Now in its tenth year, the annual Moth Short Story Prize has built a reputation for attracting high-calibre entries from around the world. This year’s judge was award-winning short story writer and novelist, Sarah Hall, who has also previously judged the Man Booker Prize and Sunday Times Short Story Award.
Hall chose Lara Saunders’ Cock’s Eye Moon as her first-prize winner. ‘It is a clear winner and a wonderful story ‒ tight, atmospheric, dramatic ‒ and it was really compelling to read from beginning to end,’ said Hall. ‘The prose is natural and evocative, descriptive but not overdone, with some absolutely beautiful phrasing. As with all great short stories it has its own torque, that subversive un-guessable feeling, a satisfying and, in this case, tragic payoff at the end.’
Saunders, who will receive €3,000, is a creative writing graduate and social worker living and writing on Peramangk land in South Australia. Her work has been twice shortlisted for the Victoria University Short Story Prize and twice longlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize. She was a recipient of the 2021 SA Emerging Writers Fellowship and is currently working on a novel-length story.
‘I have been a huge fan of Sarah Hall since I read The Wolf Border a few years ago, so to know that she read and liked a story of mine is deeply touching,’ said Saunders. ‘I am in love with writing and it has broken my heart many times over the years – and now it has made me joyful, and so grateful. Thank you to those who have made this possible for me and to anyone who takes the time to read these words of mine.’
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Of her story, she said: ‘It seemed to happen by itself, with my hand but without me, which is how I knew I liked it. It came out of the fragments of other lives and a few what ifs. I love the words and idioms of Gaelic languages and played with these to find this character’s voice. It took a long time to redraft. Whenever I reread the story, it felt like putting on a jumper back to front and inside out. But I always believed there was something there if I could just break it out of the rock. I am so proud that it found a home within the beautifully crafted pages of The Moth.’
Louise Miller’s story, Double Happiness, was awarded second prize. ‘I just love the strangeness and compression of this story,’ Hall said, ‘its tight focus and address, and the unpredictable quality. The details and observations are astute and the tone is very unsettling. The information withheld by the protagonist is interpretable by the reader and allows a greater sense of understanding and disquiet. It’s a complete little gothic tale, domestically occult, surprising, but still emotionally moving and human. It pulls no punches, and chooses a careful narrative frame but the reader still has a (horrifying!) sense of what lies beyond its borders.’
Miller was born in Glasgow and now lives in London. She graduated from the MFA Writing programme at the University of Nebraska in Omaha in 2013. Her food-themed stories are a result of a curiosity for the surreal and relief from the demands of standing for long hours as a professional chef. Her prize is a week at Circle of Misse writing retreat in France and a travel stipend of €250.
Joe Richards’ If Ye Love Me was awarded third prize. ‘A striding story that covers so much ground with really evocative detail and momentum,’ said Hall. ‘To begin with it seems like a memory piece but takes on a plot-life of its own, to become a complete narrative rather than just a reflection. The dynamics between boys, parents and overseers ‒ both neglectful and pastoral ‒ are so well portrayed, with heart-rending moments, humour and wit, and a real understanding of psychology.’
Richards was born in Worcestershire in 1946 and studied theatre at Dartington College of Arts at Hull University. He worked as an actor and director for many years and taught theatre at Dartington and Plymouth University. He has written plays for radio (BBC Radio 3) and for stage, including ‘Big Book for Girls’, a ‘glorious piss-take of 1930s girls’ boarding school adventure stories’, described as ‘gleefully perverse’ by the Financial Times and ‘blissful’ by The Observer. He will be awarded €1,000.
Hall also commended David Hanson’s story As She Lay Dying, Madeleine Rebbechi’s story Dip, Bernard Steed’s Ambition and Jude Whiley’s The Brain Named Itself.
The three winning stories appear in the autumn issue of The Moth, available to purchase in select bookshops and online at themothmagazine.com
Cock’s Eye Moon
My fadder owned a chicken shop to his trade but I didn’t like it much. Fluff, cartilage and chicken feet all balled into one thing. It was dirty work. My older brothers had the best jobs. I got the worst, sweeping chicken shit, twisting beaks and all the bloody and bloody-awful things. But I had the work of the world learning to do anything else. Daa used to say, ‘Colyn, if brains were dynamite, you wouldn’t have enough to blow the wax from your ears.’
