“The Sound of Moss Falling” by Adrian Paul – Winner 2025 Short Story Competition

To hear Adrian talk about The Sound of Moss Falling, watch our recorded livestream where we announced the winners of the competition.

“The Sound of Moss Falling”

Clumps of moss have been falling off the roof of my mother’s bungalow. This has happened throughout the years she’s lived there. Only lately has it become a focus for her concern. It’s ever since the funeral, which is almost six months now. She mentions it whenever we speak on the phone.
‘It mucks up the path,’ she says. ‘Makes everything slippery. Someone might hurt themselves. It’s horrendous, I can’t tell you.’
My mother wants the moss not to exist. She would like it eradicated from her life. ‘Can you do something about it when you next come?’
‘Well,’ I say, ‘I’ll have a look.’ In truth, I’m not sure what I can do. There’s an eternal conjugation at play here. There is moss on the roof. There has always been moss on the roof. There will always be…you get the idea. The moss tumbles off the roof and onto the path in front of the house. That is what moss does. Will always do.

Maia and I drive up to my mother’s on a Thursday evening. Maia picks me up after work. She’s organised. She comes provisioned with drinks and snacks for the journey: a flask of tea, those packets of fruit juice with the little straw stuck to the side, cake, cereal bars, bags of crisps. We have a target arrival time. The idea is to eat dinner with my mother. She likes to eat early, at six, and have the washing-up done by seven. At home, Maia and I are much later eaters, around eight. We need to be adaptable with my mother. Flexibility’s the name of the game. The idea is to avoid causing her any distress. She’s teetering nowadays.

On the motorway, I feed Maia as she drives. I pop crisps or small pieces of cake into her mouth. I hold the flask’s plastic cup to her lips.
‘Unh. It’s too hot,’ she says. ‘Let it sit.’
We have the radio on for a while. This deflects us from thinking about what’s facing us at my mother’s. We’re not ready for that yet. After we’ve heard the headlines, I turn the radio off. The serious voices were making me jittery. We motor on, just the two of us. I précis what has happened at work today. Maia makes salient observations along the way. I tell her about the forthcoming reorganisation of divisions, the hue and cry this is creating, the sessions with the change consultant. ‘People are up in arms…’ I say.
I pause: does Maia think I’m one of those people? One of the deniers? Do I sound angry? It’s true that I haven’t made up my mind how I feel about the reorganisation. I’m by no means signed up.

Maia says, ‘Change makes people uneasy. They prefer what they already know. What they’re comfortable with. Some are ok. The glass half-full types. The curious. We’d be living in caves if it wasn’t for them. You’d still be carving your policies into stone tablets like the Sumerians.’
I look at Maia. She’s never worked in an office. How does she know this stuff?
‘That’s exactly what the consultant said,’ I say. ‘Except for the Sumerians bit.’

This is all a preamble, a warm-up. The real substance concerns what lies ahead, at the end of the motorway. I come to it finally. ‘So, anyway…,’ I start. I take a deep breath and reprise the most recent conversations I’ve had with my mother. What she’s spoken about, her current health resumé, her leg sores, the pain in her hands and feet. How she’s getting on with the carers. What appointments, if any, she has tomorrow. Her other preoccupations. The moss, for one.

I don’t work Fridays, which means we can be with my mother on a weekday. This feels important. It means that if she does have appointments, we can take her. We can sit alongside her. We can hear what the doctor or nurse, or whoever, has to say. My mother’s own reports of her various appointments lack relevance. ‘Oh, it was all fine,’ she’ll say. ‘He was ever so nice, was Doctor Kapoor. Both his children are at Oxbridge, you know. He follows cricket like you. You’d get on ever so well.’
My mother is of the deferential generation: ‘I don’t like to make a bother.’ She attends her appointments in passive mode, submissively. She won’t know what to say. Or, rather, she’ll chat happily about everything under the sun except her conditions. Whereas, if we’re with her, we’ll put the appropriate questions. It’s important to advocate for her, is what Maia says.

