So once again I entered their home on Terracotta Road.

The Cat’s Table by Michael Ondaatje

8 min on the Ossington 63 southbound

I remember the smell most.  The sweetly rotting smell of dead.  I was eight years old and I knew instinctively when I walked in that something was dead and the something was Bree-Anne’s hamster.  I knew too, that I’d have to shelter my little sister from this loss.  Dad would be too happy to have the ‘rat’ out of the house.  I waited until the weekend to bury it.  It seemed less like lying when I told her as we searched, “No, Sammy isn’t dead in the ground like Mama.”