Private Rites

by Julia Armfield

Exhausting, to be so busy and so bored with no time left for either.

Jude tends to talk about family the way one might refer to the temporary closure of a favored restaurant: a shame, but hardly something to get worked up about.

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?

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.

“I think we all have to live our own lives. We can’t constantly be comparing things that happen to us to worse things happening all over the place.”

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 reception was muted, prickled over with something like dread, though that may simply have been the air-conditioning.

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