There used to be a street around the corner from my house where all the houses were picture perfect; I remember walking along the clean pavement, clutching my mother’s hand as I was led past clipped hedgerow after clipped hedgerow, every lawn mowed in parallel stripes and every house painted a sickly pleasant shade.  The pinks and yellows always fell next to each other, and they reminded me of Battenberg cake; as a child, I knew there was nothing I would love more than to live inside a Battenberg cake. At the age of five I made very solid plans that I would live in a rose pink house, clip my hedgerows and mow my lawn (in parallel lines), and I would greet other tiny children as they walked past.

   When I was twelve years old, I was very much in favour of being independent and grown up, and I would find things out for myself thank you very much – besides that, I knew I already knew everything anyway, because I was twelve years old. One of my independent grown up moments took me on a walk back down that perfect street, where for the first time I noticed something not so perfect, sitting in the middle of the road, staring at a key lime pie green house. Forever and always I will swear what happened next is true; I was there, I saw it happen, and I saw him. In front of my eyes sat a boy facing away from me on the rough, warm tarmac; he was a few years older than me, and looked as if someone had explained the idea of perfection to him and he had attempted to replicate it with a shoddy made suit (made, in fact, out of several suits), a badly tied tie and shoes so polished the toe leather was almost transparent. Since he was a few years older than me it should have been perfectly obvious to this boy that sitting in the middle of the road was stupid; I certainly knew it was stupid, so I decided to inform him of my superior intelligence. As I approached the boy I felt a feeling in my stomach I had never felt before; it wasn’t fear like I felt when I was approached by large, slobbering dogs, and it wasn’t the sickness I felt after eating too many sweets. This feeling went deeper – it was primal and called to a part of me desperately:

“You do not know what you are doing! Be quiet! Stay low! Keep to the shadows! Preserve yourself!”

By the time I had fully registered this feeling, it was too late. The boy had turned and looked at me with the curiosity of someone who does not understand, but would cut you into pieces if it meant he could. My desire to be correct was overridden, and I simply asked the boy what he was doing; he told me he was learning. Like a helpless animal I allowed myself to be led around, to inspect the straightness of the mowed lawns, the perfect pastel shades of paint, and the evenly clipped hedgerows. I was told that I was so lucky, to live in a place like this and be a part of all of it; at this point my twelve year old superiority complex kicked in, and I reminded the boy that he had seen me walk down the street from the other end, so he knew full well that I didn’t live here. He apologised, and said he would make up for his mistake; I took this chance to pass off my nervousness as indignance, turned on my heel and marched off. I heard the imperfectly perfect boy shout behind me, begging me to come back and share his perfect little world with him, but I took no notice and carried on walking. I remember that this is when I heard him speak, clearly, in a voice that filled the street but was not loud:

                                         “You will see.”

   When I was sixteen, my mother had a job working at the make-up counter of a fancy department store in town; many new businesses had been drawn to the area after news of our perfect street had got out. It had created a worldwide phenomenon, with its pristine pavements, pastel paints and perfect parallel lawns. The hundreds of reporters and film crews were not allowed in the area because of the Rules; four film crews looking for a little shining suburbia had already been turned away, and there would be many more rejected in the years to come. The residents of the street were famous too – they dressed in a certain way, travelled in particular vehicles, and shopped in specific shops. This is how my mother came to know Mrs. Jones of No. 13 from the perfect street; all the women bought their make-up from my mother because it was modest in both nature and price. Every week I would be ushered into the front room wearing an extremely unflattering lavender coloured day dress for tea and cake with Mrs. Jones. It was not the tea, the cake, or the horrible dress that I found annoying; two of these things were actually quite pleasant, and they were all rather unavoidable. The problem was that I distinctly remember Mrs. Jones, this perfect and modest woman who would sit before me in a full outfit of sky blue as she chatted about the weather, as actually once being a somewhat flirtatious and highly immodest exotic dancer named Cherrie Morella, drawn to the perfect street from Las Vegas by the camera crews, news of a vacant lot, and a shot at five minutes of fame. I could not understand how a woman who used to dye her hair all colour of the rainbow (and allegedly, not just the hair on her head) now had a perm set in chestnut brown, a family car, and a recipe book filled with delights that she would stay at home and bake for her husband and two children. I hadn’t been back to the perfect street since the incident when I was twelve; my dreams of living there had become jaded by a million television bulletins, reminding me of its quaint perfection – I longed for something more, something bigger. I voiced these longings to my mother over tea, followed shortly by a question to Mrs. Jones asking if she still had a dancing pole in her garage; while my mother cleaned the cream of Mrs. Jones’s face from where she had fainted onto a cream éclair, I stepped outside. As I took a breath of crisp wintry air, I saw something move at the very edge of my vision. I tried to turn, to catch a glimpse of the shape as it ran, but it was too fast; all I saw was the sleeve of a mismatched jacket disappear around a corner.

