Private Rites

by Julia Armfield

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. There was dry land, once, and also the concept of drowning as emergency, a thing to be thrashed against. Now there is simply inevitability, the narrowing gaps between floodplains, islands of viable space on which people build doggedly, insistently, upward, away from the mess below. There is a horror movie adage that people are always running up stairs when they should be jumping out of windows, but what is a person supposed to do when all obvious exits are underwater? Places stack up, clench inward, people forced into ever closer proximity, one on top of the other on top of the other on top of the other. People can afford real security or else they simply cannot. Those who cannot live wherever and however they can, bunched together in tower blocks ill-equipped for modern circumstances, renting well over the odds, losing power, existing. It has been so many years—a decade of this, another decade before that of almost this. People take supplements, for vitamin D, for energy, complain the damp has reached their bones. It rains constantly and the fact of the rain, of the rain’s whole great impending somethingness, runs parallel to the day-to-day of work and sleep and lottery tickets, of yoga challenges, of buying fruit and paying taxes, of mopping floors and taking drugs on weekends and rea...