Our Wives Under the Sea

by Julia Armfield

Stuck to the fridge, a sheet of paper with the shopping list scratched down in purple Biro: milk, cheese, sleep aid (any), sticking plasters, table salt.

I love this kind of storytelling. “Sleep aid (any)” here is so revealing.

A footprint, once left on the surface of the moon, might in theory remain as it is almost indefinitely. Uneroded by atmosphere, by wind or by rain, any mark made up there could quite easily last for several centuries. The ocean is different, the ocean covers its tracks.

Like everyone, most of Carmen’s higher education seems to have leaked out of her around her mid-to-late twenties, replaced in the main by methods of treating black mold, by passwords and roast chicken recipes and the symptoms of cervical cancer and thrush.

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. You can, I think, love someone a very long time before you realize this, notice it in the way you note a facial flaw, a speech impediment, some imperfection which, once recognized, can never again be unseen.

I feel exhausted, a feeling of catching up, a feeling of something finding me. My heart is a thin thing, these days—shred of paper blown between the spaces in my ribs.

There is, in my opinion, no use in demanding to know the number, in demanding to know upon waking the number of boxes to be ticked off every single day. After all, why would it help to be shown the mathematics of things, when instead we could simply imagine that whatever time we have is limitless.

When something bad is actually happening, it’s easy to underreact, because a part of you is wired to assume it isn’t real. When you stop underreacting, the horror is unique because it is, unfortunately, endless.

When I was younger, I think some glib or cavalier part of me always believed that there was no such thing as heartache—that it was simply a case of things getting in past the rib cage and finding there was no way out. I know now, of course, that this was a stupid thing to think, insofar as most things we believe will turn out to be ridiculous in the end.