I try not to think of those days, but sometimes they rush in stinging like jellyfish on the tide. The woman next to me on the bus rolled an egg on the lid of her lunchbox. I heard the small bird bone cracks as the shell opened up and the white flesh squinted through.
‘My Fadder owns a chicken shop,’ I said.
‘Does he now?’ asked she.
I pinched my nose but it was too late to stop remembering my brother Marty picking up an egg that hadn’t time enough to hatch. He scratched the shell with one dirty fingernail, then he watched me watching. Don’t, was all I had the mouth to say, and I sounded like a sheep in a storm when I said it. Marty pushed hard against the speckly edge of the shell until it gave in. The skin looked soft and raw. It hadn’t begun anything yet. He peeled away until the chick came tumbling out. It flopped on straw and gasped. I saw the dark inside the slit of its eye. The chick struggled against the heavy old world, and died.
The woman took bites out of her egg with small sharp teeth. She packed away her tub of eggshells and wiped her hands clean. Then she put on a pair of light pink gloves and laid her hands neat in her lap. I thought of foxgloves with bees inside.
‘You’ve got nice hair,’ I said. ‘Mine’s getting long now. That’s the problem with hair. My maa liked it long.’ I thought of Maa dropping her kisses on my head. I would warsh my hair to make the kisses clean. She smelled like day old perfume and chicory smoke. She’d say, you’re such a pretty girl, and kiss my sticky lipstick mouth.
‘How old are you?’ I asked the woman on the bus.
‘Erm,’ she shifted like a chicken ruffling its feathers, ‘I’m fifty-eight.’
‘She’s about that. Auntie Kate. Her husband who died was an antique arms dealer. She had me in when Maa couldn’t cope with me no more. I’ve got six brothers but they’re all bad sticks.’ I smiled with my mouth closed so she could see my cheek dimples and not my yellow teeth. ‘Want a knob?’ I asked, rummaging in my pocket. I untwisted the paper bag to show her my sweets.
‘No thank you.’
I stuffed the sweet in my cheek so I could talk. I like meeting new people. The woman’s skin was coated in something white and fine like milk powder. It settled, soft, in the lines on her face. Her eyes were ringed with blue. I stood up to press the bell and caught her staring the full length of my salmon pink trousers and embroidered waistcoat. Very smart. I picked up my carpet bag and sat back down with it on my lap. I pulled my top hat nice and low over my brow.
‘I like talking to you,’ I said as I waited for the bus to stop. ‘You’re nice. You’re like my Auntie Kate.’
‘She sounds lovely.’
‘I can give you my number if you’re ever for visiting. She likes me meeting new people. We’ve got a big house.’ I felt myself blushing. ‘I’m not airing myself. If you were thinking that.’
‘No, erm … yes. I could take your number.’
A smile sprang like elastic on my face as I pulled a pen out of my pocket.
‘I’m sorry I don’t have any paper,’ she said.
‘S’alright.’ I reached out for her arm. The nib of my pen snagged at the loose folds of her skin. I imagined it breaking through and inking her blood. ‘I’m not for bothering with mobile phones. They never ring.’ I stopped and looked at her. ‘Everyone calls me at home,’ I lied.
*
A week later, and Kate came out of the house done up to a taste in a neat red suit. There was a nice smell of her, dark and sweet, and her lips were coloured purple. She wore white moonstruck shoes. The wind fussed her hair as we walked to the car and made it big and bouncy and I thought how smart she looked and how much I loved her. She walked ahead; I’m terrible in the world for shuffling.
‘You sit in the back, Colyn.’
‘Oh, why can’t I sit next to you?’ I caught up to Kate. ‘I don’t like the back, Maa.’ I slipped my hand inside hers and she smiled.
‘Okay. Get in the front.’
What I really wanted was to sit on her lap and steer the wheel down the long drive, but I knew what the answer would be. There were more rules after I turned eighteen. I wasn’t allowed to sit on her lap or kiss her on the lips. I had to make my own sandwiches and tend the garden because I had the work of the world trying to find a real job. Her cherry wine was the only good thing about being eighteen.
Kate opened the car door and paused.
‘You have to promise me, Colyn, not to do what you are not allowed to do.’
‘I won’t. I promise.’
I folded myself into the seat and when Kate wasn’t looking I smushed my face into the window. I pressed my lips into the glass, then my tongue. My mouth made an ugly slug against the glass.
‘Seatbelt,’ Kate said.
