Our Wives Under the Sea

by Julia Armfield

Consider, once more, the universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each other, carrying on eternal war since the world began.

Sometimes I think of oceans rising faster than it is possible to escape them, of water drawing tight around the boundaries of the land.

I remember thinking that the first things had come from the water, which didn’t account for the things that had chosen to stay behind.