My mother does have one appointment tomorrow, at home. She’s expecting the podiatrist, which promises to be low hassle as these things go. We won’t have the rigmarole of getting her dressed for outside, of bundling her into the car and off to the hospital or the GP surgery. Instead, there’ll be space in the day to have certain conversations with her. By some miracle, we’ve managed to persuade my mother to accept assistance three days a week. She was the immovable rock at first. I don’t even want to remember the struggle. Agency staff come in now, to help her shower and do meal preparation. But that was the easy part. There are bigger things we need to discuss, beyond this. The next level. Things she doesn’t want to think about. Not yet at least. Maybe not ever.

**

We turn off the motorway, smack into the end-of-day traffic around Heathrow. I ring my mother to let her know where we are.
She says, ‘Shall I put the potatoes on?’
‘We’ll be about 15 minutes,’ I say. ‘So maybe. Or perhaps wait another five minutes or so. Just in case we’re longer.’
‘I’d better put them on,’ she says. ‘So that they’re ready. Then we can eat straight away.’

As we pull into the driveway, later than forecast owing to an accident in Hounslow, I glance up at the roof of the bungalow. The moss, I believe, does not fall from the roof of its own volition. A part is played by the blackbirds, crows and magpies that like to skitter around on stage up there. I’ve seen them. And in my mother’s living room, when it’s quiet, you can hear the birds gadding about on the tiles. The magpies cry their ack-ack for fun. ‘Oh, that racket,’ my mother’ll say.

She’s heard us arrive. Or more likely she’s been standing at the window peering between the curtains. She’s shuffled her way to the door, with her frame. When I use my key to let Maia and myself in, she’s right there, behind the door, leaning on the walker. ‘I thought you said fifteen minutes. Everything’s gone to ruin.’
She means the meal. The back of my brain instructs me not to engage on the point, but I can’t help myself. ‘I’m sure it’s not,’ I say. ‘It’ll be fine.’
‘Fine if you like burnt offerings.’

We drop our bags in the hallway. Maia goes to the bathroom. I flop onto the chair by the telephone to remove my boots. My mother lingers, leaning on her frame still. ‘I expect you’re hungry. You must be after a hard day’s work.’
I’m struggling to pull my right boot over my heel. My head’s down. Involuntary straining noises escape me. ‘It’s fine,’ I splutter. ‘We ate snacks in the car. Maia got us a picnic.’
The boot comes away, yanking my arm and shoulder. I look up and find that my mother has disappeared into the kitchen.

Maia has brought broccoli in a sealable bag. My mother boils vegetables to death. Maia has also brought our steamer, which fits neatly over the saucepan. She tips the pre-cut broccoli into the steamer and sets the water beneath to boil.
‘Five minutes, mum,’ she says. ‘Not long.’
My mother gives me a look. She’s too polite to aim it at Maia. Why?! her face asks. I’ve made vegetables.
‘Shall I be dishing up the rest?’ she says.
‘You sit down, mum. We’ll do it,’ Maia says.
My mother remains beside us, hovering, one hand on her walker, the other gripping the countertop, her curled avian knuckles turning white. Chicken feet.
‘I can help,’ she says. ‘I’m not an invalid.’
She’s reduced to spectatorship, silent appraising. Her eyes follow our every action. I don’t make a song and dance about it, but my mother struggles nowadays with heavy pans. It’s the arthritis. It’s an accident waiting to happen. The district nurse has advised that she needs help with tasks like this. I say nothing though, so as not to draw attention to these developments. Silently, I drain the peas and carrots she’s put on, lift the macaroni cheese from the oven, and drain the potatoes.
‘I expect they’ve gone to smash,’ my mother complains. It’s a dig at us, for our tardiness. Or else it’s irritation that she’s usurped in this, her final space.

We bring everything, all the spare food, to the table. A containment ploy. My mother’s a fidgety eater. She’ll jump up from the table like a jack-in-the-box, to offer us more food or to attend to some imaginary chore. Instead, it’s us spooning extra macaroni cheese onto her plate, or more carrots. She rises anyway at one point, before either of us can head off the move. One sees the residue of sparrow sprightliness there. Doggedness, too. She propels herself by holding onto the counter edge. Without commenting, she checks we’ve turned off the gas. Back at the table, she resumes her place.
‘This broccoli could have done with longer,’ she says.

