Private Rites

by Julia Armfield

Where, then, will they go, and how will they manage? She has listened to the radio, heard pundits speculating about a crisis point (a term she has been hearing since childhood), heard people arguing that this or that statistic is exaggerated, that nothing is changing, that everything is already lost.

There are, she has often felt, no answers to inheritance, to the slick black suckered thing that at once shoves you up and drags you inward. 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.

She wants, or thinks she wants, some other way—some veiled third thing—but resents the task of discovering it.

It’s so hard, this girl said once, to want to save the world when you feel that you shouldn’t have to.

People do what they have always done, in the knowledge that choice is limited.

Strange alarms go off in various parts of the city, once installed as a means of warning against something that no longer requires pointing out.

The night is wide, unstill, implacable. The city like a wishbone, ready to break in two.

Life, she understands, is a collapsing down, a succession of memories held not in sequence but together, occurring and recurring all at once.

All of them together and yet never enough on one another’s side to save them from disaster.