Our Wives Under the Sea

by Julia Armfield

Very often, people argue as a way of expressing the fears and frustrations they cannot say aloud.

I see my mother in myself, though less in the sense of inherited features and more in the sense of an intruder poorly hidden behind a curtain.

My father had always told me it was better to keep busy, that there could always be something to do if I looked for it. Things didn’t crawl from the sea for the very first time, he had joked, for you to pay them back loafing around idle.