Maia tries distraction technique: ‘So mum, tell us what’s been happening. What’s the gossip?’
‘Oh, well. There’s none of that.’ She has her serious face on. She says, ‘Have I told you about poor Lawrence?’
She has, as it happens.
‘No, I don’t think so,’ Maia says. ‘What about him?’
‘Poor man. He was ninety-one. His gardener found him in his garage. They still don’t know how long he’d been lying there. Phyllis’s been trying to find out. There’s no close family. He never married. His sister lived in Wales, but she died some years ago. He was still mobile, you know. I used to see him walking out for his paper. Such a gent, honestly. There’s supposed to be a niece. In Hertfordshire. Or is it Hereford? No-one’s quite sure.’
‘Poor man,’ I echo.
None of us speaks then. I sense Maia eyeing me. I know what’s on her mind. Now is the opportunity to have the important conversation. It’s the best we’ll get. There’s a way in here. At the very least, I could air the issue, float the idea, and let it hang there. But I chicken out. It’s in the file marked “too difficult”. As I’m thinking this, my fork slips from my fingers and clatters onto my plate.
‘Oh, please. That went right through me,’ my mother says.
‘Sorry,’ I say.

Maia and I clear up. My mother says she needs to go and sit down. She leans into her frame, which taps on the lino. Ti-tap. Ti-tap. The sound recedes into the lounge. I hear the TV come on. She has the volume turned up loud. In no time at all she’s laughing at something. Maia sidles up to me at the sink. ‘How does she seem to you?’
I pull my grim face.

We join my mother once we’re finished in the kitchen. Maia sits beside her on the sofa. I take the armchair in the corner, from where I can observe my mother. Maia has brought through the remainder of the crisps we started in the car. She’s tipped them into a bowl. She rests the bowl on the sofa between her and my mother. I watch my mother watching television and eating crisps. In these moments, she seems absorbed and not unhappy.

Out of the blue my mother says, ‘I had to ring the carers’ office. The rota didn’t turn up. I didn’t know who was coming on which days. It was a right muck-up, I can’t tell you.’
‘Oh?’ I say, and glance at Maia.
‘Why is it so difficult for them? Don’t they have any efficient staff? Why are these people so useless nowadays? I told them. I said, “You’re inefficient, you are.”’
Maia is patient. ‘Care firms have a lot of staff changes. They’re doing their best.’
I’ve already explained all this to my mother. Many times. She doesn’t respond now. I console myself: at least she isn’t agitating for me to cancel the whole carer arrangement. That would take us back to square one.

A new programme comes on, about the incredible dramas witnessed in a vet’s surgery. ‘Oh, I do like this one,’ my mother says. She’s genuinely thrilled – I recognise an old inflection. Her words set off a satisfying ripple of pleasure through me. It passes back and forth in waves. It’s by-proxy of course, delight registered in sympathy with. This is what I will have to do now, I understand. Be on guard to capture the wins. Hold onto these.

Not long afterwards, I glance over. My mother’s arms are folded over her chest. Her eyes are shut, and her head is lolling forward, her mouth ajar.

**

In the morning, Maia and I are up later than usual. My mother’s on the sofa doing one of her crosswords. Her walker is parked beside her. From her position she spots us emerge from our room at the rear of the house. She calls out, ‘Chef says the kitchen’s closed until lunch.’ She laughs. She herself is still in her night clothes, which gives me the chance for a sarky rejoinder. I would’ve done in the past, but I bite my tongue now, inhibited by new realities. All I do is raise my eyebrows as I come through towards her. I pull a daft expression at her joke. She says, ‘Oh, there. Dad used to make exactly the same face.’

