A Clearing | Short Story

The Fishwick house was unashamedly a vanity project. It was set deep in the wooded Northumberland countryside with only a single rutted road providing access, the kind with a precipitous ridge of grass In the middle which one had to navigate via a roaring clutch. The hassle was worth it though, or at least it should have been.

Colonial in style, the building should have had no place in northern England; its displacement, however, was part of its charm. Even now, dilapidated and crowded by weeds, it retained some dreamlike quality – the wide porch which should have played host to a rocking chair, the sloping lawn which should have been littered with toy cards and half-built forts.

For a while it had seemed as though the family had built a timber-clad utopia. The understated saloon went back and forth, the children were homeschooled, and each morning Mrs. Fishwick would walk along the gravel road to the post box, stopping to take selfies illustrating her new-found and hard-won isolation. Walk far enough and she could no longer hear Martin’s voice rising, falling, rising once more as he spoke with his former colleagues in their slick city offices. Walk far enough and the low-clung winter sun reflected off her husband’s home office windows so that she could no longer see him finger pointing on the phone, or pressing clenched knuckles against the side of his head whilst the trees gently tapped on the glass from outside.

Then came a night still talked about at the local inn, when news is scarce and the red coals in the log burner are frosted with grey. Lots of people had heard the story. Few had any real knowledge of what had occurred on that dark January night, and fewer still were willing to talk about what they had seen.

What was accepted was that, a little after midnight, Mrs. Fishwick had arrived at the nearest farm, almost incoherent with cold and fear. Her two children were huddled around the hem of her nightie, tousle-haired and wide-eyed. Blankets were provided, spoons chinked against the sides of cocoa mugs, and phone calls were made. Before long there were police cars crawling up between the divots on the gravel drive, with no great sense of urgency, no blue lights, and no sirens. What was done was done.

After the forensic tents were erected and disassembled and the undertakers had scuttled from timber-clad shadow into grey winter half-light, the house was left to the forest. Years passed. The rhododendrons are a riotous wave of green and red now, gathering themselves as though to crash down on the damp timber. The thin forest soil has blown into the cracks between the wooden boards, where it plays host to yellow-green moss and huge, leathery dandelion leaves. Ears of grass sprout from clogged gutters and oak branches reach slowly across the house’s rotting façade – a curtain of bark slowly drawn closed.

*Thanks for reading, folks. My recent short stories include ‘Rendered Soft‘ and ‘Across the Glassine‘.

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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.