~
At some point, a building catches fire in your small town, reducing a long-standing restaurant and the apartments above to a now-empty lot. Before your mother mentioned it, you hadn’t thought of this restaurant in years. Thinking back, you recall hearing two people died in that fire, and wonder if it really happened that way. If you heard about it and you’re mis-remembering. If those two people you were thinking of didn’t actually die, that was two other people. Those people are fine.
~
Six days after she escaped from home at fifteen, she landed three houses east as a newly-dyed blonde, hoping no one would recognize her. Their small hamlet, not much more than an intersection, held twelve houses in total, leaving it too small for a storefront or even a post office. Mrs. MacLeod sold muffins and other baked goods, but that was only on Thursdays. More animals than people, my father would say, and yet, it still took three months for her family to find her. But by then she was pregnant, and none of it really mattered, anyway. They hadn’t been looking that hard.
~
Most of the houses on Orchard Avenue are similar in age to my wife, in a neighbourhood the age of her parents. Half a block north, you can see the original farmhouse, set between in-fills. This was most likely the first house to emerge from this former assemblage of fields, now unidentifiable as anything but contemporary suburban sprawl: a street named for what it once held. And forty years on, from the exodus of apples, stray tree roots still infect the backyard pastiche of new in-ground pools. They enact their revenge.