She’s in her bedroom dressing when the phone rings. ‘Ohhhh!’ she cries out. ‘Whoever can that be?!’
I need to be on my mettle, alive to her alarm. I snap to it. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll get it,’ I call. I shout so there’s no doubt she’ll hear me. And hearing me, she’ll be mollified. All the same, the cluck of her walker on the carpet sneaks up on me almost before I’ve established who’s calling. She’s at my back, anxious to be in the know. She mouths at me: Who is it?
‘Yes,’ I say to the caller. ‘I understand. That’s fine. No, no. Yes, definitely. Ok. No, not at all. Yes. Thanks for letting us know.’
I hang up and explain to my mother that the podiatrist has had to cancel. A situation has arisen. I don’t convey the whole story, that it’s to do with staff shortages. I know this will rile my mother. She’ll work herself into another stew about the general deterioration of the world.
‘Oh well,’ my mother says. ‘These things happen. They’re doing their best.’
‘They’ll call again to make a fresh appointment.’ The instant I say this, I worry that, when they do call, if we’re not here my mother will be too slow to get to the phone. They’ll hang up and the appointment won’t be made. She’ll miss out on her treatment. I make a note to call them myself. I’ll do it in a while. I write on the pad beside the phone: “Podiatrist!”

The cancelled appointment frees up Maia and I to head out earlier than anticipated, to do my mother’s shopping. We ask her if she would like to come with us, for the trip out. She says no, she’ll stay back. She’ll see what’s on television. ‘There’ll be one of those auction programmes,’ she says.
Maia and I drive to the supermarket mostly in silence. I only say, ‘She doesn’t seem too bad this time.’
I’m honestly not sure what I mean by this. I’m just talking, aerating.

Before we do the shopping, we have a quick coffee in the supermarket café. We’re the youngest people there. At every table there are retirees, elderly people. Suddenly I’m seeing the frail and the infirm everywhere. I catch sight of a bulky man trying to transfer himself from his mobility scooter to a seat at one of the tables. The scooter is lower than the chair. It’s unnerving to watch the manoeuvre. There are cuts on the man’s head. And no wonder. Elsewhere, there’s an expressionless woman with Audenesque deep lines and watery eyes being pushed in a wheelchair by a helper. Her mouth is open. Her coat is misbuttoned, so that one side of the collar is riding up her neck towards her ear. As a result, her head leans stiffly in an unnatural position.

My mother’s in the bathroom when we let ourselves in. We’re in the kitchen putting away the shopping when she emerges. I hear the chirp of her frame on the hall carpet before I see her. It’s moving faster than normal. She stops in the doorway.
‘Here you are. I was just about to send out a search party.’

**

Maia’s in the study, sorting my father’s book collection. I’ve been in the bedroom next door, examining a folder of my father’s papers, checking for anything important I’ve missed. When I stop and come through to the hallway, I find my mother standing at the front door, which is wide open, as is the porch door. She’s left her walker behind and is supporting herself on the doorframe. I can’t see what or who she’s looking at. I’m afraid she’s about to try to step down into the porch, unaided. Cold air is rushing into the hallway.
‘Are you alright?’ I ask.
‘Ye-es,’ she says. There’s a strained edge, a note of Why wouldn’t I be? She turns back in, a note of sheepishness in her eye. I push her walker towards her and help her get a firm hold of it. Then I shut the door behind her. ‘Let’s keep the warmth in’.
‘I was just seeing if I could see anyone,’ she says. ‘Sometimes one of the neighbours comes past and we have a chat.’

After lunch, we take cups of tea to the living room. We sit in the same places as the night before. With the door to the back room wide open, light from the bright, clear day floods through. The near miracle of this gladdens me. Though I know it’s also because we’re on the home stretch now: we’ll be setting off soon.

