Private Rites

by Julia Armfield

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

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?

People think it’s just hellfire and brimstone, four horsemen and out, but actually the end times go on and on and on.

It’s still hard, though, all this pushing forward. Sometimes I think hope is a far less satisfying feeling than despair.

Perhaps, after all, God is simply a poached egg and a yolk cooked just as it should be.