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

remember, does he maybe not come in the rain? Or is he sheltering, under the trees? She puts her eyes right up to the window, presses her forehead against it. The raindrops go blurry and she blinks. There’s mist on the window now and she draws a flower on it with her finger, four big petals and then a little one because she’s run out of room. When she’s bigger she wants a pink bike with streamers. She wants shiny patent shoes and white lacy tights like that girl. She puts her fingertip against a new raindrop and traces its path down the glass. Raindrops don’t go straight down, ever. They go round each other sometimes, like magnets that won’t touch. Another one. She tries to do two at once, with the forefingers of each hand, but you can’t watch them well enough to get it right. One at a time. He’s still not there, the tree man.

Izzie folds her fingers the way Granny showed her. Here is a church, here is a steeple, open the doors, here are the people. She doesn’t think she’s been in a church, but there is one, with a steeple, by the bus stop at home. Suddenly she needs to be there, at home, with her butterfly wallpaper and pink curtains, in her own bed with all her toys and knowing that Maddie upstairs is in her bed on the other side of the ceiling. She doesn’t like it here at night, there are no streetlights to come on and if she wakes up later it will be thick, woolly dark, the sort of dark that fills up your mouth when you open it so you can’t call out as well as not being able to see, so that whatever came at you with bony fingers there would be nothing you could do – Izzie wants to get out of bed and go find Daddy, but now she’s scared to move because of the dark place under the bed which is exactly the right size for a crawling snatching thing with long arms, like a giant spider, scuttling, but with pincers. She tips over and squirms under the duvet and curls up small with it over her head, but it’s still not her own bed or her own duvet and she has only Elsie Bear to hold because Mummy left all the others at home, and what if there’s a fire or burglars there while they’re away, what if all her bed toys are being stuffed into a sack and taken away so they’ll never see her again, or if they’re burning, if their whole flat is burning, and Maddie’s flat too because they’re joined together? What if Maddie’s burning? There’s no air under this duvet.

Izzie comes up. It’s darker than it was, dusk gathering by the door and under the dressing table and especially in the mirror. She tries to look away from the mirror. There isn’t one in her room at home and she hadn’t realised that they’re scary, especially in the dark, that things seem to move in them. She keeps forgetting that the mirror isn’t a window, that there isn’t another room on the other side of it, another dark room with another door through which shadow people could come, all the dead people who live underground. She looks at the real window, where light is now reaching in through her peephole, but she doesn’t feel safe turning her back to the room and the mirror-room to see out. How can you be sure, in the dark, which is the window and which the mirror? He’s probably there now, the tree man, in one or the other. She hears Mummy laughing in the living room, and then Daddy’s voice, and that gives her courage to sit up and wrap the duvet firmly around her shoulders and kneel again at the window, offer the back of her head to the mirror. It’s still raining and the clouds are a funny colour, but there’s enough light yet for Izzie to see the shadow cast from the kitchen window, where the grown-ups have the light on now, and to see across the fading grass to the nearest trees.

There is someone moving, someone coming round the house, too close, creeping, but just while Izzie’s trying to find her voice to call Daddy the figure goes past and turns into the red boat boy’s sister, wearing the red boat boy’s top with the hood up and her hair hanging over her face, and while Izzie’s watching she goes round the back of her own cabin and kind of scrabbles at the wall and then she’s in through the window and Izzie’s wondering if that counts as a burglar, if someone’s breaking in to her own house, though she didn’t break anything. She watches while the light comes on, a square of light making a square of bright raindrops in the dark, and then she remembers to look for the tree man.

She was right, he is there, in the trees. Just standing, watching.

From out of sight, the music begins to play.

maybe they dream

The trees change shape at night. In the darkness, limbs relax, leaves droop. Branches reach out for each other, like holding hands. It’s tiring, raising boughs to the sun, making energy of sunlight. Come night the trees’ bodies have less work. The pressure in their cells falls a little, like ours. Like us, like any creature, they don’t stop at night. Some tree-mind keeps the respiration running, tends the flow of sap. Some green thought reads the turning of the earth and the slow tilt towards winter.

The woods expand, settle down for the night, offer a little more shelter to those who need it. Trees sleep, more or less. Maybe some nights they dream and wake, check the darkness, sleep again till dawn.

a woman sitting on the edge

HE’S NOT BEING racist. Even though they weren’t meant to be