Dean the Derelict Dentures' Adventures

Dean was a set of derelict dentures. He had once belonged to a creaky old man who had lost a significant portion of his teeth - to decay, a couple due to a bar brawl, some because he had a peculiar English mouth in which the jaw and number of teeth never seem to be in agreement, one as a memento taken by a particularly deranged ex-girlfriend, and then the rest to make way for the dentures. The old man had alternately kept Dean in his (not as clean a living space as might be desired) mouth, and in a glass next to his bed. Life had been quiet, but Dean had liked it that way, and he did his best to aid the old man in talking, chewing, and other activities that tend to require teeth.

When the old man died, Dean fully expected to be buried with him - surely they wouldn't bury an old man without his teeth? - but Dean was proclaimed too dirty to follow his master to the grave, and the old man was buried with a new set of fake teeth instead. Now unneeded, Dean was tossed unceremoniously into a garbage can. This was a new and quite astonishing set of surroundings for Dean, and he quickly made friends with the nearby tissues, discarded packaging, rubber gloves, and sandwich crusts - though he found that none of them were particularly talkative. Just as he was beginning to make real progress in his budding friendships, Dean and his cohorts were scooped up by the night janitor and heaved into a dumpster.

The dumpster was dark and smelly, but Dean had lived inside an old man's mouth most of his life and was used to this.

The dumpster also contained rats.

Dean did not initially know that there were rats in the dumpster. For a while, he sat in the garbage bag and made polite conversation with the surrounding trash, but the tissues pined for sunshine and open air and besides, Dean was quickly tiring of this particular heap of rubbish. So he gnawed his way out of the garbage bag, and into the dumpster.