The Last House on Needless Street

by Catriona Ward

(I don’t always get tenses right. Everything always feels like it’s happening now and sometimes I forget it actually happened then.)

So the person who took Lulu also took Dee’s mother, and then her father. Dee was taken too. For how much of her remains, after everything? She feels like a big, dark, empty room.

“Did you like it there?” I asked. “Do you miss it?” She shook her head, impatient. “‘Like,’ ‘miss’—these are soft words. Such places just are. It does not matter what you feel about them.

“In this country, all the people are afraid of death. But death is what we are. It is at the center of things. That was the way in Locronan. In the iliz the ankou was carved on the altar. We left milk by the graves for him to drink, with one of his many faces. The cemetery was the heart of the village. It was there we came to talk, to court and argue. There were no playgrounds or parks for children. Instead, we played hide and seek among the gravestones. Life was conducted amid death, side by side.

The cord is white and soft, glowing. It connects the three of us, heart to heart. Then the white light grows, spreads over the earth, and I see at last that actually the cord runs not only through us, but also through the trees, the birds, the grass and everything, out across the world. Somewhere, a big dog bays. The sun has risen. The air turns warm and golden. The LORD is here, before me, a burning flame. He has four delicate paws. His voice is soft. Cat, He says. You were supposed to protect. I cannot bring myself to look up into the LORD’s face. I know that, today, it will be my own.

In the end it is my turn, and they staple me up, which is weird. I refuse the painkiller. I want to feel it. So short, this life.