Summerwater by Sarah Moss (top 10 motivational books .txt) 📕

Mary looks up and smiles as they enter the café. It’s one of those indoor spaces that holds more light than the sky outside, its white walls almost luminous, the wooden floor gleaming and the rough grain of the roof beams back-lit. There’s a smell of coffee and wet coats, and a family with a baby in a high chair and two young children gathered around the big table in the window. The children, both in red wellies and muddy trousers, are pressing their noses and sticky fingers on the glass wall, trying to look down into the water at their feet. Smears right across the glass. I’ll go over there, Mary says, out of people’s way and a nice view to sketch. Will you be staying for a coffee or are you off out right away? Off out, he says, if you don’t mind. No, she says, I don’t mind, and he sees that she really doesn’t mind, or rather that she wants him to go, that she’ll probably smile at the sticky kids, let them see her drawing, and strike up a conversation with the mother, who is holding on to her coffee as if it will save her and staring out of the window while the dad reads yesterday’s paper. The waitress is busy behind the counter. Will I order your coffee, he asks, on the way out? She’ll come over, says Mary, when she’s ready, there’s no rush, you enjoy your walk.

But he doesn’t, really, enjoy it. You don’t live your whole life in Scotland to be scared of the rain, but this weather is odd, too much, the rain drilling the ground and churning up mud. Erosion not irrigation. The waterproofs are all right, they work, but his knee hurts a bit and it doesn’t wear off and the path is so muddy he decides to go the other way, along the road, not that he’s scared of slipping but it’s no fun, picking your way through mud, and it’s not much more fun walking into a driving rain that settles on his glasses and drips off his nose, and between the glasses and the hood and the cloud he can’t see much of the landscape anyway. He should be away at least forty-five minutes, he decides, not to look as if he gave up, and so he walks, hands jammed in pockets, knee aching and pulling, for twenty-three minutes before he turns around. It’s a bit easier, or at least a bit less unpleasant, with the wind at his back. He bows his head and keeps going. She’ll be surprised to see him back so soon, or maybe, worse, she won’t, maybe she knows perfectly well that he’s only taking so long to save face, maybe in her mind she can see his every step. He peers up from under the hood. There is the new hotel now, in the Big House. He thinks it has a bar, thinks he’s seen the menu on the noticeboard by the jetty. Not that he wants to drink before lunch, but they’ll serve coffee, won’t they, and it’s a reasonable enough thing to do, isn’t it, to stop on the way back for a hot drink? They’ll have newspapers, probably, and he can sit there and read and drink his coffee like the bloke in the café only without the disapproval of women lapping around his ankles. It’s a long time since he went to a bar on his own. There might be an open fire, a day like today.

engines above the clouds

There are highways in the sky. The shortest way between two points on our spherical planet is an arc, and so transatlantic flights follow the Viking sea road even between Istanbul or Dubai and Quebec or New York: over the Baltic, over the top of Scotland, Shetland, Faroe, the curve of southern Iceland and the arrow of Greenland and then the ragged edges of Canada. Some of the airborne people close their blinds against the sunlight, settle to doze their way across the Atlantic. Others crane to see outlines of treasured places once or never visited, names that conjure out of past violence exile and longing, glens and islands from which southern landlords drove the ancestors and burnt the houses behind them. There was no one looking from the sky then, no one to see smoke staining the clouds and a silence beginning in those places that has not ended since. Cairngorm, Glencoe, Loch Linnhe. Ardnamurchan, Laig, Rùm and A’Chill. South Uist.

If the winds are right, some people will keep looking, watching the windows at their sides as others watch the screens before them, reading the map on the water below. If the clouds are right, some people – children, mostly – will look up from the shore of the loch, tilt back their heads as the planes cross their sky, and imagine departures and arrivals. They will follow the passengers from the Old World to the New, imagine other children bound for sun-seared roads towards flat horizons, for prairies and big skies. Not today. Today you can hear engines above the clouds, in a blue and sunlit place, but down here the sky ends at the treetops.

Zanzibar

THEY ARE TRYING to have simultaneous orgasms.

If we can learn how to do it, Josh says, we’ll be like a hundred times more likely not to get divorced. I read about it.

Milly stops trying for a moment. Read about it where, she says, on the internet?

He shrugs, as if it’s obvious that that’s where everyone reads everything, and she sighs. He does read books, she wouldn’t be marrying him otherwise, but not the way she does; he likes wartime history and spy thrillers but takes so long to read them he can’t be that thrilled. Not that it’s not a plausible idea, the sex. She supposes she can see why you’d be less likely to leave someone