The Last One

by Will Dean

Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change. —MARY SHELLEY, FRANKENSTEIN

“Sometimes—and he was a good man in other ways, don’t get me wrong, he never hit us or even shouted—but he’d take Mum’s shopping money, her housekeeping. He’d even help himself to our birthday money some years. Gemma said it was like living with a magpie. He was gentle and kind most of the time, but he was supposed to be keeping us all safe and he never really did.”

My sister is my rock in so many ways but she is a fragile, weathered rock, complete with deep stress fractures. We only really work well when we’re together.

Alice is a vibrant green sapling, who somehow pushed her way up through poor-quality soil, and now that she’s grown roots and fronds she is becoming unstoppable. I’m so proud of her I can’t put it into words. She’s a survivor.

Perhaps his secrets contributed to his sickness. The toxicity of maintaining such a complex web of lies.

But, like every woman I know, I’ve been followed down alleys, stared at in car parks, leered at on buses. Men have come over to sit next to me when all the other seats are unoccupied.

I hardened myself in those later years, in sixth form, and ever since. You never forget.

It means the powerful remain powerful by way of distraction and cheap satisfaction of the most base and immediate needs of the masses.

Poverty is only understood properly by those who have lived it.

“Part of me went numb that year and that part never really came alive again. It lies dormant.”