The Last House on Needless Street

by Catriona Ward

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.

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. 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.

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.

I understand something about life that Ted never has: it is too painful. No one can take so much unhappiness.