The doorbell goes. We can’t decide which of us is going to answer it. We do a dance where all three of us make a move to stand up and then sit back down again. Somehow, we all end up in the hallway, in a huddle at the door. Maia steers my mother to the front of our welcome party. It’s Phyllis at the door. Phyllis lives in the corner of the cul-de-sac, next to poor Lawrence. Her husband, who has dementia, is in a nursing home. Phyllis goes there once a month, to play board games with the residents. Her husband no longer plays, but Phyllis continues going all the same. According to my mother, she likes the games because she always wins.
‘I won’t stop,’ Phyllis says. She doesn’t even enter the porch. She stays put outside, a step or two away from the house. She’s calling about Lawrence. ‘I thought you’d want to know. It turns out there’s a nephew. He never mentioned a nephew to me. Anyway, the house is going on the market. I spoke to the agent when he came. Seven hundred thousand, he reckoned.’
‘Won’t you come in?’ Maia asks. ‘We’re just having tea.’
‘Oh no, I shan’t stop,’ Phyllis repeats. ‘I’m on my way out. Just thought I’d let you know the next instalment.’ She addresses this to my mother, who doesn’t say anything.

After Phyllis has gone, my mother says, ‘She doesn’t sit still for five minutes, that one. Ants in her pants. She won’t ever come in nowadays. She used to like coming in before, when dad was…We used to have some good laughs. And if she’s not here, she’s off on holiday somewhere. Gallivanting. What does she need a holiday for? She doesn’t do anything!’
I chuckle at this, although my mother, I notice, isn’t laughing. She shuffles towards the kitchen. Over her shoulder, she says, ‘Are you going to see to that moss?’
‘Moss. Yes. The moss,’ I say.

I find a pair of my father’s old gardening gloves. I need to pull them taut around my fingers to stop them slipping off. His hands must’ve been a size bigger than mine. I ought to have known this. How come I didn’t? The question unfolds: a more general challenge rushes to the surface, one I’ve ignored for years. But now is not the time. I dodge it, and bend to the work. I begin sweeping the moss from the path at the front of the house. I start by the door and work outwards from there. I push the broom carefully. The moss accumulates as I work my way along. The green velveteen surface of the moss shimmers in the sunlight. My fingers tighten their grip inside my father’s gloves, to fix them on my hands. The movements of my arms and shoulders, the stance of my legs and feet, become known to me. I’m alert to my normal-wise deskbound muscles. A vision takes over: me as a monk, in a Kyoto temple. The scussing of the broom on the path is curiously soothing. Labour as meditation. I invent a koan: “What is the sound of the broom sweeping?” The shifting of each clump leaves behind a moist, discoloured patch on the paving stones, memories of moss that was.

**

Maia slaps her hands to her sides. ‘Mum, I’m afraid we need to make a move.’
We’ve deduced from past experience that it’s better this line comes from Maia, rather than me. If I say it, it provokes a bad reaction. Even so, my mother says, ‘Oh. I thought you were going to stay longer.’
‘We have things we need to do at home,’ Maia explains. ‘And we need to be there, ready, in the morning. Frankie’s arriving. Before lunch.’
She tells my mother how our daughter’s coming up from university for the night, for a friend’s birthday party. We’d like to spend time with her before she disappears again. As if Maia has explained none of this, my mother says, ‘Can’t you stay another night?’
I feel myself bristling. I specifically told her we were planning to leave this afternoon. I made sure to be clear when we spoke earlier in the week. It’s even written on her calendar, the one by the phone. I checked.

We gather our things. My mother hovers in the hallway as we move about. I happen to notice her peck with her finger at something on the shelf beside the telephone. She takes up the pen, crosses something out on the notepad. When we’re at the door, ready, she starts crying. ‘I don’t know what I shall do without you. It’s so lonely. No-one comes.’
Maia and I make sympathetic noises, Maia more than me. Really, I want to berate her. I ought to. It’s nonsense to say she doesn’t see anyone. She has any number of visitors. There’s the carers three times a week. The podiatrist. The district nurse, who attends to her leg sores. The gardener, Dean. The curate calls round twice a month and gives her communion. I know for a fact that Jennifer across the road pops over to check how she is. One or two other neighbours, too. It’s open house. A cavalcade.

When I put it like this to Maia in the car, she says, ‘Yeah, but they don’t count. It’s the grief talking. It’s the space that’s left. That’s what she means. The gap beside her.’
‘Hnn,’ I say. I realise I’ve forgotten to call the podiatrist.

