In a heart-shaped box, a mother keeps her children’s teeth, collecting them like coins or snowglobes. Out of love, of course. It's love that has her picking at her children's teeth, digging them out of their mouths. It's love that has her pressing a tissue against their mouths to stop the bleeding. It's love that has her drugging them so they can't feel any pain. She looks at her children now. All sleeping peacefully, their bodies lined up on the ground, each 2 inches apart. She wonders what it would be like to raise them. If they would be kind and joyful or sad and alone. If they would come running up to her after school, jabbering about their annoying friends. If they would clutch at her hands, scared to explore the world on their own. If they would get married, have kids, a career, travel, put her in a nursing home, cry over her death bed as the doctors pull the plug.

The mother strokes her little girl's hair. It would've been nice, she thinks, to raise them. She wipes the dried tears from her son's small face and closes his eyes. They were too blue, too bright, and she couldn't keep looking at them. It was time.

She picks up her shovel and starts placing dirt on her son's body first. She glances at her daughter and blows her a kiss, continuing to drop dirt on her son.

The sun is a kaleidoscope of orange, red, purple, pink, and a million other colors we can't see by the time she's done. She places her makeshift graves on top of each of them. Then, she crouches down and kisses the dirt on top of her children, one by one. They're still her children after all.

Too bad they're dead.

She strokes their teeth in bed later that night, remembering how it felt to rip them out of their children's mouths. The way they screamed and clutched at her shirt, begging and begging. How it felt to deny them and watch the way their eyes glassed over.

She looks down and rubs her hand over her slightly rounded belly. A flutter of excitement washes over her.