Small Things Like These

by Claire Keegan

they were fed hot dinners with soup, and fish & chips on Fridays. ‘The empty sack cannot stand,’ Mrs Kehoe liked to say,

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

Always it was the same, Furlong thought; always they carried mechanically on without pause, to the next job at hand.

nothing ever did happen again; to each was given days and chances which wouldn’t come back around.

What was it all for? Furlong wondered. The work and the constant worry.

he felt the strain of being alive and wished he had stayed in bed,

Of late, he was inclined to imagine another life, elsewhere, and wondered if this was not something in his blood;

It seemed both proper and at the same time deeply unfair that so much of life was left to chance.

So many things had a way of looking finer, when they were not so close.

Why were the things that were closest so often the hardest to see?

Crossing the river, his eyes again fell on the stout-black water flowing darkly along – and a part of him envied the Barrow’s knowledge of her course, how easily the water followed its incorrigible way, so freely to the open sea.

As they carried on along and met more people Furlong did and did not know, he found himself 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?

The fact was that he would pay for it but never once in his whole and unremarkable life had he known a happiness akin to this,

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.