   I was willing to put up with the circus surrounding the perfect street, until I returned home from university in London the week before my nineteenth birthday. I had brought my new boyfriend along with me – he looked scruffy in a way that could only be achieved by a substantial amount of money and he was in a band and studied art and we were faithfully, desperately in love. I wanted to share with him a gem of my childhood; a takeaway outlet that served all kinds of vegetarian dished and gourmet salads, and was filled with the kind of people who had inspired my love of art in the first place. Imagine my slow, creeping disgust as I realised that the buildings on the street of my beloved restaurant were now all painted the colour of a box of macaroons – this does not even begin to allow you to picture the restaurant itself. The restaurant, my restaurant, was now a ‘diner’ with neon lights in the window. It served malts and fries and hamburgers, and the waitresses were painfully pretty.  I stormed out, slamming the door and cracking the pristine clean glass. I was finding it hard to breathe I was so angry, and as I dropped my clenched fists from covering my eyes, there he was. The boy stood in front of me, looking just as young, earnest, and disturbing as he did all those years ago.

                                                “Well?”

Unable to comprehend what he meant, I screamed at him, demanding that he explain what was going on. I was given a childish explanation; this is what I had wanted – something bigger – so he had made the perfect street into the perfect block. I still couldn’t make my mind twist in the ways he wanted. It wasn’t possible for this man – this boy – to be in charge of the street; after all, it was just a street for goodness sakes, and there was no way that even if the people could be controlled by a single child. My voice shaking, I told him that he was wrong, and that I could never be a part of that perfect little world because I wasn’t capable of it anymore. The boy looked as if he was struggling with something; he nodded slightly. I blinked, and he was gone. As I turned back to face the diner, I could see the strained smiles of workers and perfect patrons, each one displaying the same strained smile behind which lurked the hope for a fire or an earthquake or a meteor to just end it, end it all.

   I left again for London, hoping that I could again escape the sickly sweetness that had engulfed my town; nothing could have prepared me, or the town, or the world, for what happened next. The precise details of everything are still unsure, and I’m talking to you presently from six years after the event itself, with me aged twenty-four. I have returned more than once to the space where the perfect street used to be. It didn’t burn down; it didn’t get washed away in a flood; there were no casualties, but there were no survivors either. The street is not there any more, in a very literal sense; no bricks, no charred remains, not even any soil – just soft, small grains of black sand, filling the entire length and width of the street. The buildings that were taken in by the street and its perfection are now either shells of what they once were, boarded up and used for illegal parties, or they have become missions to remind everyone of what had gone before – ranging from memorial services for those lost on the street, to cults trying and failing to regain the delusional perfection it created. My boyfriend went to fetch me some coffee to help calm me down after that last argument with the boy, and he never came back; my mother doesn’t visit me any more after I told her about my boyfriend and the boy. I think she holds me personally responsible for the disappearance of my boyfriend, the street, and every person who lived on it; she seems to think I could have stopped it all, but she refuses to explain how. I live on my own, in a crumbling house right on the very edge of the perfect street gap. I have spent years trying to explain why the perfect street should never have existed in the first place, and the best I have come up with, on one of the many pieces of paper stuck to every wall in the house, is this: human beings were not built for perfection.  We may talk about it and dream about it, and lust after it in glossy magazines and on movie screens, and if the mood takes us we just might put on some fancy clothes and dance the night away, telling everyone we wished every day could be like this, but we know that none of it is, was, or will ever be real. Real life is human error; it is completely random people and events, colliding into each other by chance, creating sparks and setting things on fire. How else would you explain a Vegas stripper drinking tea in my mother’s living room?

   Sometimes the wind in my town is fierce; it whips everything up, creating a dark sandstorm that sweeps along every street. They rage and boom, rattling windows and shaking fences, but they always calm. At night I watch from my broken, paneless window as daring children egg each other on, into the black sand. I watch as they creep about marvelling at the little sand castles, left by the trickiest, most energetic wind, and I hear them make up stories to go along with the two, life-size sand figures in the middle of the street gap – one curvy and standing, one awkwardly sitting, facing away from the other figure. After the children leave, when it is pitch black night, I can see the sitting figure glow slightly, holding something in its misshapen hands.

   If I had been quieter back then, more stealthy and curious, I would have seen the boy cradling the world in his hands.