I jumped back and wiped the glass with my sleeve. Kate didn’t like me licking windows, but that was not the thing I was not allowed to do.
Peel Market stank of dirty fish. I knew the smell would get into my clothes and underneath and everywhere, and I felt a million dead fish eyes staring at me, turning my thoughts grey. I thought of a girl at my school who once ate a fish eye like a skittle. Then I thought of another girl – her name was Cherry. I didn’t want to remember Cherry. She used to brush my hair with her fingers. She liked soft things. She kept a teddy bear in her pocket. Pretty girl, she said to me once. She made me remember something that I was, and wasn’t, meant to be. I lifted the pencil in my hand and brought it down on her, and I made a sound like a gull cry that cuts the morning. Her eyes shimmered under cold classroom lights. The silence crumbled into tears like sherbet on my tongue.
Kate got her manx kippers and cold crab meat. She chatted to the fishmongers using her sugar voice. That vexed me. My head ached from the smell of the fish and my velveteen dungarees itched like a skin that couldn’t work loose.
Driving home, I threw my ice cream out of the window. Kate asked me why I was cross and I made the grunting noise she hates. I couldn’t keep still in my seat and it was boring in the car. Kate sat straight up in her seat, her nose almost to the window. There was a silver thaw on the roads and she drove slowly. She puts a big mouth on me not being able to drive yet. She’s frightened out of driving and only does it because her husband is dead. Next to my feet there was a lever. My feet brushed against it, teasing it. This lever opened the bonnet, but it was in the footwell on my side and not hers. Kate grumbled about that. I had a habit of pulling the lever. I knew I was definitely not allowed to pull the lever, Kate said it was dangerous, so I tried not to look at the lever. I tried to ignore the squirming feeling in my tummy and the voice that seemed to say, levers are there to be pulled.
We were driving at full git when I tucked my breath into my mouth and lurched forward and pulled the lever. The bumper flew open like a fish on a hook. The flat metal struck the window and Kate made a gaspy noise and her foot pressed the brake to stop us spinning. The road was slippy as all git out. Kate’s hand pinned itself to my chest like a bird in a gust. She held her hand there. Then the world did one big upside down and the touch – the pressing-down touch of the flat of her hand, was what I last felt.
‘Don’t move.’ I opened my eyes to see a big fireman’s jacket with a man inside. Cramped I was, with the world the wrong way up, or else I was the wrong way in the world. I opened my eyes and stared at him. I tried to turn my head to see Kate. Kate would know what to do.
‘Look at me,’ he said. ‘Just look at me, son.’ It was a kindly voice. I liked that this man called me son. He didn’t seem to mind that I had pissed myself, and I liked that.
In the hospital, everyone knew what to do about me. How to glue the broken bits and warsh the bleedy bits. Later on, the police said it was an accident and since it had been said so often, I got to believe it too. The lever was a separate thing and they shouldn’t make cars with levers on the passenger side and there was the silver thaw that made the wheels spin even though Kate tried to make it stop.
I came home to the big empty house. It smelled sweetly like Kate. She allis knew what to say and now there was only quiet. The house got dirty and furry and I got bored of eating cereal. It was hard remembering to warsh and clean clothes and brush my teeth and take the yellow tablets. Kate made everything easy, but she was dead and I did not like anything about that.
*
It was said that every chicken eaten on the Isle of Man, from Cregneish to Cranstal, and from Peel to Douglas, was slaughtered, scalded, plucked and peeled in one of my fadder’s chicken shops. I hadn’t seen my fadder in five years and I hadn’t eaten any of his fucking chickens neither. So it was a shock to me when he came round to see me all of a slap. He stood on the step in his big coat with his white breaths puffing out of him like a steam engine.
‘Let me in here, Colyn, there’s talk of dirt coming.’ He looked up at the sky and the dark clouds rolling in.
‘Come in through.’ He strode in and sat down, knees spread, frowning at the kitchen table. He flicked a dead fly off onto the floor.
‘How are you then?’ Daa asked.
‘Still a bit sore.’
‘Really?’ Daa arched an eyebrow. ‘After all these weeks?’
‘I hurt my ankle pretty well.’
‘I came to see if you needed any help.’
‘You wasn’t at the funeral. None of you was.’
Daa only shrugged. When his brother died they weren’t for seeing much of Kate.
