The mother kept her children's teeth in a heart-shaped box, in the drawer of her nightstand, next to the magazines and the band-aids, below a few decks of cards and above the gun her ex-husband didn't want her to have.

She would count the teeth, if she could. It'd be better, she knew, if she ignored the box entirely, tucked it away in the back of her mind like the bottom of a nightstand. She did not ignore it. She did open the box from time to time, sifting the contents through her fingers while she sat on her new bed, in her new room, beneath a new roof on the same block in the same neighborhood.

She would count the teeth, if she could. But how could she?

The teeth were ash.

The rest of her children, ash.

It was all that remained after the fire.