Unlikely Animals

by Annie Hartnett

We see and hear it all in Everton, one of the perks of being dead, omniscience within town limits. It’s a little frustrating how the living come and go, but we always get the full story eventually.

She had never been able to heal her father’s back pain, not completely, and it had gotten worse these past few years with Emma gone. It’s unfair how the body crumbles while the soul still lives in it.

Her father often said that a poet loves anything that better illuminates the daily horror of being alive.

“That was only the imperfect human body having a hard time,” he told Harold Baynes. That line was actually something his wife had said first, to Auggie, as a way of comforting him, one of the times Auggie was trying to get off heroin. He was having bad diarrhea, a common side effect of the detoxing process. Auggie had shit his bed, Ingrid had cleaned it up, and that was exactly the kind of reassuring thing you say to someone you love when they are being an awful burden but you’re trying to convince them that you don’t mind. Not at all. No big deal. For you? Anything.

People talk a lot about first loves, or the love of your life, but people don’t say as much about the friend of your life.

She knew the addiction wasn’t his fault, but then again, she blamed him for it anyway.

Through all his forgetting, Clive Starling had not forgotten about her.

“Why do you keep looking for her?” Olivia asked. “If she’s in heaven?” “Everyone deserves to be looked for if no one knows where they are,”

Anticipatory grief, it’s called, when you’re sad about something that hasn’t happened yet. Oh man, we thought at Maple Street, how we missed the excruciating pain of being alive.

No one ever stops loving their high school best friend, no matter how we lose them. Some of us at Maple Street had lost our childhood best friends to world wars, to polio, to childbirth, to other violent ends, or just to plain old boring time and separation, but we’d all taken a piece of that love to the grave. That first love. It had shaped us all.

Someone you had failed to always be there for, like you’d sworn you would, sworn best friends forever and ever, two halves of the same heart, unable to survive without the other. Someone who you hadn’t been able to help, in the end. There was no name for that mixture of grief and guilt and shame.

It’s easy to figure out how you feel about something when you think you’re about to lose it.

“Dad, the realization that you’re going to die is not an excuse for an affair.” “Oh, my dear daughter. You’ll find dying is an excuse for everything.”

You’re not too messed up at all. You’re just as messed up as you should be.” At Maple Street, we knew those four words—“I’m proud of you”—outrank “I love you” in terms of how much we need to hear them, especially from our parents.

It would be so great if you really felt like there was someone out there who listened to your bargains, your pleas, your promises to yourself. Like someone somewhere was keeping a lookout.

Emma Starling didn’t understand the importance of a proper burial. Those left unburied can never fully rest.

Even if Crystal Nash was never found, she wasn’t forgotten in Everton. She wasn’t invisible. She was everywhere.

That’s why we like living with animals so much; they exhibit their joy so outwardly, remind us how to be better alive.