natural love of secrecy, magic, and good cheer, we skibbereen have found ourselves a duty and pledged ourselves to our task.

“Please rise and join in singing the Tooth Fairy Anthem.”

What-the-Dickens, amazed at the power of great theater, was swept to his feet. Though he didn’t know the words, he listened with tears in his eyes as his kin and kith, his own beloved kind, bellowed their national carol. The audience sang along with Silviana, Edith Monster-Babyface, the Honor Guard, the butterflies, the children, the lepidopterist, Tickles the Toothbrush, and the actress playing the First Fairy.

The room erupted in cheers. Pink balloons, fashioned from prechewed bubble gum, were released from the ceiling. Ticker tape — made from the raveled edges of newspapers — fell everywhere. Silviana took a half a dozen bows. From his private box, Doctor Ill himself tossed the star a bouquet of violets wrapped up in party ribbons. “It’s the best thing I ever saw,” wept What-the-Dickens in joy.

“Get used to it,” said Pepper, who wasn’t clapping. “It doesn’t change at all, month by month, year in, year out. It’s our history, for good or for ill.”

“Is it true?”

Pepper shrugged. “It’s true that this is what we tell ourselves. Is the history accurate? Who knows? How could we know one way or the other? Does it matter? It’s a pretty enough story.”

The crowd was chanting, Free the tooth! Free the tooth!

“Can I meet Silviana?”

“In your dreams,” barked Old Flossie, wiping her eyes on her sleeve. “She doesn’t condescend to notice the likes of you, laddio. Besides, you have an appointment with Doctor Ill. Pepper is to take you to his den at once.”

She blew her nose loudly. “I do love to be reminded of our duty,” she said, and cuffed Pepper on the shoulder. “And so should you, Pepper. Now get going, you, and don’t keep the good Doctor waiting.”