Waiting for the Flood (Spires, #2)

by Alexis Hall

I wonder, sometimes, if it’s a strange occupation, this semi-obsessive preservation of the transitory. But whereas for some people history is a few loud voices declaiming art and making war across the centuries, for me it’s a whispering chorus of laundry day and grocer’s bills, dress patterns and crop rotations. The price of tallow.

My friend Grace, who was less romanced by sandstone and dreaming spires than me, once called it England’s cunt. She said it was basically a big wet cleft in the middle of the country—a phrase that has somehow never quite found its way into the poetry or history of the place.

You don’t really fall in love with a house. You fall in love with the life you could have in it.

Pensioner and Homosexual Found Dead in River—Coincidence, Tragedy, or Satanic Ritual Gone Wrong?

His body had clearly been designed to be shirtless and hefting hay bales around in the hot sun, rather than swaying its hips clumsily to his own rendition of faux-country themed pop music in the middle of a half-flooded street in Oxford.

And no matter how much you love what you do, there’s something irresistible about stolen days.

It’s all I’ve ever wanted, really. Someone to make tea for. To know how they like to drink it, and share some pieces of time with them at the end of long days, and short ones, good days and bad, and everything in between.

“It . . . it shows you the smallness and the nearness of history. The w-way a society reflects its preoccupations and prejudices in its minutiae.”

It was true, but also an evasion of a kind. I wanted to give him more than that. For those eyes and all his smiles, I wanted to give him everything that mattered to me.

“Yeah, I know. People make choices, and sometimes they just leave. And, afterwards, we gather up our hearts, pick up our lives, do the best we can with them, and see what comes.”

“family is really just whoever sticks around.”

He glanced at me, smiling now. “Hot and kind and slightly mysterious. How did I get so lucky?” “Is that how you see me?” “Everyone’s mysterious before you know them.” “But w-when you know me, I won’t be mysterious anymore.” “Yeah, you’ll be you, and that’ll be better.”