This is the opening four paragraphs of a short story, which was shortlisted in the 2024 Minds Shine Bright Light and Shadow international literary competition. The story is about how the protagonist lets go of Earth and commits herself to the Moon, with some nefarious activity along the way.
Lavatime
Waking up on the Moon was a process of adjustment. Sleep was such a terrestrial phenomenon, she had decided. In the transition before her eyes opened, she always felt herself to be still ‘at home’, in the Earth bedroom, the Earth bed with the pale green satin quilt that no longer existed. It was a moment of disorientation before she became fully conscious of where she was.
The residues of bright trees fled from her dreams. She could set her room’s ‘window’ to show any view she liked from Earth — such earthly connections were held to be beneficial for the mental health of the lunarians — but somehow these digital forests seemed less real than the trees formed solely inside her sleeping brain. Hers were usually eucalypts with long glossy leaves and piebald cream-and-brown trunks. Sometimes the hum of insects hung in the leaves, barely leaving an imprint in her mind as the regular morning sounds of the lunar habitat started to overwrite them.
So she did not usually turn the window on to Earth. She preferred the live feed to the surface. Not many of her colleagues did, she knew; but somehow this made the Moon real for her, stabilising her here. The unchanging, silent, grey surface was an anchor to a reality that grew further and further away from Earth the longer she stayed.
The surface was never as still or boring as the others believed, though. Over 15 Earth days, the angle of the sunlight slowly changed, and she saw the plain, strewn with rough boulders, reveal different contours and textures to her gaze. It was quite dynamic really, if snail-slow in its progress sometimes. Time was such a moveable feast on the Moon. Inside the lava tube, they worked to a local clock which matched circadian rhythms, aided by artificial light and dark; they communicated with Earth using UTC; and they pitted themselves against the implacable force of the long lunar day, which would have frozen them in its dawn and boiled them at its noon. Of the lunar night they did not speak.
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| Lava tube entrance. Image credit: NASA / Goddard / Arizona State University |
Reference
Gorman, A.C. 2025 Lavatime. In Amanda Scotney (ed) Light and Shadow. Minds Shine Bright International Creative Writing Anthology Seasons 2, pp 109-114. Windsor, Vic: Minds Shine Bright
Purchase a copy here.
Acknowledgements
I'd like to thank Amanda Scotney for tracking me down when I was ill, and including me in the public events around the anthology, and my esteemed colleague Lynley Wallis for providing valuable feedback and encouragement!