Near Reading, we stop at the service station. Maia finds a space in the car park away from other cars. We don’t mind a walk over to the building. We’ll get a few steps in. There are drifts of dried leaves from last autumn on the path. The past month has been dry and cold. The brittle leaves swirl about, stirred by the late afternoon breeze. I’m unnerved. The loudness of their scraping against the ground makes me jump. Though I know it’s not the leaves doing this, not really.

We pass a children’s playground behind the service station building. There’s a row of swings and a multi-coloured plastic climbing frame. I tell Maia that when I was five or six I would jump at any chance to go on a climbing frame. ‘They were metal in those days,’ I say. ‘You must remember. Not plastic. Nothing fancy, just this basic grid of metal poles. We called it “the monkey bars.” I’d clamber all over it, crawl across the top on my knees, shift from bar to bar. Or I’d hang upside down by my legs and gaze at the inverted world. I can’t believe how confident I was, how unconcerned. Fearless, I suppose. My mother would be repeating, “Do be careful up there. Don’t slip, will you.”’
‘She must’ve been anxious,’ Maia says.
‘Hnn,’ I say. ‘I suppose so.’
Then Maia says, ‘You remember the wall in the park? How Frankie liked to walk along the top? You were exactly the same, always telling her to watch out. I can hear you saying it.’

Earlier, tidying the moss, my mother was keeping watch. She was inside, peering around the edge of the lounge curtain. She knew I was aware of her. She gestured at one point, supervising, letting me know I’d missed a piece of moss, though in fact I had seen it. From where she stood, my efforts were below par. She would rather have had me up on a ladder, raking the roof, clearing the moss entirely, so that it wouldn’t fall anymore. The bottom line is, somewhere along the way I lost my nerve. No more monkey bars. Frankie laughed at me when I refused to go on the London Eye. I’ve no head for heights now. Not even a bungalow. ‘Wild horses won’t get me up there,’ I told my mother, over-dramatizing.
‘Your father would’ve done it,’ she said. ‘He used to clean the gutters too. All the muck. He’d get up there and scoop out every little bit of that moss. With his hands.’

In the cafeteria, Maia and I take our sweet time over a cup of tea and a slice of fruit cake. Idly, without commenting, we watch the other customers come and go. We’re waiting for something. We’re reluctant to get going again, to return to the car and complete the journey home. We’re loathe to return to the swim. It’s comfortable here. We’re suspended halfway along the motorway. The orange lights in the cafe, the gurgle of the coffee machine. We’re among people who have no claim over us. Families joshing over where to sit, over who wants what to eat and drink. Salesmen, account managers, on the phone or laptop, completing their paperwork. People moving around, going about their business. But us, sitting here, between the two ends of the journey, we’re free for the moment, on pause. No obligations.

Back on the road, I say to Maia, ‘Shall we turn our phones off?’
I’m joking, of course. Only, I’m not joking. Not really. Maia’s focused on the road. She doesn’t react. What I mean to say is, I’m afraid of getting a call.
‘What if something happens?’ I say. ‘What if we have to go back?’
I picture the call coming not from my mother, but from a neighbour. Jennifer across the road. One of the others. My mother’s been found outside. She’s managed to make her way out of the house and onto the front path. She’s tried to pick up the bits of moss I’ve missed. She’s slipped and fallen. We have to turn around and go back.
‘We’d have to, wouldn’t we?’ I say. ‘We’d have to turn off the motorway and go back to the next junction. Find our way again, through wherever.’
Maia nods. ‘Yep. No choice.’
‘We’d be dreading it,’ I say. ‘Dreading what we’d find. Our stomachs would be flipping.’ And even as I’m saying this mine does flip, there and then.
‘There’d be hospital and everything, most likely. All of that. That would be it, then. How would we manage? We’d be… I don’t know. It would just be horrendous.’
‘Well, for one thing we wouldn’t see Frankie tomorrow,’ Maia says. ‘We’d miss her.’
‘God, yeah. That would be…’ I tail off. I think about Frankie then. I can’t help myself. I shouldn’t, but I think about Frankie in the future. I think about the time when it’s us calling her.