Our Wives Under the Sea

by Julia Armfield

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

Her blood retains no sense of the boundaries it once recognized and so now just flows wherever it wants.

Miri used to call these my sunken thoughts, tapping on the base of my skull with the flat of her hand when I grew quiet, frowning at some thought I was chasing in circles. How’d they get so far down in there? she’d say. Next thing you know they’ll be halfway down your neck. When she did this, I would often catch her palm and keep it there, take her other hand and hold it to my temple, as though surrendering the responsibility of keeping my head in one piece.

she went away and forced me into closer proximity with myself.

I loved her hard and at a distance, which made it easier to do, experienced brief but powerful compulsions to hug her and almost never did.

In the sea there’s no such thing as a natural horizon, no place for the line of the sky to signify an end.

the type of man to whom anxiety was only proof of thinking too hard,