Lent

by Jo Walton

“You can only torment each other? You really can’t just exchange information?” Pico asks. “No,” Girolamo says, looking at the cups as he pours. “How do you know? Have you tried? Stop fiddling about and look at me!” Shocked, Girolamo spills a little water and mops it with his sleeve. He looks at Pico. “I have tried,” he says. “It’s hard to explain, especially to you. It would be easier to explain it to worse people, strange as that seems. Have you ever known someone who annoys you? Or have you ever known someone for a long time, and fallen into a bad pattern with them so that you’re always quarrelling? So that no matter how good your intentions are, no matter that you’ve prayed to do better, when you start to talk to them you hear everything they say as malicious, and they do the same with you, so you can’t even say good morning without them saying sarcastically that it might be good for some people? Or if you haven’t done that yourself, you might have seen some brothers get like that with each other, in the monastery? The First Brother will always try to separate them and maybe send one of them elsewhere when that happens, but you might have seen it.”