Dropping | Creative Nonfiction

Beginnings in the crags, where the mist skeins slide over rubbled morain, where the clouds purple and brood. The water is nowhere and everywhere, tinkling and spidered under the stones, the little rivulets caught between plains of sky and scree.

A gathering, fog-borne and trembling upon mountain frond. The soil, suddenly rain-choked, heaves its burden downhill, down the mountain and into the water-worn channels, veined in the thin soil. The gathering gathers, guttering unseen in the high places, licking the smoother rocks and gaining pace, a frigid churn and the first tentative

                         drops. Gurgling now, and tufted grass overhanging the foam-flecked vertices, those perma-shadowed dirt-and-stone walls.

                                                                                                                 Leaps now, and foam hangs light in the thickening air, plunging into the bubbling pools, churning in the wind-stirred water.

Calmer now, winding through the sheep pasture, no sign of the still-strong currents other than the guttering suck of undercut banks, the wobbled eddies on the surface.

Dropping

      into a land of sweeping curves and manicured oxbow lakes, of damp-legged jetties and beer gardens festooned with warm pint glasses winking in the sun, of the well-to-do messing about in boats and leaf-dappled lawns sloping down to the drink. Staid, now, a tamed bolt against a verdant green.

On, and darkening into the post-industrial hinterlands. A littering of rusted wharfs and gaping outflow pipes, of river waders fluting on upturned, bed-bound hulls, of brick warehouses leering over the water with black, gaping windows.

Wider, now. So wide that the cold churn of the mountains is nothing but memory, its kinetic energy smeared across floodplains in jaded sweeps.

Down

     through the dunes and onto the sand, a creeping rush of fresh-meets-saltwater. Sun on the dipping waves and, on the horizon, the first plumes of a cloudbank seeking the mountaintops.  

*Thanks for reading, folks. Images courtesy of Vittorio Staffolani and Rakhee. My recent short stories include ‘The Young Man from Number Twenty-Seven’ and ‘Plausible Deniability‘.

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Matthew Richardson is a writer of short stories. His work has featured in Gold Dust magazine, Literally Stories, Close to the Bone, McStorytellers, Penny Shorts, Soft Cartel, Whatever Keeps the Lights On, Flashback Fiction, Cafelit, Best MicroFiction 2021, Writer’s Egg, Idle Ink, The Wild Word, and Shooter magazine. He is a doctoral student at the University of Dundee, a lucky husband, and a proud father. He blogs at www.matthewjrichardson.com.