Our Wives Under the Sea

by Julia Armfield

For Rosalie, on dry land and elsewhere

“What you have to understand,” she says, “is that things can thrive in unimaginable conditions. All they need is the right sort of skin.”

I used to think there was such a thing as emptiness, that there were places in the world one could go and be alone. This, I think, is still true, but the error in my reasoning was to assume that alone was somewhere you could go, rather than somewhere you had to be left.

I did my best to keep my gaze away from the windows, thought of strange-shaped ocean creatures peering in at the three of us and smiling with all of their teeth.

The problem with relationships between women is that neither one of you is automatically the wronged party, which frankly takes a lot of the fun out of an argument.

She refused almost every aspect of my help, the way women will when they’ve been bred to accept little more than the basest civility.

I find that if I squint at the television hard enough, it’s easier to think about things other than how much I miss my wife.

I want to explain her in a way that would make you love her, but the problem with this is that loving is something we all do alone and through different sets of eyes.

What I remember, then, becomes what happened: Leah leaving like the summer from the ocean, not by degrees but all at once.

I thought about the day it first occurred to me that, should she die, there would be no one in the world I truly loved.

“A genie,” I say, “an ice-cream scoop. Was the Rorschach test not widely discredited around the mid-60s? An enchilada.”

That’s true, Toby said, suddenly narrowing his eyes at Sam, when are you going to buy us a forever place? Sam snorted, leaned back on her elbows, and surveyed me upside down. Haven’t I got a bitch of a wife? she said, and laughed.

Almost everything that lives in the ocean is also made up of the ocean, to some degree, rather like the way we inherit mitochondrial DNA from our mothers, and our cells likewise hang around in our mothers’ bloodstreams for years after we’re born.

Let go of them in the water