The Last House on Needless Street

by Catriona Ward

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.

The high chiming sound is not coming from the Parents. I turn my back on them, lift my tail and show them my butt.

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

The car rumbled through the coming night and I felt happy. Everything was gentle, inside me and out. Only children can feel that kind of safety; I know that now.

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. When we got home Mommy put me in the bath and gently checked me all over. She found a scratch on my calf where I leaked out red. She drew the flesh back together with two neat sutures from her kit. Breaking me, then mending me, over and over—that was my mother.

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. It relieves a lot of pressure and lets me think.

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 in line at the grocery store.

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

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 how gods travel, through minds.