Private Rites

by Julia Armfield

A house, unlatched, is less a house and more a set of rooms through which one might be hunted.

Easier, instead, to remember only make-believe. After all, a blanket over the head can amplify a person’s breathing, can make them think they hear things that aren’t there. A mouth spilling blood can be unpleasant to wake up to, but the baffle of the darkness can be kind—can allow a person to imagine that they’re still, in fact, asleep.

She’s good at her job, but the impulse to open her mouth and say something dreadful recurs and recurs. Not unlike the irrational desire to dash a contemplative silence to pieces or to climb to some high place and jump, so it seems a compulsion born less of intent than of the simple fact of its own possibility. The fact that she could do it is more than enough.

A memory, briefly summoned and then swiftly, professionally set aside: Isla’s own mother, white to the lips and muttering. Isla’s own mother, her face very close: This will only hurt for a second.

Her sister Irene once said that, at pinch points, people always turn to the divine, or if not to the divine, then at least to the well-trodden.

It’s a backup, she said, like a tested recipe. People love a ritual when things get hairy, to feel they’re doing something that thous...

Isla asks if he believes in the devil. “I don’t,” he replies—clasps his hands so the knuckles pulse as if filling and retracting—“I don’t, but I feel him anyway.”

Embarrassment, the potential for it, like something caught on the sole of the foot and hard to slough off again, a physical object she carries around at all times.

The irritation of that, of having missed it, will simply be something to shoulder, like everything else.

I don’t know, Jude will say in the sanguine tone they tend to apply to things unrelated to the Now, that I’d even know how to go back to things being drier. I don’t know if it would suit me at all. But the whole point is that you were suited to it once, Irene replies on the days when she’s feeling disagreeable. When we were kids, when we were teenagers, even. The whole point is you were different once, too. I know that, Jude says, but what’s the point in dwelling. Once you start, you’ll never get to the end of it.

Remember this: the world as it once was. The way things appear in the instant before they go under: first assured, then shipwrecked. The ease with which facts presumed permanent can change.

It’s exhausting, as it always was, to live with such a breadth of things to take up one’s attention—exhausting, the way there can be too much world, even in its final stages. Exhausting, to be so busy and so bored with no time left for either.

Their father built houses, which is to say he designed them and let someone else construct them.

There are, Irene has always felt, few frustrations to match that of being read a certain way by family members. To be misunderstood is one thing, but the curious hostility of a sibling’s approach lies less in what they miss than in the strange backdated nature of the things they choose to know. A person can be thirty, thirty-five, and yet still largely described by her sisters in terms of things that happened to be true at the age of seventeen.

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

Events are tricky to remember in constituent pieces, a symptom of submerged chronology, of a timeline moving fast and incoherently, too much unpleasant daily news. The facts, as far as Isla can recall them, are that no one wanted to smoke in the rain, so either they didn’t or were told they didn’t have to, and in either case, that seemed to be that.

She remembers, all at once, that Agnes is eleven years younger than she is, recalls the gape of time between them like something taken from her body, the ache like stolen flesh.

The pleasant sting of this, but then Irene spots them and the moment is over and the three of them are what they are again.

It’s a fact that Isla should be too old and too well trained to resent, and yet that slides beneath her surface like a splinter nonetheless.

this writing is exquisite. ms armfield i would die for you

In a purely clinical sense, death occurs not in the five minutes it takes the brain to starve but in the second that circulation stops and, along with it, breathing. Death, then, as an immediacy, as something pulled out of air.

I think all this is my fault, she thinks to herself, looks down at her phone again, and finds it has locked. I think I was supposed to sort this out. Doesn’t know what she means by this. Pulls her map up again and squints at the route.

The truth is not that Jude is calm to the exclusion of all problems but rather calm in the face of them, calm as a method of attack.

Can you fucking stop it? Irene wants to say. Wants to say, Do you remember when they took me to the hospital because I ate all those cherry stones and couldn’t stop throwing up?

I love these interludes, they’re almost Greek chorus like. I love that the City gets a say in the story

No one realized that cities are as variable as any other landscape, as made up of peaks and valleys, until the rain arrived to fill them in.

