Excerpt from The End We Start From by Megan Hunter, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Pinch of salt, R grumbles, glancing at my belly.

* * *

R arrives four minutes after the boy is born, frowning and yellow, into the midwife's hands. I am too exhausted to hold him. My eyes ache from three hours of pushing. My undercarriage is a pulp.

* * *

In the darkness demons flew. Their shapes made a fearful noise until a voice called out, and they were still, and the silence was complete.

* * *

I am in the hospital when R comes to tell me, but I already know. The reports have spread through the ward like infection.

In the bed across from me a girl possibly just young enough to be my granddaughter cuddles her toddler on one side and her newborn on the other.

Schoolboys visit her and let their eyes roam over my udders as they pass.

I am veined and topless, doing skin to skin with the boy, who is mysterious and silent. Occasionally he twitches, as though remembering something.

In the night a nurse with hunched shoulders like the start of wings comes to my bedside and lifts him to me. She says his eyes look like sharks' eyes. They all do.

* * *

The lady through the curtain has no baby.

Or she has one, but he is upstairs in a plastic box filled with wires and tubes, and she wails out for more drugs.

Crash section, I hear the midwives murmuring. They give her the drugs.

She has a radio and doesn't use headphones. She has her pain and no baby so I don't say anything.

She likes talk radio mostly, interminable phone-ins in different accents that all pass through my body in the same way.

The phrases spill out, unstoppable. Deckchairs, document, pressure, response.

They seem to swell from under me like a bath filling up. Like indigestion. Like something no bad simile could ever do justice to.

* * *

I am eating lime jelly with the boy in the crook of my arm when I hear.

His hands circle in tiny, victorious fists. I feel that I could, all things considered, conquer the world.

The news on the hour, 14th June, one o'clock. Tina Murphy reporting. An unprecedented flood. London. Uninhabitable. A list of boroughs, like the shipping forecast, their names suddenly as perfect and tender as the names of children. Ours.

Two hours later R is there, breaking the news again, lifting the boy against his shoulder. Apologizing like it's his fault.

* * *

The hospital now seems to be a ship, a brightly lit ark housing all the new ones aloft.

We – the women in the open-backed gowns, bursting stitches in the bathroom – are their escorts.

The food becomes a lot worse.

The End We Start From © 2017 by Megan Hunter. First published 2017 by Picador, a UK imprint of Pan Macmillan. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic, Inc. All rights reserved.