Our Wives Under the Sea

by Julia Armfield

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.

“Some people,” she says, “think the granite floor of the Pacific was torn away to make the moon. Darwin’s son, actually. He said that. That when the Earth was young it rotated very quickly—it went so fast that part of it flew off into space, and the Pacific is the scar it left behind.”