Stories in Golddust Magazine, Literally Stories, Idle Ink, Writer's Egg, CafeLit, McStorytellers, Whatever Keeps the Lights On, Flashback Fiction, Down in the Dirt, Close to the Bone, Shooter, Soft Cartel, Fiction Junkies, and Heavenly Flower Publishing
Silicon and gallium lenses, held up in supplication – a requiem for the real, a feast for the shortsighted. Lost is the sense of wonder, of bare-eyed goggle, replaced instead with a brutal cataloguing of experience, a repackaging of the physical for the swipers, the sofa-saddled.
Would those crafters, those master masons, those flit-fingered painters have sweated and pored by lights – candle, rush, oil – if they knew their creations would be framed by sweaty-fingered glass? Would they have risen from their beds if they knew their fate was to be repackaged and talked over, buried under the suffocating, expanding blanket of ‘content’?
As I work away on the second draft of my novel (working title ‘Detox’), I recently had the opportunity to visit South Stack Lighthouse in North Wales.
‘Detox’ is set on a rock lighthouse, and getting a sense of the space and isolation of such a building was helpful as I look to weave the building and landscape into my plot.
South Stack sits somewhere between a shore station and a rock station; the lighthouse is accessible from the North Wales shore, but only via a set of steep switchbacks cut into the rock and a bridge over to the main island. As such, I was able to get a sense of the isolation of being an early twentieth century keeper without the hassle of going out on a boat. Weather can still get pretty wild on South Stack – our guide told us that there have been storms so severe that seawater reached the top of the tower – I wouldn’t want to traverse either the bridge or the switchbacks in such weather!
The visit gave me both plot contextualisation and ‘grace notes’ to add to my writing. The birdlife was astonishing in volume. Guillemots and razorbills were packed tightly together on the precipitous cliffs facing onto the lighthouse, whilst the lightroom itself was far more cramped than I was expecting; there was really only room for two people to nudge past each other whilst walking around the lenses. I will have to adjust the plot to suit this tighter-than-anticipated space.
My main takeaway from the visit to South Stack was the importance of using place in my writing. This was a building steeped in drama and history, built onto bare rock and designed to weather the fiercest storms. I will have to endeavour to ensure that the prose is worthy of the place!
Matthew J. Richardson’s fiction has appeared in publications including Golddust Magazine, Flashback Fiction, Close to the Bone, Shooter, and Idle Ink. His work often explores psychological tension, place, and the quiet edges of human behaviour. He lives in Scotland and holds a Professional Doctorate in Education.
Even the boy’s parents conceded that the optics were poor.
Pages of notes in the haphazard handwriting of an eleven year-old, grime-encrusted beakers, oranged rubber piping curling across desks, and all of those phials filled with viscous, bubbling liquid…
Whether it had been a neighbour or a delivery driver who had alerted the authorities they never knew, and by the time the story took off on social media, no-one really cared. All anyone could talk about was the forensic tent erected on the front porch and the boy being taken away for interview. Then, of course, came the speculators – the Twittering, Redditing vultures happy to get creative, to opine that the boy had always been odd, that he had spent too much time on shady internet forums, or that – in an apparent non sequitur put forwards by his primary school classroom assistant – the boy had shown an unhealthy interest in science.
No-one was quite sure what the lampman’s purpose was. They knew that he appeared on still nights when the fog swept up from the Avon and slicked the dark cobblestones. They knew that he was looking for someone or something, but his purpose? No-one could come up with a plausible explanation.
It was not as though the man was shy. His buckled boots sounded loud against the worn stone, and he was unabashed in leaning close in to the shop fronts and the street level windows, cupping his hands around his eyes to avoid his own reflection. A moment’s searching, and then moving on, the flame of his cruisie lamp guttering with his movement.
And then the jumble sale – the canned vegetables, the fruits, the canned meats. She sometimes thinks that it is the world’s worst tombola. They are brought forwards, these tin, flush against the edge of the steel shelves. Everything in its place.
There is a comforting airlessness down here. A silence. Everything is in its place. Everything counted, stacked against some half-imagined Event which would send them down here.
