Private Rites

by Julia Armfield

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

If there is somebody watching, they will run back to bed and hide beneath the covers before the scene can resolve itself. The memory of what was seen, or heard, will fade the way memories do when they are only halfway certain. Hard enough, in time, to sort it from the drift of dreaming, from the sense of only being half-awake. 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.

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 thousands of people have done before them.

The afternoon is wide, peach-ripe—rain incoming as always and the windows greased with mist, the city grown porous and slack around itself.

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.

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.

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?

“King Lear and his dyke daughters,”

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?

The problem with love, of course, is that it frequently asks too much of unlovable people. It can be hard, on even the best of days, to compel oneself to be selfless and patient and undemanding or even halfway reasonable when one is not given to any of those behaviors. But these are nonetheless the qualities that love demands.

Any horror story could be said to work in two pieces: the fear of being wholly alone and of realizing that one has company.

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.

She has wondered, before now, whether thinking about God is part of this. Wondered whether endlessly circling the same topics, harping hopeless and uncertain on God and on silence and deep, drowning lack have simply functioned as ways to keep her unhappy, keep her tight in the grip of an answer she can’t help seeking. Perhaps, after all, God is simply a poached egg and a yolk cooked just as it should be. Perhaps God is being fisted by the person you love most in the world, being taken apart one finger at a time until the whole of you is fucked out and pulled like a cord strung tight, white-eyed and waiting for crescendo. Perhaps God is all of that and kissing afterward, kissing most of all, sore-mouthed and messy, half asleep and trying to remember if you locked the door and if you need to set your phone alarm for seven. Perhaps God is all of that and an apology.