So Late in the Day: Stories of Men and Women

by Claire Keegan

‘Why don’t we marry?’ ‘Why don’t we?’ She’d let out a sound, a type of choked laughter. ‘What sort of way is this of asking? It seems like you are almost making some type of argument against it.’

‘A child is not an idea,’

That was part of the trouble: the fact that she would not listen, and wanted to do a good half of things her own way.

‘Just a lot to deal with.’

As a child, she had been told that hell was different for everyone, your own worst possible scenario. “I always thought hell would be an unbearably cold place where you stayed half frozen but you never quite lost consciousness and you never really felt anything,” she said. “There’d be nothing, only a cold sun and the devil there, watching you.”