Private Rites

by Julia Armfield

Some time ago, she accidentally winked at a woman while messing around with her contact lenses and the horror of that moment stayed with her well into the end of the day.

The tips of her fingers still smell like chlorine from the pool, a smell that never seems to leach away in its entirety.

There are any number of ways to be annoying in a public pool, even during designated lane swim, and Agnes is fairly sure that the list she’s compiled is more or less exhaustive. Men who join the medium lane, swim two incredibly dramatic lengths and then stop at the shallow end to breathe loudly for twenty minutes. Women in swimming caps who spend what seems like hours adjusting their goggles poolside only to overtake you with a school-teamy front crawl the second they start. People who swim too slowly. People who swim the wrong way. Anyone who chooses to do the butterfly, which is a stroke for cunts.

The sensation, then, not so much of being misunderstood as of being understood too well at one time and then never again.

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.

Best not to recollect that once there were any number of options and now there are fewer.

Irene has always registered a low note of panic at the thought of getting rid of any possessions. She is prone to treasuring her most trivial items, ticket stubs from the ferry, old water bills, books she didn’t really like. This is never so much in the belief that they’ll one day come in handy as that the act of throwing them out will somehow trigger their long-withheld purpose, a sudden and obvious use revealing itself only as she watches the item fall from her hands.

It me

At what point, she wanted to say, do we stop being the direct product of our parents? At what point does it start being our fault?

If silent prayer is untrustworthy then what does that say about the God you’re praying to?

Silence pervades faith, but more than that it pervades the institution, a constant deafening silence, a holding back of crimes, of secrets, of the many sordid things the Church would rather not be known.

We love people before we notice we love them, but the act of naming the love makes it different, drags it out into different light.