Sunset Hours | Short Story

The mountainside gloams around the man. He sees it in the dulling of the red-brown autumn heather. It is in the greying, the blueing of the chill air. It is in the sound of the ben quietening.

The man already knows what the evening, what the night will look like; he has seen it once before. Umber and steel and fathomless blue and breeze and movement and yawning space. The man also knows that he will not see nights beyond the one approaching.

Things were different even twelve short hours ago. There had been the sight, close and yet so far away, of cars beetling along the B-road at the bottom of the valley. Once, gloriously, there had been the dissociated whumph of a helicopter searching an adjacent hill. The man had shouted, had made ready to wave his three working limbs, but his ministrations brought nothing but wind and silence.

And now the onset of evening once more. The first night had been long, drawn, unbenumbed by dream or delirium. Stars had not wheeled above him. No spectral relatives had appeared. It had been cold, though – so cold that he was surprised when the wan October dawn broke over him. Luck, he supposed.

Still, luck only takes a person so far; it certainly won’t take him to another dawn. He shifts amongst the bracken, not even uncomfortable anymore. It is soothing to have had the fight leach out of one onto the scree. And there are worse places it could have happened. Here the man has the world at his back, the world laid in front of him in the scudding underlit clouds, in the early snowdrifts high in the Cairngorms, the col-borne breeze in the heather.

Thanks for reading, folks. My recent short stories include ‘A Clearing‘ and ‘Crib Stuck‘.

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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.