Mother Hannah
an excerpt

Down the winding streets of the city of Ham, at its outermost edge and the point where Florentine St. ended abruptly, Mother Hannah lived in a medium-sized apartment building. This Mother Hannah was seldom ever seen around the city, but when she was seen, most people kept their distance. As was bound to happen with people who kept amongst themselves, speculative stories from curious, but fearful citizens wound themselves around Mother Hannah. She never denied nor affirmed any of them.
Mother Hannah’s apartment building appeared to be no different from the many other buildings in the city. It had your usual flight of stairs, a never-working elevator and of course, the tenants who proved to be some of the more colorful characters in the city. Mother Hannah herself lived in the basement and again, rarely ever saw daylight except through a single, small rectangular window that could be seen from the outside. All of the goings on in the apartment were never spoken of and even the tenants kept mum as to what Mother Hannah was like, exactly.
But it wasn’t that the tenants wouldn’t say, but rather because they couldn’t say exactly who Mother Hannah was. She was among those souls whose personalities liked to keep things to themselves for their own personal reasons. Now and then, the tenants would be struck with an unfaltering curiosity and devise a host of plots to discover what exactly lived in the bottom of their unassuming home. Such plots ranged from the harmless trailing of Mother Hannah, to a more elaborate scheme that involved sophisticated voyeuristic technology that even the most advanced space centers were light years away from discovering. Needless to say, these plots never worked, or if they did, nobody ever lived long enough to tell the tale.
Still, this was not to say that Mother Hannah was in any way a nasty old woman. In fact, she was a rather pleasant person. She smiled when she met people in the street, though she never extended a hand. Once in a while, a household in times of need would discover a parcel on their doorstep containing trinkets that would ease their problems if only long enough for the household to gather themselves and fight their mishaps. Most people weren’t bothered by her personally, it was just that for a woman who had lived all of her 106 years in the city of Ham, her life was creepily private. It was as though Mother Hannah had managed to imbue the town with her presence, even though the quality of that presence was entirely lacking. There was no way to capture what exactly Mother Hannah was to the town, only that she was probably its most prominent citizen. A few boisterous and well-meaning youths had even started a campaign to elect her mayor in the hopes of “drawing her out of her shell” and letting her know that she was appreciated. Mother Hannah politely declined.