In a heart-shaped box, a mother keeps her children’s teeth. They’re all she has left of them. They’re mingled together with their roots and grime, but she can identify each one as if she were looking at them eye to eye. “That one there is Michael’s,” she’d say, showing anyone who’d listen. “And that one, with the hole on the side, is Miriam’s. Oh, and that one gave little Morris so much trouble.”

The children all lost their teeth on the same day, one by one. Mother wanted something to remember them by before she lit the home on fire and fled to the yard to watch it burn. Father was long gone by then, away with some new woman in America, was the rumor. Mother had intended to walk into the burning house, but seeing the teeth in the box gave her a new fuel for life.

She found that so depressingly odd.