‘I know you’re on your own and you’re not used of being on your own.’ He took the flat leather cap off his head and turned it in his hands. I stared at the wisps of hair on the tips of his ears. I wondered what it would feel like to be hugged. I wanted him to hug me tight and keep me there. ‘Now Kate’s gone west you might want to spend more time with your Maa and me. And your brothers. They’ve asked about you.’
I felt my heart quiverquick inside my chest. ‘Have they?’
‘Sure they have. Alyn’s getting married next year. Big to-do.’
‘Is he for inviting me?’ I swallowed and leaned forward, eyes closed, imagining what I might wear. I had never been to a real wedding before.
‘I don’t know about that, Colyn. We’ll see.’
I knew what Daa meant when he said, we’ll see. They would do all the wedding things without me. I felt tired and I felt hollow and I wanted Daa to leave and to never have come and to stay forever. Daa was quiet, then he put his elbow on the table and rested his head on the fist of his hand as if his head was very heavy all of a slap. His neck was flushed red. ‘There’s talk in the town that you’ve come into a bit of money.’
‘So what if I have.’ My heart sank like an egg full of rot.
‘I thought you might want to get involved in the family business.’
‘I don’t want to work in the chicken shop.’ My chin dipped onto my chest. ‘Do my brothers still work there?’
‘That’s not what I meant, Colyn. And yes, they do, as it goes.’ Daa frowned again. Seemed like everything I said vexed him. ‘I meant you might want to invest in the business.’
‘I don’t know about that.’ I wanted him to stop saying words with meanings hidden in them. ‘Do you want a drink of tea?’
‘No, I’m right.’ Daa put down his cap and fiddled with a pot plant on the table. ‘Jesus, Colyn, you could give it some water. How are you supposed to look after yourself if you can’t even …?’ Daa sighed and stroked his temples. ‘And when is the last time you had a warsh?’
I didn’t know what to say so I just stared and stared at Daa. At his hair thinning at the sides and gone on top. It was cold in the house and nothing was easy without Kate, and Daa was here and angry as he ever was. I felt the tears at the corner of my eyes and I wished for Kate. I closed my eyes and thought if I wished it hard enough, she would come in singing and start cooking up a storm. I tried to picture her face but I could only think of that sly lever in the footwell of the car and glass shattering into giant spiderwebs.
‘You must get lonely in this big house by yourself. It’s more than you can manage.’ He cleared his throat, ‘I’ve had a word with an estate agent. Seems it could fetch a good price. With that and a bit out the money Kate left you, well, you’ll have more than you need. And there’s not many who can say that. And truth be told, Colyn, I could use a bit myself.’
There it was. There it was. Daa’s interest in me was as thin as the wind. I got up and moved to the lounge room. Busied myself by opening the curtains, heavy, velvet, the dust curled off them like smoke and I liked the smell of that dust.
‘So what do you say then, Colyn? Fancy investing in the family business?’
I turned around and stared at Daa. ‘I won’t give you a shiny penny,’ I said. Everything Daa said was a lie with a lid on and I wasn’t for listening any more. I sat down on the chaise lounge and pretended to read one of Kate’s magazines. She’d circled some clothes she’d never got to buy and I thought maybe I’d buy them anyway and hang them up for her in the wardrobe but that made me even sadder. Daa stood red-faced in the middle of the lounge room. He was looking at me terrible strange. His lips moved but no sound came out. Then he put his cap on his head and buttoned up his jacket slowly as if this was some big thing and not him just coming round to be a bother and a nuisance to me. He nodded once as if a forever matter had been settled between us and looked me up and down and made me glad I was wearing nice clothes. New silk pyjamas. Crimson.
‘You know, Colyn, the higher a monkey climbs, the more it shows its arse.’ Then he turned away and walked out of the room. I heard the latch on the front door click softly closed like a tongue inside someone’s mouth.
Good shuttance to him, I thought. But I also wanted him to come back. Truth is, I felt both things at once.
*
‘Hallo, the house,’ I called out the old blessing and carried in the shopping. I’d been on the same route lots of times but I hadn’t seen the woman from the bus again. Shame. She might have warshed the number off her arm since she never rang me like she said she would. Then I thought how even my mudder turned away when she saw me in town.
