Private Rites

by Julia Armfield

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

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.

Any minute now, she thinks, any second, I could crash this whole day into the wall.

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.

She hates making eye contact in public places, the idea of an inadvertent brush with someone best kept in peripheral blur.

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.

Anyone who chooses to do the butterfly, which is a stroke for cunts.

Thinking when swimming is not thinking but something more like elevator music.

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.

She had pictured holding her loss in one hand and then the other, pictured opening up a window and lobbing out her loss to see how quickly it fell.

She used to rage, to get involved with direct action and instigate chaos, but her anger has waned over time, the way laughter eventually becomes forced, and what is left feels unpleasant but nonetheless easier.

I am angry, she has thought before, I just don’t know that I’m angry twenty-four hours a day.

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.

Irene, then, at the age of seventeen: first blond, then a crispier, bleach-fried blond, self-consciously furious in every direction and seldom polite enough to let anyone reach the end of a sentence before starting one herself.

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

Jude has always made Irene want to be better, or at least to appear to be so, to be calmer and more generous, easier and less enraged.

In dreams, she packs herself tight into a box and hopes this will be enough to evade some questing creature, holds the lid shut with two fingers and tries to ignore the sound of something breathing nearby.

“It’s like she works to be as pissed off as humanly possible. She treats it like a fucking job.”

the knowledge that a body can be tricked into eating itself,

Every minute, every second, our bodies are eating themselves.

She remembers him looking at her—opaque expression of one thinking of something else—imagines she is eight again, thirteen again, and the nothing she always was in his company.

Don’t look. She looks at her father. There you are.

The two of them going at it in a play of hostility that is still a greater intimacy than either has ever shown to her.

Agnes shakes her head again, tries to force down the feeling that occasionally arises, of wanting to be wanted more than she pretends.

All it takes is for someone to decide to kill you, of course, but usually you’ll find that they won’t.

It’s the kind of thought that comes to her with a whirring regularity, the fact of how little she knows about the needful things in life.

It’s not a nice quality (and, more to the point, it is not an interesting quality), this tendency to react to the prospect of intimacy with immediate panic.

He liked, Agnes knew, to push you to excel and then to cut you down when you did so.

Agnes exists—everything dies.

Unfair, but then having a child with one’s second wife not ten months after divorcing the first was never going to work for everyone.