The Last House on Needless Street

by Catriona Ward

One of Lauren’s favorite games is to take each plate out of the cupboard one by one and lick it. Then she yells, “Dad, all the plates are dirty.” Now she rolls off the bike onto the floor and starts pretending to be a tractor, growling and crawling. “As long as she’s happy,” I mutter to myself. Parenting.

Children are like a chain around your heart or neck, and they pull you in every direction.

That is when it happened. A soft white glow gathered on his chest, over the place where his heart must be. The glow became a cord, reaching out through the air. The cord approached me. I rowed and struggled. But I was held fast. I felt the light encircle my neck, link me to his heart. It didn’t hurt. It bound us together. I don’t know if he felt it too—I like to think he did.

That’s enough for now. Feelings are very tiring.

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

She didn’t read. She just looked out through the forest and the land and the water, at something none of us could see. She seemed like she was dreaming, or watching for an enemy. Looking back, she was probably doing both.

Everything in life is a rehearsal for loss.

Breaking me, then mending me, over and over—that was my mother.

“Are you going to take them away from me?” I asked her. She said, surprised, “How could I? They do not

belong to you.” I saw that she was showing me something that was safe to love.

For how much of her remains, after everything? She feels like a big, dark, empty room.

Getting hurt makes the body and brain weird, even if you don’t feel the pain. My thoughts are everywhere right now.

The air smells strongly of cleaning products, a chemical impression of a flowering meadow. At some point in the future, I guess, almost no one will know what real meadow smells like. Maybe by then there won’t be any real meadows

left and they’ll have to make flowers in labs. Then of course they’ll engineer them to smell like cleaning products, because they’ll think that’s right, and it will all go in a circle.

These are the kinds of interesting thoughts I have while in waiting rooms and at crosswalks or standing...

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

My memory is Swiss cheese, in general.

“You are more frightening than anything that lives in these woods.

I understood then that there was another, shadowy her, made of the past—like a ghost and a living person bound together.

“So her mind fragmented. It formed a new personality to deal with the trauma. It’s rather beautiful. An intelligent child’s elegant solution to suffering.”

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.

That’s why I drink, I say to myself, to control time

and space. It seems the truest thought I’ve ever had. Faces tip and slur.

I wanted a friend to look after us. The weird thing is, now that I have one, all I want to do is to look after him.

Memory is not linear, but nested in a series of compartments.