Echoes | Short Story

Fiction 1 Minute

The clock struck and I woke, echo of an echo of a chime sounding in my ears. I remember it as the knell bringing in my second life. The Time After.

My wife was not in the bed beside me – no trace of warmth remained in the tangled sheets. The next discovery – the hardest to bear – was my children’s beds laying empty, their blinds down just so, the books we had read to them scattered across their bedside tables.

It was two, probably nearer three days, before it started to sink in. No neighbours, no newspaper boy, no Mr. Shaheed at the local convenience store, no traffic, no-one to answer phones or respond to emails or hear my shouts echoing around redbrick rooftiles and blank monoblock driveways.

I have survived much as you might expect, elbow-deep in chest freezers and sliding through insecure hopper windows in search of canned goods. I always pause at the mantelpieces, at the coffee tables, at where the photos of the disappeared fade and yellow. From where echoes, faint beyond hearing, still sound.

Thanks for reading, folks. My recent short stories include ‘The Right Kind of Haunting‘ and ‘November Cold‘.

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 has a Professional Doctorate in Education. Matthew blogs at www.matthewjrichardson.com.

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Published by Matthew J. Richardson

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

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17 thoughts on “Echoes | Short Story”

  3. Eerie. Your shortest short story I’ve read to date, but the message comes through loud and clear. This man has truly been left behind, and all the world has to offer him cannot silence the echoes of the departed. But is he truly the only one left on earth? It’s hard to say. Is an equally unsettling sequel in the works? Well done, as always, Matthew.

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  5. You do know we live in a 3D projection from and 4th dementional universe – well that is the best guess quantum physics can offer and even they don’t like it. So sad to say we could all just fade away and no one would be the wiser. DOOMED ALL DOOMED ; )

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