Author: Matthew J. Richardson

Words in Gold Dust magazine, Literally Stories, Close to the Bone, McStorytellers, Fiction Junkies, Soft Cartel, Whatever Keeps the Lights On, Flashback Fiction, CafeLit, Best Microfiction 2021, Writer’s Egg, Idle Ink, and Shooter.

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.

Continue reading “A Clearing | Short Story” →

Storm and Song | Haiku

What appears to have been the Scottish ‘summer’ is now apparently at an end. The first of what I imagine will be plenty of Autumn haiku are below…

Rain running down a window

Storm

Violent spatter

Against a square of slate sky.

Bulbous autumn storms.

Fire embers glowing

Song

An empty grate, yet

That smell of red embers, of

Songs sung, lilted verse.

*Thanks for reading, folks. Images courtesy of David Wagner and Peakpx. My recent short stories include ‘Rendered Soft‘ and ‘Across the Glassine‘.

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.

A Time to Keep | Book Review

A Time to Keep

George Mackay Brown

Polygon Books

ISBN: 9781904898657

£7.99

‘It was early spring. Darkness was still long but the light was slowly encroaching and the days grew colder. The last of the snow still scarred the Orphir hills. One sensed a latent fertility; under the hard earth the seeds were awake and astir; their long journey to blossom and ripeness was beginning. But in Hamnavoe, the fishermen’s town, the lamps still had to be lit early.’

Review

I was first introduced to the work of George Mackay Brown by an academic who came to Ayr Writers’ Club to speak about his work. She spoke of his fiction being centred around the Orkney Isles where he spent most of his life, and of how he captured those Orcadian communities in his writing. I read ‘Simple Fire’, a selection of his short stories, before moving on to ‘A Time to Keep’, his own arrangement of work.

Continue reading “A Time to Keep | Book Review” →

Across the Glassine | Short Story

Well, how did you think that they come to be dislodged, those photographs in the old albums? How many times have you opened one of those faux-leather bound books, only to be met with the sound of the glassine sheets unsticking from one another and the flutter of photographs dropping to the bottom of the page?

They move, of course. The people, I mean, not the books. Did you expect anything else from them? Did you think that they would be content to sit there, slipping further into sepia and collecting dust motes? Not likely; not when they are doomed to the gloomiest bookshelf in the gloomiest room of the house, sunlight only filing across those pages once or twice a decade.

Continue reading “Across the Glassine | Short Story” →

Buttercup and Broil | Haiku

Big skies and crowded lawns today, with a couple of haiku…

Buttercup

Buttercup

Sun-waxed buttercup,

Deep amidst the heaving grass.

Summer peering through.

Cirrus clouds against a blue sky

Broil

Cumulonimbus

Banked broad, far-flung cirrus. A

Broiling troposphere.

*Thanks for reading, folks. Images courtesy of Flickr and Caribb. My recent short stories include ‘Rendered Soft‘ and ‘Eyes Wide‘.

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.

Rendered Soft | Short Story

A dank green. Blink. The far side of the loch, bulbous and warped. Blink. A yachtsman sliding across, issuing silent commands to his crew. Blink.

The woman removes the glass from her eye. The bottom of a bottle, maybe. Perhaps the bubbled lens from a pub window, popped from between corroded lead beading. What matters is that the glass is old. The relentless grind and smash of waves has dulled the shine and made the surface rough and scarred.

There is less romance in the newer glass. Jagged edges and see-through, it is redolent of bar fights and shattered lights. There is less mystique about the modern glass. The light shines through it too readily, blinding the beachcomber.

Blue and green seaglass

The woman moves on, across the kelp-strewn beach and onto the bigger rubble, where flies dart around the drying seaweed and bulbous jellyfish lay dying in the morning sun. She must return to the house before long, to where the windows shine bright and to where the edges have not yet been dulled. Her pace does not quicken.

The pee-whit, pee-whit of oystercatchers’ alarm fills the air. The woman is walking past their nest and they are protecting their young. Defending their home. She walks along this stretch of beach each morning, and each morning the oystercatchers scream with alarm as she passes. Lovely, to be able to protect one’s family in such a manner.

There, in the damp sand. Pale blue glass, soft and mottled, with only the barest trace of some thick-set writing on its base. One for the top of the garden wall. The woman pockets the glass and twists her wedding ring; some sand has worked its way between gold and skin. ‘Till death do us part was right, and she has fulfilled her side of the bargain. It’s not wrong, she tells herself. It’s not wrong to wish for the most recent renderings – of bedpans and pain and of blue-veined hands gripping tight – to become scored and dull and rough. It’s not wrong to know that when she reaches into her pocket, later in the empty house, her fingers will find those mottled curves.

*Thanks for reading, folks. My recent short stories include ‘Travelling‘ and ‘Eyes Wide‘.

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.