That she had been so afraid to look at him but that, when she did, the sight made her feel such a heap of nothingness—not a nothingness brought on by grief but by an absence of grief, an absence of anything at all—that she had to leave or risk opening her mouth and speaking the void aloud.

His work was something he appeared to discuss simply in order to have discussed it, his tone always that of a man who expected to have his words reflected back at him more than he actually longed to be understood.

He could just as easily have built himself a high-rise and ignored the problem, but he loved the illusion of harm’s way.

this invention of escape is so typical of privileged people

yet felt little about her father’s technical absence from the room. This lack was not a new sensation.

How, she wondered, was one supposed to grieve an absence when that absence was familiar? What, she wondered, was grief without a clear departure to regret?

chases a memory through the upper story of her mind and abandons it.

It’s hard to tell if it’s worse or just business as usual.

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

The world has a way of erasing its own history.

Thing is, someone comments in response to the final video, she’s clearly a fucking fruit loop but I get it.

They were a bunch of silly kids subletting a too-small flat and they killed themselves for attention—stop being so dramatic. The girl rolls her eyes toward the camera. What do you mean, “for attention”? Pretty hard to enjoy the attention if you’re dead.

She is aware, painfully aware, that there is nothing more tedious than a person who turns to another and says, I don’t know, I just find it hard to stay interested in someone who actually likes me.

Hard enough, at the age of eight, to speak aloud what she knew of their father: that he accepted her presence only because she was already there.

Well done, he would say when she used a word he had taught her, now let’s find you one that’s actually difficult.

Isla had been fifteen, possibly fourteen, and had laughed in the way this kind of confidence always invites, then gone away afterward and worried about it.

The first time you lose a parent, a part of you gets trapped there, trapped less in the moment of grief than in the knowledge of the end of childhood, the inevitable dwindling of the days.

One can start to more fully understand oneself as finite, as coming from a person who was finite and having to inherit that trait, she has said on more than one occasion. When my mother died, she is more careful not to say, I became aware of the limits of things, of the fact of my own ending.

Her father is dead, she thinks, and no one has bothered to clean up after him.

Only you make me like this, she wants to say. You think I’m like this and that makes me worse.

Irene pictures Isla at sixteen, swinging around the living room after getting into their father’s vodka to celebrate the end of exams. He says I’m not allowed, well here I am doing it. Their father had found the bottle in her bedroom the next day and made her stand on the landing and count while he administered a smart set of cracks to the backs of her knees with a ruler.

difference in the memories of each sister - isla remembers not being enough for irene when she was hurt, irene remembers isla rebellious, being punished

Your sister takes after your dad a little, their mother once said. She’s so purposeful, sometimes I worry about what would happen if she ever stopped. Irene felt, at the time, oddly torn at the thought of this distinction—Isla taking after their father being, of course, tacit confirmation that she, Irene, did not.

You’re so interesting, their mother would say to her, your mind moves in all these different directions, and Irene would want to tell her that actually she could be capable, that she could do what Isla did and move in one direction at once. I don’t know, she would think and not say to her mother, that I really want to be like you.

The problem, of course, has always been her father, the sense of him shattered across her—first broken and then embedded. You act like this, as Jude said once, because you were raised by a psychopath who made you believe everyone was somehow in opposition to you or out to con you or waiting to abandon you. Irene had told them this was pop psychology and then gone away and brooded on it. The problem has always been the way her father treated her mother, that he loved her and then ceased to love her, the way this withdrawal caused her first to unravel and finally to die. The problem has always been the way he left them alone in the house for long periods, the way he spoke to his daughters, the way he pitted one against the other—left each to struggle for a love they should have known they couldn’t earn. The problem has always been squaring one fact with another, her father’s great ease and easy cruelty. That’s good, he would say, in response to something Irene would tell him about her work, and the sun would shine.

The afternoon is gray and warmer than she likes it—unkempt about the edges and shifting underfoot.

She cries—perhaps—because her father once told her she was spiteful and parents, she has always felt, should have to like their children more than that.