Hannah Moore
Stories (39/0)
God's work
God and I work hand in hand in the garden. I pile the leaves he rots to soil, I sow the seeds he blesses with life. I add the water, he the sun, and we wait together. While we wait, we turn to the dying. He lets me know who is ready to go, and I give things a little push. He slows things down, I speed it up. When the flowers bloom, we rejoice. Afterwards, I collect the seeds, and add the bodies to the compost heap he blesses with decay. In the winter, we stay busy, waiting.
By Hannah Moore8 days ago in Fiction
The Damsel
The princess didn't need rescuing, but the knight rescued her anyway. Her father wept as she entered the throne room, and her mother, overcome, swooned and was hastened to her chamber. The knight was smitten, and expected her hand. He pined for his love from the dark of the dungeon. For her part, she thought no more of him, as she plotted first her father’s poisoning, then the burning of the villages in neighbouring lands, and parties where she roasted deserters on the spit and served them to their regiments. The knight went on loving her in darkness.
By Hannah Moore8 days ago in Fiction
Grounding: five senses
I wrote this in answer to the Sensational challenge...but transatlantic timekeeping and life lead to a missed deadline. Never the less, I brought it here anyway, rough edged and open to critique. I based this on the five senses grounding exercise.
By Hannah Moore13 days ago in Poets
Cabin Pressure
I could be a hero every day. Save the day, every day. Or most days. Many days. No one knows. Can you imagine? I am single. I have had relationships. Short relationships, which are initially fun and, later, leave me feeling worthless. I live alone. And I rarely see people, these days. But I have a mother, and a brother and cousin who was raised in my back yard. And even though my mother thinks I don’t try hard enough, and my brother thinks I’m lazy, and my cousin would rather watch TV alone that sit at the table and eat a family dinner, I love them, and they love me, and so four times a year, I fly across the country to see them. So here I am. Seat 17A, allocated at check in, hand luggage only.
By Hannah Moore2 months ago in Fiction
Border Force
“Open the bag please sir”, I say, staring my most intimidating stare, eyes fixed, lip curled, ears forward. They’re usually so shocked they don’t immediately run at least, but nor do they immediately obey. I allow my hackles to rise slightly. He doesn’t know it, not consciously, but his gut still picks up on it and he feels the threat, I hear it in his quickened heartbeat. “Take out the cocaine and place it on the counter”. Sometimes, in a stressful situation, people need clear direction. It can help.
By Hannah Moore3 months ago in Fiction
The Dance of the Queens of Heaven
Every night at midnight, the purple clouds came out to dance with the blushing sky. The women slipped silently from their front doors and danced under pinks and reds and blues, their arms high, or wide, or stretched out in front of them, their skirts rippling as their hips swayed, and their eyes reflecting the myriad shades of the sky. They danced for the parts of themselves they had lost, tear laden, bruised souls, vaporising the embarrassment of wanting with those fires that had burned in their girlhood, whose embers still flared under that midnight sky. They danced so that in the morning, heaving simmering kettles from the stove, or pulling weeds from between neat rows of beans, they would feel whole enough to hold together. They danced so their husbands would recognise them, so that their children would listen when they spoke, so that their voices would find the songs that carried morning into noon, and noon into afternoon, and afternoon on towards night.
By Hannah Moore3 months ago in Fiction
On the Travelator of Time
ONE: THE DISCOVERY Two days ago, on Sunday, the 26th of February, 2023, I was eating breakfast, when a book appeared. By which I mean that an orange A5 notebook coalesced in my wife’s cornflakes. You would think, wouldn’t you, that such a thing would cause you to leap to your feet and exclaim “What the gubbins!” before the milk had landed in your lap. But it never ceases to surprise me how little attention “freeze” gets when we think about fight and flight. My wife and I sat absolutely still, spoons midway between now gawping mouths and the polka dot breakfast bowls my parents had brought us back from the souks of Marrakesh last spring, and stared at the book. After some seconds Lucy – that’s my wife – looked at me, and I looked at her, and taking courage from one another’s need of it, we rose to our feet in order to bend down and look more closely at the interloping volume.
By Hannah Moore3 months ago in Fiction
