Our Wives Under The Sea — Chapter no 35

Miri.

The night is cold, white lights, a curve of moon like a finger crooked into a claw. On Tuesday, Leah started losing motion in one of her legs and now the other appears to be defeating her. The strange transparency of her skin is intermittent; I will look at her and see more than halfway through her and then nothing again, almost as normal. The opal sheen of her is recurrent but not consistent; her skin seems to flex between states, first skin and then abalone and then water and back again.

I understand that she needs more salt, but I’m running low and I don’t want to leave her. I put my hand to her face, the place where her eye once was. I try to take her hand and experience the distinct impression that if I squeeze it, it will melt away into the water. There is a softness that wasn’t there before, the sense of a semi-porous membrane in place of what was once a solid scaffolding of muscle and skin.

It is after midnight when her breathing becomes bad enough that I am seized with a sudden mania for changing the bathwater. She has been lying in it for so long that there is a scum of dust over the surface and the salt is collecting across the upper planes of her body. I try to pull her from the water, although when I do so, her face is not as I remember it. She has been beneath the surface for days now and the shape of her expression without the distortion of water above her is something I am not prepared for, to the extent that I almost drop her back. It is hard to explain, the way I see her in the moment before she starts to gasp and protest at the air and her extraction from the water. The way her features sit in her face seems uncertain, as though they have been placed there only delicately and might at any point leak sideways like ice melting off a curving surface. In the second before I drop her, I half expect her to sluice through my fingers. She goes down again – a sharp splash, water slopping forwards over the edge of the bathtub and soaking my feet – drops back, her eye on me, her long-drenched bandage slipping sideways, and I realise as I watch her sink that I cannot keep her here.

I’m not sure what time it is when I call Juna, though she picks up right away. I have a car, she tells me after I’ve explained, don’t apologise, I barely sleep any more as it is. When I’ve hung up, I take every towel we have and wet them in the bathroom sink, one by one, then pour the rest of the table salt over each and allow it to soak into the fabric.

OceanofPDF.com