Livvie Owen Lived Here by Sarah Dooley

they meant. I couldn’t remember who or why. What I remembered about this building was a water fountain in the kitchen and a mail slot between mine and my sisters’ rooms. I remembered fluorescent lights that dimmed and brightened willy-nilly, and the way it made me hum a lot more. The memories were distant, as though I were dreaming and tomorrow G could tell me about it with the thought bubble picture on her Velcro strip. But the memory was warm, like fuzzy slippers or nine blankets.
    â€œI think I liked you a lot,” I whispered to the apartment building. I was fourteen, so of course I knew apartment buildings couldn’t whisper back, but I thought maybe it waved at me a little, just with its curtains. I gave it a wave and a soft, sad smile. It wasn’t a sad place, but memories felt that way anyhow.
    At the crossroads, I looked longingly left, toward the blue-and-white trailer with my name sketched on the door of the hall closet, toward the cabin with its rough walls and my name drawn on the bathroom windowsill.
    Then turned right onto Pendleton Street.
    There was longing on this road, too, but it was different. Older and less peaceful. It felt like a scratch that never closed up no matter how many Band-Aids my parents tried to slap on it. This road, it hurt to learn, didn’t recall my step. It would have been easier to walk on the other side, where there was less gravel. If I had known in time, I could have crossed at the corner. It wasn’t like there were cars at this hour, stealing through the darkness like a burglar, or like me.
    â€œBut I didn’t know,” I said out loud. “I guess I did forget something.”
    We stopped coming here once the whistle stopped blowing. When we lost our house at the end of the road, when we moved into the trailer park and started the string of rentals we had lived in ever since, none of us quite had the heart to turn right onto Pendleton Street anymore.
    Still, as the lawns with their political signs and their plastic riding toys and their mailboxes gave way to vacant lots, to weeds and old beer cans and the start of the fence that would run alongside the factory all the way to the entrance, I felt a familiar feeling whirl up through my stomach and come to rest in my heart.
    It wasn’t sun yellow anymore, but there it was. The railroad track snaking behind it, the factoryholding its hand on the right. It was slightly bigger than the other houses on the street—not big in a fancy way but like it was simply overgrown, too big to be as fanciful as it was, a lot like me. I loved the way it looked at me like it remembered, windows familiar even though the paint had changed from sun yellow to moon white. I loved the way it still smelled of new paper and fried potatoes.
    In the dark and the cold, I felt warm, conjuring memories of the gas furnace in the living room, the first place I ever drew my name. You lit it with a switch on top—Karen never let me touch that part—and it made clicking noises. Once it was lit, the fire sprang up inside. I was little, but I knew about fire, so I thought it remarkable that a fire could sit politely in a box on the wall and not burn down the house. The first few times you lit the heat in winter, you smelled gas throughout the house, a smell that always made Karen and Simon nervous, but to Natasha and me, it smelled like warm kitchens and fleece blankets. We stood together in front of the box of flames, arms outstretched with our blankets dripping off the backs of them, capturing the heat together. But even when we weren’t there to catch the warmth, the house held it for us, no cracks or gaps for the heat to escape.
    This house got a real wave. There was nothing shy about it.
    I stood beside the sign tacked to the porch rail and looked at my old bedroom window, all the way on my left, the house’s right, beside the factory fence. The window was acting weird, though. Instead of having warmth