#julia armfield

[firstfullmoon]

anne boyer “the harm will come: it never doesn’t” / julia armfield “to watch a horror movie is to know that something bad is going to happen. to have a body is really the same thing” / hilary mantel “we don’t have to invite pain in, it’s waiting for us: sooner rather than later” / marie howe “you know how we’ve been waiting for the big pain to come? I think it’s here. I think this is it. I think it’s been here all along” / gregory orr “I want to go back to the beginning. we all do. I think: hurt won’t be there. but I’m wrong” / toni morrison “the hurt was always there” / torrey peters “pain that had to be endured, withstood, pain that was the same as being alive, and so without end”

[derangedrhythms]

The deep sea is a haunted house: a place in which things that ought not to exist move about in the darkness.

Julia Armfield, from 'Our Wives Under the Sea'

[feral-ballad]

Julia Armfield, from Salt Slow; “Cassandra After”

[Text ID: “she was a gentle sort of horror;”]

[hellboundheart]

"Guts" by Julia Armfield

[llovelymoonn]

julia armfield our wives under the sea \\ hanya yanagihara a little life (via @moranjpg) \\ chino otsuka summer

kofi

[myrmeraki]

james flint + the sea

our wives under the sea - julia armfield / black sails screencaps 2x9, 1x1, 1x8, 1x8 / moby dick - herman melville

[lillyli-74]

AI by Lilly Li

She was a gentle sort of horror.

~ Julia Armfield

[bones-ivy-breath]

Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield

[luxaofhesperides]

OUR WIVES UNDER THE SEA

miri + leah

[wester-nesse]

Woke up in a cold sweat after dreaming this meme.

[acotars]

Read in 2023:

To know the ocean, I have always felt, is to recognize the teeth it keeps half hidden.

OUR WIVES UNDER THE SEA by Julia Armfield ★★★★★

[thechills]

IN THE DEEP (horror and the sea for @antichrist-demoncore 🌊)

hermann melville / triangle (2009) / julia armfield / the deep house (2021) / h.p. lovecraft / underwater (2020) / mira grant / 47 meters down: uncaged (2019) / werner herzog / the deep ones

[derangedrhythms]

To know the ocean, I have always felt, is to recognise the teeth it keeps half hidden.

Julia Armfield, from 'Our Wives Under the Sea'

[the-final-sentence]

Top Final Sentences of 2023

He knew that on the day of his death he would see her face and he could hope to carry that beauty into the darkness with him, the last pagan on earth, singing softly upon his pallet in an unknown tongue. Cormac McCarthy, from The Passenger

And there are so many silences to be broken. Audre Lorde, from “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action”

For Guinevere Tallow, it felt like coming home. Ethan M. Aldridge, from Deephaven

And we laughed and held each other and filled our hearts with the faith that we could always do that, always blow away the clouds that threatened our stars. Andrew Neiderman as V.C. Andrews, from Honey

But as anyone who loves reading and writing quickly learns, both activities allow you to commune with the living and the dead, to listen to the thoughts of those who have come before you and argue, cajole, and sing praise for them in response. Kaitlyn Greenidge, from “Books for a Black Girl’s Soul”

The greatest shame would be to reach the end of our lives and have the epitaph read, ‘They worked really hard.’ Roxane Gay, from “Yes, Your Job Is Important. But It’s Not All Important.”

The sky is gory with stars, like the insides of a gutted night. Julia Armfield, from “Salt Slow”

Sometimes, even in towns built on curses, at least once in a blue moon, things turn out okay. Ryan Douglass, from “Knickknack”

Eventually, if we speak the truth to each other, it will become unavoidable to ourselves. Audre Lorde, from “Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred, and Anger”

In the distance, the darkness has started to lift like a veil, the first light of dawn spilling over the Beijing skyline, a promise of all the beautiful and terrible and sun-soaked days to come. Ann Liang, from If You Could See the Sun

[bossuets]

— Julia Armfield, Our Wives Under the Sea

[heavenlyyshecomes]

Something I learned very quickly was that grieving was complicated by lack of certainty, that the hope inherent in a missing loved one was also a species of curse. People posted about children who had gone missing upwards of fifteen years ago and whose faces were now impossible to conjure, about friends who had messaged to confirm a meeting place and then simply never showed up. In almost every case, the sense of loss was convoluted by an ache of possibility, by the almost-but-not-quite-negligible hope of reprieve. Deus ex machina—the missing loved one thrown back down to earth. Grief is selfish: we cry for ourselves without the person we have lost far more than we cry for the person—but more than that, we cry because it helps. The grief process is also the coping process and if the grief is frozen by ambiguity, by the constant possibility of reversal, then so is the ability to cope. It’s not grief, one woman posted, it’s more like a haunting. Her sister had disappeared two decades previously […] There was no proof that anything bad had happened, the woman typed, no proof of anything at all. They told us hope wasn’t lost so often that it became impossible to live with it. It’s too hard, trying to exist between these poles of hope and death. You just find yourself imagining all these possibilities, all these possible sisters wandering around half unseen like people with sheets over their head, except that somewhere among them, you know that one of them’s real—one of them’s dead, one of them’s the ghost.

—Julia Armfield, Our Wives Under the Sea