Private Rites

by Julia Armfield

The city is littered with follies of this nature, relics of a very recent history: a place first throwing itself into resistance, then management, then damage control.

People think it’s just hellfire and brimstone, four horsemen and out, but actually the end times go on and on and on.

Any horror story could be said to work in two pieces: the fear of being wholly alone and of realizing that one has company.

Inheritance, both in the sense of what is owned and what is embodied, the sense of herself as indistinct from the influence of those who came before.