Category: Fiction

Scale and Perspective | Short Story

The house on the mountain. It was as good a name as any.

There was a path, such as it was, cutback atop cutback, gouged into the loose soil and the scree on the side of the rockface. The sun spooled out over the mountain face within which the house was crammed for only a few hours every day, fewer in winter. When the pale warmth hit the face, the ice thawed and rocks fell like teeth from blasted gums, hurtling down to threaten anyone foolish enough to be climbing. In the summer, meltwater eddied and gushed from on high, thrumming down and beating upon the weathered rock. What stone and stream did not deter, terrain made fools of. Air and wind yawned around the bare faces; only trembling wildflowers and feather-bustled birds were brave enough to cling on.

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Shadow and Light | Short Story

A highly detailed, high-resolution image of a front door with coloured glass in its windows. The door is from 1940s Britain and is in deep shadow at night. There is an air of mystery about the door.

Keep the home fires burning; that was what the troops had sung in the Great War. And she does, never going out without a carnival glass lamp switched on to welcome her home, its warped, lead-lined shapes throwing up a kaleidoscope of shapes against the wallpaper.

Locking the front door behind her, she starts the Morris and lets it tick over, still glancing through her front window at the bright, coloured glass. The blackout is still in force, of course, but no German bomber is going to release its cargo based upon seeing a carnival glass lamp from twenty-thousand feet. She pulls away from her front door, the gravel crunching beneath the Morris’s thin tyres.

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The Kinmount Straight | Short Story

Front cover of the literary magazine 'White Witch's Hat' featuring a scary-looking witch.

My festive ghost story ‘The Kinmount Straight’ has been published in ‘White Witch’s Hat and other Yuletide Ghost Stories’ courtesy of Heavenly Flower Publishing.

All is not as it seems as a man drives south on the A75 as night falls, one of the most haunted roads in Scotland…

US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FWRP99CP

UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0FWRP99CP

Thanks for reading folks. Recent short stories include ‘A Prompting at Greysteer House‘ and ‘The Clacks‘.

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, Down in the Dirt, and Shooter magazine. He has a Professional Doctorate in Education. Matthew blogs at www.matthewjrichardson.com.

The Clacks | Short Story

The outside window of a cafe in Edinburgh's grassmarket. It is winter, and the cafe's windows are steamed up from the inside. There is a feeling of cosiness inside the cafe, in contrast with the cold Edinburgh city landscape outside.

I was in my early teens when the typing inside my head started. The sounds of the keys – not the soft, muted depressions of a laptop keyboard, but rather the staccato clunk of typewriter slugs hitting paper – were distinct and immediately identifiable. It goes without saying that I found the sounds strange, worrying even, but I soon learned not to mention it. There’s not even a name for something as weird as that, is there? Hearing the sound of someone typing in your own head?

The typist was unpredictable. The narration – for narration it surely was – seemed to be idiosyncratic in what it chose as subject matter. The writer rarely bothered to record my university experience, banal and predictable as it undoubtedly was. It seemed inordinately interested, on the other hand, on my reading material. It takes a certain level of concentration to read a book whilst another manuscript is being typed inside one’s head – this was a skill which I had to master.

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A Prompting at Greysteer House | Short Story

Sometimes, one has to do a job oneself if it is to be done properly.

The house had looked promising – on the market for years, home report on request only, limited pictures online. The estate agent had been downbeat when showing Max around Greysteer House, waiting in the draughty hallway while his potential buyer picked his way through shuttered rooms and underneath walls spattered with black mould. He had looked positively astonished when Max said he would be putting in an offer for the property.

Max had set up his Olivetti in one of the downstairs reception rooms – one of the only spaces where a peat fire really seemed to drive out the cold – and had waited for the house to tell its stories. He had waited a full month before deciding to take a more proactive approach to listening. The British Newspaper Archive, local historical societies, Facebook groups, even the original drainage blueprints for the house – none of these resources had uncovered the slightest hint of intrigue or criminality. Max found himself wondering how a house could have weathered two hundred years and not have taken on even the slightest echo of the paranormal. Autumn was overtaken by winter, and the Olivetti’s carriage return remained locked.

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Ribbons in the Valley | Short Story

The smell of coal smoke hangs low in the valley, skeined in ribbons of mauve and grey. As the nights draw in, it is the smell which welcomes the men home, filthy and goggle-eyed.

Straight to the outdoor tap, where mountain-cold water brings new aches to already weary bones. Hands move slowly, deliberately, the joints already worn from a day’s work. They will not be allowed in to eat until they are immaculate.

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Passing Traffic | Short Story

The lay-by is one of many on the A82, hidden from the trunk road by a line of winsome, non-native pines and looking out on the sometimes grey, sometimes Mediterranean Loch Lomond.

It is not a place in its own right, not really. No-one says to their spouse, I’m away for an afternoon at that lay-by north of Luss. You remember, the one with the overflowing dogshite bin and the vicious, hypodermic stinging nettles. Still, it is a waypoint for lives, a parallax for the moments of peoples’ existences.

In the spring there are the young lovers, cloistered by the everyone-knows-everyone villages and emancipated by those pines. Steam rises up windows and tinny, unsatisfying bass sounds from within the Vauxhall Corsas and the Seat Ibizas. Young love is born in the lay-by, only to be set aside days or weeks later.

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A Shadow World | Short Story

A shadow world, drawn long. It grows after the sun has crested, seeping out from the church spire and the echoing viaduct. Slow at first, it crawls across the cobbles, pushing against the midday glare.

It advances, just as it retreated. The gloom reaches long-fingered down alleys and into closes – pre-dusks slinking eagerly behind the gable-end and the high, dusty hornbeam. Up drainpipes and across windowsills the shadow slips, glazing no bar to its progress. 

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