Private Rites

by Julia Armfield

its walls vibrating the way a creature might breathe in its sleep.

It’s depressing, all this thought that has nowhere to put itself,

She is tired in a way that seldom leaves her, a tight, acidic exhaustion.

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.

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.”

Wants to hold on to her arms and tell her that sometimes she worries she’s never felt anything but a blanketing sense of dread.

the one job you have as a parent is to give your kid a childhood they don’t have to recover from

Sometimes, she said, I fantasize about being a 1950s housewife and then I realize that all I’m actually getting off on is the idea of having enough money that I don’t have to work or worry about working.

loving someone being no guarantee that they won’t hurt you.

Sometimes I think hope is a far less satisfying feeling than despair.

and registers a painful stab of longing for Irene. Her sister, always resisting her steadiness, yet simultaneously demanding of it. Her sister, always reliably in need of an older sibling, reliably grudging about that need.

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.

it was all very well to be virtuous but one had to be bearable, too.

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

A stupid thing, Irene thinks, to have allowed a silence to grow like this.

A feeling out of nowhere, longing like a kick in the stomach: to be anything to anyone.

I’m scared that, if I were my wife, I would have left me, too.

her mouth half-open, white spot where her thoughts ought to be.

the kinder sister, leaving rancor in the dust.

I don’t want to be responsible for any of this.