The End of the Day | Short Story

Becca is lonely. They say it like it is a bad thing, those teachers, that guidance counsellor, the parents whispering behind their hands at birthday parties. They said it as though the condition has a horrifying miasma surrounding it, some sort of accompanying social smell. Rancid, like milk gone bad.

There are worse things to be than lonely, though.

These people though, they don’t take into account the worlds that are visible only to Becca. Universes that only she can see. Walking along a school corridor, she can be anywhere inside her head. The tinny slamming of the lockers is muted, the boyish jostling becomes immaterial, the spitballs seem to arc around her, pulled out of her gravity by the mass of her imagination.

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Shift | Flash Fiction

Cold air shifts, tugged between a closed door and another, closing. Shoes shuffle against the swept floor, footsteps purposeful but never rushed. Speech is superfluous here in the mountains, amidst the thin air and underneath the morphing skies.

There are privations of course, the hardships of rock-hewn bedrooms and straw mattresses, but also the sense of paring back, of the shedding of the unnecessary.

So as the poets, the thinkers, the lost, shift past each other in the shadowed-sunstriped cloisters, do not think of them as poor or desperate. Think of them as rich – rich in spirit, in solitude, in silence.

Thanks for reading folks. Recent short stories include ‘Scale and Perspective‘ and ‘Picking your Mark‘.

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, Down in the Dirt, and Shooter magazine. He has a Professional Doctorate in Education. Matthew blogs at www.matthewjrichardson.com.

Picking Your Mark | Short Story

Picking your mark is important. This is no smash and grab. This is no crime of opportunity. This is tradecraft.

You look for sloppiness, for laziness. Expensive bikes left in back gardens. Hopper windows ajar. Packages left hanging from letterboxes. Easy pickings.

You look for signs of opulence, of wealth. How expensive are a person’s drapes? What car is parked in their driveway? Does security lighting protect their wealth?

Lastly, you look for patterns. When do they leave in the morning? Are their hours regular? Are there neighbours twitching at drapes?

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Scale and Perspective | Short Story

The house on the mountain. It was as good a name as any.

There was a path, such as it was, cutback atop cutback, gouged into the loose soil and the scree on the side of the rockface. The sun spooled out over the mountain face within which the house was crammed for only a few hours every day, fewer in winter. When the pale warmth hit the face, the ice thawed and rocks fell like teeth from blasted gums, hurtling down to threaten anyone foolish enough to be climbing. In the summer, meltwater eddied and gushed from on high, thrumming down and beating upon the weathered rock. What stone and stream did not deter, terrain made fools of. Air and wind yawned around the bare faces; only trembling wildflowers and feather-bustled birds were brave enough to cling on.

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Shadow and Light | Short Story

A highly detailed, high-resolution image of a front door with coloured glass in its windows. The door is from 1940s Britain and is in deep shadow at night. There is an air of mystery about the door.

Keep the home fires burning; that was what the troops had sung in the Great War. And she does, never going out without a carnival glass lamp switched on to welcome her home, its warped, lead-lined shapes throwing up a kaleidoscope of shapes against the wallpaper.

Locking the front door behind her, she starts the Morris and lets it tick over, still glancing through her front window at the bright, coloured glass. The blackout is still in force, of course, but no German bomber is going to release its cargo based upon seeing a carnival glass lamp from twenty-thousand feet. She pulls away from her front door, the gravel crunching beneath the Morris’s thin tyres.

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