After | Short Story – Matthew Richardson

The child trudges after her mother in the lengthening hill shadows. No child of her age should trudge; she should gambol, leap, perform clumsy cartwheels, but not this thickset stride, this downtrodden lope.

The older woman does not keep an eye on her daughter as she works – she knows the child will not wander far. As she picks mushrooms in the woods or washes clothes on the flat rocks in the brook, the little girl follows.

Before, chores would have been set to the soundtrack of aimless chatter, of primary school gossip and playground politics. The nearest the child gets to playing now is trailing a stick in the water, watching as the linen billows and gutters in the icy burn. There is mostly silence between them, the silence of shared experiences, of common understanding.

When the shadows reach the gurgling stream, the woman gestures and begins walking home. The journey is not long – no one in their right mind travels far these days – and soon they arrive back at the but and ben cottage. The low-slung building huddles in the valley, its slate roof either slick in the rain or weeping in the sun.

Tonight they will risk a small fire in the grate. Mother and daughter will eat in its warmth. She will tell the child stories of the people who used to be in their lives, and they will smile and laugh for a while. Her tales will stop short of when news anchors begin saying things like ‘highly contagious’ and ‘mandatory isolation’.

Even in these small, sad moments of comfort, the woman’s eyes will keep glancing out of the warped windows, to where the sun is shrinking and the horizon rushing towards them. Despite her daughter’s half-hearted protestations, the fire will be doused early to allow the smoke to disperse in the mountain air.

The woman will murmur and sing to the girl, buried under worn duvets and old jackets. She will shush her to sleep and stroke her forehead with work-roughened hands, watchful for a chill or sore throat that might presage both of their dooms.

Even when sleep smooths the child’s brow, work is not done. These are the longest hours, when darkness reaches long-fingered into the bare corners and the cold creeps between the slates and the rattling window frames. They have not been attacked since the early days of the plague, which is not to say it will not happen again, despite all her precautions. Who knows whether some desperate wretch has caught the smell of woodsmoke on the wind, or heard her daughter’s voice carry on the breeze?

She will stay awake as long as she is able, her heavy eyes fixed upon dark hills against a dark sky. She will listen to her daughter’s soft breathing, to the shuffling of wild things outside. She will listen for those dread tones of voices kept low, of footsteps in the night.

*Thanks for reading, folks. Images courtesy of Pxhere and Neetesh Gupta. My recent short stories include ‘Digging‘ and ‘Property for Sale – Grim-on-Wye’.

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 and tweets at https://twitter.com/mjrichardso0

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