Look In the Mirror

by Catherine Steadman

Death, it turns out, to those left behind, is an activity centered around the cataloging and dispersal of material objects.

“Chaos holds no answers,” you told me, a child of nine. “Look for the answers to your questions in the structure of things,” you told me. “That’s where meaning lies.”

Good things are rarely kept secret, which means I might find something I don’t like in all this. It is always dangerous to look too hard into the lives of those you love and respect more than anything.

That wish, that the world had opened up and swallowed him whole for his baseless assumptions, no doubt springing from anger built up over a lifetime of having to anticipate every eventuality in her own life as a woman: just in case.

She knows this fact as implicitly as she knows how to stand and walk and run as fast as she possibly can. She learned it young. Sometimes the only way out is through.

Why would anybody do something like this? Because they can, because awful, evil people have always existed and sometimes you can’t tell they’re awful and sometimes those people turn out to be someone’s lovely loving clever cuddly dad.