I put my best suit on to cheer myself up and I watched the television. I might have dozed off since I am terrible in the world for sleeping at night. It was dark when I woke up and the news was on and I saw something uncommon. I saw my Daa. His face. His face on the screen looking at me. At first, I thought it was just one of my seeings. I’m not for bothering with my tablets no more. Daa hadn’t been round again even though I hoped. Even though if he asked me again, I thought I’d give him the money. I shuffled over to the television and reached out. I touched his eyes on the screen. Then there was a shot of the beach where a local man’s body washed up last Thursday.
The photograph was of my Daa all dressed up in a nice suit. The television said that it was an ‘accidental death’. No one knew why he was out swimming with no clothes on. One of the locals started talking from the TV. I sat with my face close to the screen. I felt the warmness of it like lots of bees’ wings against my cheeks. She said about Daa’s Money Worries, and how everyone knew the chicken business was in Financial Difficulties. I looked out of lead-paned windows built up like daggers cutting the night and I saw a moon with a ring of light all around it.
‘A cock’s eye moon,’ I said to the ghosts. And I pushed my fingers into my closed eyes until I saw fireworks. I swallowed so many times it made me bellysore. I stared and stared at the moon ringed by a cloudy light, like an eye, or a halo in the dark. It speaks bad. A ring around the moon like that speaks very bad.
That night I couldn’t shake the voices. I drank the last of Kate’s cherry wine and I had all sorts of thoughts. And I remembered again about the wren.
*
We were children when they brought me to the groaning, growling woods.
I was afraid of the twitching shadows and the crawling earth. Afraid of my brothers under that crisscrossed sky. They stuffed me into fusty skirts and dresses. They shadowed my eyes with dirt. High heels sank into rotting leaves. These were dirty nights. They had the time, they did.
They screeched, they danced around, with sticks in hands. They hunted the wren. They beat the bushes with their sticks to hunt the wren. They whooped and hollered, having fun tremendous. They chased me through the woods and when I fell under their feet and hands they sang a new song: ‘I see him, I see him, said Robyn to Bobbin. How shall we get him? says Robyn to Bobbin. With sticks and stones, says Robyn to Bobbin. He is dead, he is dead, says Robyn to Bobbin.’
When my brothers caught a brown wren, they did the last of him with thorns. The body was stuck up on a long stick and jeered at.
They laughed all the way through. They made me flap my arms. They made me wish I was a wren. It was over by then, for the wren, but not over for me.
The chicken shop looks the same as when I saw it last. The blood smell tangs the air. The killing box is where they do the last of the chickens. I swallow my heart and step into the forecourt. Three brothers are wearing black overalls and boots to the knee to hide the blood. One has a bag of pellets, two carry tubs of bloody mess. The clouds are blanched like chicken skin and the moon last night was a sign.
My brothers stop to stare at me but it’s too late. I lift the antique gun to my shoulder and I aim, and the men tilt and fall as if the world has knocked them off its back. There’s smoke in the air, the vibrations linger in the barrel of the gun, a burnt treacle smell, and there’s blood on the ground. I stare at the collapsed paper faces of these men. Dead men must all look alike because I have to look again before I recognise my brothers Ivar and Alyn who whipped me with sticks. This one is Thomas – one of a twin – though neither one of them mended the other.
Marty comes out from the chicken shed and falls next. He is dead. I thought. He is dead like sticks and stones and little brown wrens.
Three more brothers bunch together in the doorway and their limbs flail against the flaking wood when the gun lays them stretched. I go close and turn them over with my hands – not rough. Marty’s eyes are full of sky and here is the other twin, Yvon, who made me lap water from a dish like a cat. Rory folds two double at the waist with a half-smile on his lips. I step over the bodies and into the chicken shed. The birds are fat, squashed together in rows. I can’t put a mouth to it but the chickens tell me what to do. Daa’s office overlooks the sawdusty, nasty world of the pent-up chickens, but there is no one in there who can see or stop me as I open the cages up. There is a crooning noise that sounds terrible strange until I realise that it comes from me. I close my mouth. A loud noise streaks the air blue. It gets closer. I hear them call my name but the word sounds so big I am startled alive by it. It’s as if they’re calling to me from another world. The voice is loud and it is calming like the fireman. I step over the bodies, the gun clatters from my hand and I am outside. And they are pushing my face into the chicken-shit cement and they hold me there. Lying like this, I can see the length of myself. I see that I’m wearing Kate’s dress which was long on her but bunches up at my ankles. My hair pillows like feather-down against my cheeks. A smile bubbles on my lips and grows until it splits them open. Then a giggle, a laugh that is outside the breaking shell of my body.
