The Last House on Needless Street

It is the anniversary of the disappearance of the little girl with the popsicle. Ted Bannerman remembers the day with trepidation. The police searched his house, and a reporter took his picture, which later appeared in the local paper.

The townspeople persecuted Ted, breaking his windows until he boarded them up. The house remains boarded, with only small peepholes through which Ted and his cat, Olivia, peer. Ted was innocent; his alibi was that he spent the whole day outside of 7-Eleven asking for candy.

To calm himself, he goes to look at the birds in the yard. To his horror, somebody has left glue traps. Birds are stuck to them, dying in the heat. Ted views this as murder. He does not want his daughter Lauren to see, so he goes outside to clear up the birds and chases away a stray tabby cat. Unfortunately, the birds and the glue traps all stick together into a mass, and Ted is unable to extricate them without damaging them. Desperate, he builds a miniature gas chamber out of a Tupperware container and suffocates them. Ted is distraught.

Ted puts the dead birds in a trash bag.