A Sense of Perspective

Fiction 2 Minutes

I can smell bullshit a mile off. A person can do all the reading and all of the Youtubing they want – some things can’t be faked. Journalists will write about the history of the Great Pyramid of Khufu, but I can tell that they’ve not been inside, that they haven’t felt the sweat of tourists run down its four and a half thousand-year-old walls. Nor is such fakery limited to sunburnt tourists and more-money-than-sense septuagenarians. I’ve lost count of the number of lithe young things ironically wearing Beatles or Rolling Stones t-shirts. Scream all you want at Summerfest – in the seventies I was close enough to smell the sweat from Mick’s vest and to see the gleam of his back teeth as he attacked the microphone. Back then us ladies knew how to swoon.

That’s how I can pick out the fakers. It is always the unexpected sensual experience that stays with a person. It was exactly this way with us. Where I was expecting the rich aroma of coffee in my nostrils on our first date, I was instead assaulted by a scalding sensation on my tongue and the sound of your stifled laughter as you checked if I was alright. When I was expecting the taste of lager as you kissed me underneath the Christmas lights in George Square, in its place I remember your chilled, rough hands in the small of my back.

Senses, then, are winsome. They are flighty. Emotions, conversely, are much easier to label. I felt nothing but joy as I saw you turn and smile at me from the altar, only gut-twisting misery when you left me for my best friend less than a year later. Similarly, I was unable to multilaterally process the news that you had careered off the country road with your new partner on that clear, frosty January night. Perhaps I simply do not have the emotional capacity to process competing emotions simultaneously. I am a single input, single output computer. The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel elicits wonder. The thought of spending my remaining years alone prompts terror. Driving by the twisted remains of you and your fancy woman’s car? Nothing but glowing satisfaction.

Give me senses over emotions any day. My mind is multi-layered where sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell are concerned. I savoured it all – the smell of the grease and the oil as I slithered underneath your BMW, the shock running up my arms as the brake pipes snapped, the bitter taste of adrenaline under my tongue as I made off under the streetlights…

Yeah, senses win by a mile and like I say, I could smell bullshit from the moment we met.

Matthew Richardson is a writer of short stories. His work has featured in Gold Dust magazine, Literally Stories, Near to the Knuckle, McStorytellers, Penny Shorts, Soft Cartel, Whatever Keeps the Lights On, and Shooter magazine. He is an absentee member of the Glasgow Writers Group, a PhD student at the University of Dundee, a lucky husband, and a proud father.

Not necessarily in that order.

Published by matthewjrichardson

PhD student and short story author. Published in Gold Dust, Literally Stories, Near to the Knuckle, Soft Cartel, Penny Shorts, and Shooter.

Published

17 thoughts on “A Sense of Perspective”

  2. That’s quite the lady you’ve written about there, Matthew. 😉 I am super fascinated by the fiction-writing process since I can’t seem to write fiction and yet I believe I’d like to… can you tell us what inspired this piece? Also, I think it’s so neat that I never know where you’re going with a story, at the beginning, until you begin to leave clues along the way. Do you know the ending before you begin? Or do you write from a first line/paragraph? (i.e. are you a “plotter” or a “panster”? And btw have you ever tried NaNoWriMo?) Inquiring minds want to know! :))

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    1. I sit at a happy halfway house between planner and pantster I think! With a little piece like this I start out with some scribbled notes, phrases which I think 😒 sound snazzy and then I reorder. This ended up a mile away from where it was going though so not sure of the benefit to planning! I always think you’re excellent at the ‘stream of consciousness’ style. Really engaging and so intimate. Allows the reader unfettered access to the thinking of the MC and is so much more accessible because of that. Sign me up for whatever you write!

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      1. omg you are so sweet! Thank you!!! :)))) But I think anyone can do stream of consciousness if they let themselves… it’s the easiest type of writing, once you let yourself get started… it’s publishing at first that’s the hard part… until that becomes an addiction too. 😉 I’d love to read yours. I do hope you try it sometime…. even for yourself, or rather, especially for yourself. BTW publishing under a pen name (even semi-pen name :))) can be quite freeing. Maybe start a second blog, Matthew? 😁The beauty of wp is the blogs are free to start with. And there’s still that awesome community.

        What I love about your writing is that you’re able to write in just about any genre. Awesome book reviews, scary fiction, beautiful haiku… so soc will be a cinch for you.

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      3. Hmm, yes, on second thought probably good to have priorities other than blogging. 😉 I think I’d better try to take a cue from you. One can always try…

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