The Last House on Needless Street

by Catriona Ward

I ate a pickle and now I feel a lot better.

Pets are better than their owners in general. I feel bad for all those dogs and cats and rabbits and mice. They have to live with people but, worse, they have to love them. Now, Olivia is not a pet. She’s so much more than that. (I expect everyone feels this about their cat.)

I judge people two ways—on how they treat animals, and on what they like to eat. If their favorite food is some kind of salad, they are definitely a bad person. Anything with cheese, they are probably OK.

The gods are closer than you would think. They live among the trees, behind a skin so thin you could scratch it open with a fingernail.

I think it’s OK for me to say that I am beautiful.

And Lauren has some kind of psychological issue; I’m not clear on the details but it seems to involve being very rude and loud.

Anyway the trick to life is, if you don’t like what is happening, go back to sleep until it stops.

Everything in life is a rehearsal for loss. Only the smart people know it.”

“I want you to feel the power of it,” she said. “Of walking away from something you love. Doesn’t it make you feel strong?”

So it was many years before it happened that Mommy began to prepare me for her departure. I understand her better, now. Now I’m a parent I know how afraid you get for your child. Sometimes when I think about Lauren I feel almost see-through with fear, like a pane of glass.

I like this kind of place, where you’re in between one thing and another. Hallways, waiting rooms, lobbies and so on; rooms where nothing is actually supposed to happen.

My mother would be very upset if she knew I had a homosexual cat. She had very strong feelings about it.”

The young feel pain intensely, I think, because they don’t know yet how deep it can go.

She tries to turn, to run. But everywhere she turns there are silent crimson birds fluttering among the trees of bone, bearing in their beaks the wisps of grass that are not grass, lining their nests with her dead sister’s hair.

How many times can someone bend before they break forever? You have to take care, dealing with broken things; sometimes they give way, and break others in their turn.

She felt the sorrow deeply in herself. It was awful, what she had been forced to do.

“I’d like people to know that we are always striving toward the good,” they said. “We are always protecting the child.”