Small Boat

by Vincent Delecroix

Their sinking didn’t start in the Channel; it started the moment they left their homes. Maybe they even started to sink the day they got the idea in their heads that everything would be better elsewhere, when they started to want supermarkets and child support, when they heard about Social Security or when a cousin living in London told them you could become a billionaire doing the washing up in a Tamil pop-up. You could say, I repeated, that all their problems stem from their inability to stay sitting quietly in a room.

was meant to understand that in fact the distance between doing wrong and wrong-doing was actually not that great, just as it is only one small step from unwillingness to ill-will.

Empathy, I said to the police inspector, is an idiotic luxury indulged in by people who do nothing, and who are moved by the spectacle of suffering.

But when it comes to protesting and calling other people monsters, then everyone has enough breath.