Small Things Like These

by Claire Keegan

Some nights, Furlong lay there with Eileen, going over small things like these.

Getting up in the dark and going to the yard, making the deliveries, one after another, the whole day long, then coming home in the dark and trying to wash the black off himself and sitting into a dinner at the table and falling asleep before waking in the dark to meet a version of the same thing, yet again. Might things never change or develop into something else, or new? Lately, he had begun to wonder what mattered, apart from Eileen and the girls. He was touching forty but didn’t feel himself to be getting anywhere or making any kind of headway and could not but sometimes wonder what the days were for.

But people said lots of things – and a good half of what was said could not be believed; never was there any shortage of idle minds or gossips about town.

‘What have I against girls?’ he went on. ‘My own mother was a girl, once. And I dare say the same must be true of you and all belonging to us.’

‘You don’t mind bringing the foreigners in.’ ‘Hasn’t everyone to be born somewhere,’ Furlong said. ‘Sure wasn’t Jesus was born in Bethlehem.’

he found himself asking was there any point in being alive without helping one another?

The worst was yet to come, he knew. Already he could feel a world of trouble waiting for him behind the next door, but the worst that could have happened was also already behind him; the thing not done, which could have been – which he would have had to live with for the rest of his life.