Small Things Like These

by Claire Keegan

‘Where does thinking get us?’ she said. ‘All thinking does is bring you down.’

asking was there any point in being alive without helping one another? Was it possible to carry on along through all

the years, the decades, through an entire life, without once being brave enough to go against what was there and yet call yourself a Christian, and face yourself in the mirror?

Had it not been for her, his mother might very well have wound up in that place.

In an earlier time, it could have been his own mother he was saving – if saving was what this could be called. And only God knew what would have happened to him, where he might have ended up.

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 coul...