Our Wives Under the Sea

by Julia Armfield

Carmen typically speaks about him the way one might refer to a degree: a three-year period one has to endure in order to talk with overbearing authority on exactly one subject.

She is the world’s living expert on loving and losing thirty-year-old men named Tom.

I typically think it’s easiest to feel warm when a part of us is cold.

that night I dreamed auroral colors and woke at three to a white rubbernecking moon at the window, which I chose not to find unsettling.

Sex with Leah was a key and a lock, an opening up of something I had assumed impassable, like a door warped shut by the heat.