This Is Happiness

by Niall Williams

And in all the times you replay that instant you can’t quite believe the simplicity of it, the unannounced arrival of calamity on an ordinary day in the ordinary street, and in all those times you make the move you didn’t make to save her, it’s just a shudder, a spasm of rescue that’s in the pulse of humanity but in the dream version you do make it, you push aside the idiot embarrassment you’re feeling and you reach out a hand that can’t save her from crashing on to the path, but you reach it and maybe sometimes you jump forward and you get your whole body in the way to break the fall so that your mother and you fall together on to the cold indifferent concrete of Harcourt Street and her head does not go crack like that, crack, so sharp, so violent and unexpected that in the same instant your stomach turns and you vomit in fierce convulsions as if a foulness is being pumped up out of where you knew it always was, and there’s nothing you can do, because now here it is, here is how the world goes, your mother fallen and you throwing up but keeping your head forward to save your new secondary-school shoes.