It is teeth-chatteringly cold today. Not as desolate as in the midwest, where simply stepping outside could result in instant frostbite, but cold nonetheless. And frigid days like this, when all you want to do is cozy up under a thousand blankets and roll around in the fireplace, are just right for telling stories. So gather ‘round, children, to hear a Tale of Teeth:

There once lived a girl whose smile was too big for her mouth. With a such toothy, gummy grin, you’d think there’d be plenty of room for dozens of teeth—hundreds, even. Yet as her teeth grew in, they pressed and shouldered their way among each other like a game of dominoes until someone finally peered into that congested maw and said, “This will not do.”

“Some of you will need to come out,” a dentist told the teeth. “Then we’ll get things straightened out.”

So in he went with his needles and his Novocaine and his clamps and his pliers and his rusty forceps and his bone saws of various sizes, and he plucked teeth out like so many pomegranate seeds: one, two, three. The blood ran down her chin in grisly streams, yet he would not stop: four, five, six. “They use this technique in the Nacirema culture,” he murmured, a fiendish gleam in his eye: seven, eight, nine.

“There, now,” he said as he gathered the teeth together and placed them inside a small velvet bag. He handed them to a hygienist. “Please clean these carefully and put them with the others. At last…I have enough.”

The hygienist knew better than to ask what he needed them for. Hillary-Who-Used-to-Work-There asked him once. Back when she used to work there.

“Let’s close these gaps up,” the dentist said to the girl. “Your mouth is like a damp cave with stalactites and stalagmites grasping for each other in the darkness.” So he clamped her jaws in vices, which he cranked tighter once a month when the moon was full.

The hygienist tried to be kind. “Would you like me to put some festive colored bands on your mouth vice?” she whispered. “I won’t tell him. He’ll never know.”

After two years, the vice could be cranked no tighter and so was removed. The dentist filed her front teeth and made a plaster mold of her mouth. He claimed it was so he could craft a device to keep her teeth from slipping back into disorder, but the girl had her doubts. What did he do with the molds afterward? How many molds did he possess? How many rows of children’s straight, orderly teeth grinned at him from dusty glass cases on high-up shelves? Where did he keep them all?

“I can’t tell you that,” the hygienist told her. “Not after what happened to Hillary.”

The girl tried to put it all from her mind. She chewed peanut brittle and butterscotch candies with abandon and blithely ran her tongue across the smooth enamel, unencumbered by any metal impediment. Sometimes, lying awake in the dark at night, she counted the teeth still in her head. “Nine short,” she said to herself. She found she missed the teeth, missed having a smile that was too big for her mouth.

“How curious,” she said.

Soon enough, she was summoned back to the dentist.

“Step into this device,” they told her. “Wear this lead apron, lest your particles disassemble inside The Device.”

Thus attired, she stepped inside and The Device circled her once, and then again, all the while flashing lights and humming violently. She emerged to find the dentist leering at her over what she took to be images of the inside of her own head. He pointed to four teeth lurking beneath the others, like great sea creatures in the depths of the ocean.

“These will have to come out.”

This procedure took more than Novacaine and rusty plucking devices. A nurse in ominous black scrubs led her into a dimly lit room where she was given sweet-smelling gas and told to count backward from a hundred. When she woke, four more teeth had been taken from her. In their stead, someone had left small bits of white cotton—which ordinarily wouldn’t have fooled her, but the anesthesia had left her loopy and giggly and thus inattentive to such matters as impostor teeth.

“Bye, nice nurse,” she called, waving feebly. The nurse in black scrubs stood at the door and waved after her, a scalpel still clutched in his fist.

These, she vowed, were the last teeth she would ever have taken from her. The moment she turned eighteen, she packed a soft-bristled toothbrush and a jumbo roll of floss and set off on the road, an orthodontic outlaw. She used fake names and slunk into back-alley dentist chairs for periodic checkups, but she never stayed long enough for things to turn surgical.

She’d been running for nearly a decade when she found herself slowly reclining beneath an exam light in a small, dusty town. Already masked, the hygienist sat silently beside her head, placed a bib around her neck, adjusted the light, and got to work.

“Aykoo her eegy,” the girl said.

The hygienist nodded and kept scraping away at a bicuspid.

“Oo uck huniller.”

She shook her head. “Spit please,” she whispered.

But the girl knew that voice. She gripped the hygienist’s wrist and held it while she spit onto the grimy floor. “Take off your mask.”

Eyes wide and terrified, the woman slowly lowered the mask.

“It’s you,” the girl said. “After all these years. But how—”

“I’ve been searching for you for a very long time,” she said.

“What do you mean? How did you find me?”

“I heard tell of a wandering patient,” she said, “at a regional dental conference.”

“But how could you be sure it was me?”

“The x-rays, child,” she hissed. “I’d recognize those canines anywhere.”

The x-rays. She’d known it was foolish to leave records in her wake, but she couldn’t have imagined that the network of dental hygienists would be so extensive and well-organized.

“That’s not why I’m here, though.” She pulled out a small velvet bag.

“Are those…mine?” the girl asked.

The hygienist nodded. “Hillary left a secret Post-it hidden under the reception desk with a riddle on it which, once solved, revealed the location of hundreds of children’s teeth. Maybe thousands. The…the sight of them still haunts me. It was like the Catacombs of Paris, but just teeth.”

“That’s…super gross.”

“Yes. It was. But we retrieved them all. The dentist escaped with the molds, but we mean to return the teeth to any patients we can find. The rest we’ll destroy—anything to keep them out of the clutches of the dentist.”

The girl uncinched the bag. Nestled inside, like bits of milk glass, were thirteen teeth. She clutched the bag to her chest.

“Chin up,” the hygienist said.

“Thank you. That means a lot.”

“No, I mean—could you put your chin up a little bit? I can’t see your—there, just like that.”

“Oh—shar ou’ at.”

The cleaning finished, she placed her teeth one by one in a careful pile on the dusty ground. She closed her eyes, smiled a toothy, gummy smile too big for her mouth, and ground them to dust beneath her heel.