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

Becky reaches the road, where all the potholes are full of brown water, and sets off into the trees.

beginning to rise

Deep in the woods darkness is beginning to rise, gathering under wet branches and between heavy leaves. In their den, badgers uncurl, snuff the air, lumber into the evening. The vixen stirs and stretches out for her cubs to nurse. She’s hungry, and when they’re done – before the slow smallest one is done – she shakes off the runt, nudges them further into the dim warmth and gets to her feet.

The vixen threads the dusk, quick and low. The traces of small creatures have been washed away and there are no little birds on the wing. She snaffles a fat drowned slug, trots on. She knows a place for bacon rinds, stale baps, a chilly feast of fish skin and potato peel. As long as the cubs stay where she left them, as long as no hunting owl wings the night in her absence, as long as no late car strikes as she crosses the road, she will return and feed them again.

hold off your tornados

JOSH DOESN’T LIKE the weather. Well, of course he doesn’t like the weather, he’s not a masochist, unlike his mum he doesn’t even secretly believe that rain is God’s way of stopping Scots having sinful levels of fun. (He shouldn’t be mean, though, didn’t she after all hand over the keys knowing perfectly well that sinful levels of fun would be exactly what he had in mind and a whole year before the wedding, she’d have had some grief from her own mum about that.) But this time last year it was exactly twice as warm as it is now. He got sunburnt climbing the Ben. He was carrying a litre bottle of water everywhere. There were folk swimming all along the beaches. The water and sky were blue and he remembers spending about half an afternoon just sitting on a flat rock a couple of miles along the shore path watching the leaf-shadows on the sand and stones and the birds on the water, feeling as if his skin was photosynthesising sunlight. Felt good, right enough, but for the first time there were hosepipe bans even on the islands where people don’t own hosepipes, don’t ordinarily want more water than the good Lord has already seen fit to pour on their leaking hoods and shoulder-seams. In some ways this year feels safer, as if being cold and wet makes climate change less bad than it was last year, but it’s not right, this kind of downpour. It’s as if the weather’s got stuck, as if the whole arrangement, the Gulf Stream and the space winds, the water cycle itself, stuff we don’t notice, has stopped. Won’t the water be running out, somewhere else? There’s only so much in the system.

He said he’d cook this evening, so he’s flipping through the recipe book his mum keeps here though he knows fine well what he’s going to make. Pasta surprise, they call it: couple of onions (sprouting a bit but that’s OK, you can eat the greens), red pepper with the bit that’s gone soft cut out, garlic also sprouting, wrinkly mushrooms but it won’t matter once they’re cooked, tin of tomatoes. It’ll do the job but Milly’s right, they really do need to go shopping tomorrow. He just likes it here with her, afternoon sex and morning sleep, the world centred around being in bed together, doesn’t want to break the spell. They’ll be back in the world soon enough, you probably don’t get many days like this, days when love is your primary activity, in your whole life. Break the fishbowl more like, Milly said, break the bell jar, you know if we drove round to the station we could be in Glasgow in less than an hour, go to the Kelvingrove or the Women’s Library, they’ve a festival on. She needs her friends, her tribe. It’s not that he disapproves of women or libraries or festivals, any of that, he just doesn’t want to go. It’s not his thing, same way she doesn’t want to go to the football, and they’re supposed to be on holiday, doing things together. He missed the game at the weekend, didn’t even mention it. The book’s more photos than words. Roast lamb with apricots, which seems a strange idea and his mum never made any such thing, certainly not here where she tends to keep things simple, frozen pies and fish fingers because it’s her holiday too, isn’t it? Smoked haddock fishcakes, look a right faddle. Broccoli and stilton quiche, that’s Milly’s kind of thing. Though he’s never made pastry and anyway they’re out of eggs. We could go over to the pub, he says, if you fancy getting out, they do food.

Milly looks up, refocusing as if he’s just pulled her from another horizon though he knows she’s reading that book for the second time this week. I’m going to run out of proper books, she keeps saying, if you had wifi I could at least download e-books. Proper books means paper books, taking over their whole flat at home, piles starting to grow even in the kitchen. When they have their own place, on the island, he’ll build shelves for her, all the shelves she could want. She shows him pictures, sometimes, in magazines, houses with shelves up the stairs and over the doors, nothing like any house he’s ever been in, but he could do that, for her. The pub, she says, mm. What is there down the road, in the village? He shrugs. Another pub, he says. Not that I’m not happy to cook, I just thought if you wanted out— She’s looking at the weather, at the rain dripping off the roof and the vagueness of the blotted loch behind the trees. Nah, she says, let’s save the money and go out properly another