Drip, Drip, Drip | Short Story

Rusted water tower against a desert background

The water tower looms, as all water towers do. It does all of the things that water towers are supposed to do; it winks in the setting sun, it slowly rusts. It groans in ponderous, metallic agony.

You like that? Made that up myself, so I did.

Buy some of the more suggestable townsfolk a beer and they will tell you all sorts of things about the tower. They’ll wax about how the creatures first crawled into the shadowy cylinder on a dry, moonless, desert night back in the sixties. They’ll talk, if you let them, about an unsatiable appetite for moisture, for dankness in the arid northern winds, of an incomprehensible idyll of beaded moisture on oxidising iron. You’ll see, if you’ve time enough in the bar, the locals side-eyeing you, even more than might be expected for an out-of-town businessman. You’ll notice lips twitching and elbows dug into friends’ sides.

An outsider would notice these things, an imbecile even. I think you’re more than that, friend.

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Listen | Short Story

A rusted trampoline in a shadowed, overgrown garden.

I’m delighted to say that my flash fiction piece ‘Listen’ has been published in ‘Down in the Dirt’ magazine.

Read it here.

Other recent short stories include ‘Bellahouston‘ and ‘Echoes‘.

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.

Bellahouston | Short Story

Brace

Ice-stiffened grass and dogs wearing hi-vis in the gloom. Here roam the early risers, the antisocial, the lost-in-thought, the lost. There are few words, fewer greetings. Instead, breath plumes over shoulders, shoulders hunched up around ears, eyes fixed to the paths. People pretend not to see dogshit, each other.

Birth

Once the twilight wanderers have disappeared – work, breakfast, despair – come the first real actors, for whom the park provides the clumsily-painted scenery for their fantasies, their crumbling dreams. The wind-chapped cheeks of parents and toddlers bob by, trudging from park entrance to jungle gym, joined by the cold and the conviction that this is what they should be doing. Professional dog walkers, encumbered by tangled leads and tangled dog-eared business plans, wonder how short a distance qualifies as a ‘good walk’. Quasi-gurus set up for fitness classes, their open minds trammelled by quasi-ideas – wellness, holistic, wholeness.

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Echoes | Short Story

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.

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The Right Kind of Haunting | Short Story

‘Would you mind waiting in the back sitting room? Graham, was it? I’m afraid we’re running rather behind.’

‘That’s no problem,’ I replied.

And it wasn’t, not really. I had nothing apart from that house viewing to occupy my time on that cold, bleak Saturday afternoon. Slightly more irritating was the houseowner Madeleine’s demeanour. Upon answering the door, she had seemed surprised, irritated even, as though not expecting me. She struck me as an ethereal presence as she led me inside, gauzy material fluttering underneath her arms, her dress bustling against door frames and chair legs.

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November Cold | Short Story

My father disappears on the train between Neilston and Kilmarnock. He does this without leaving my side, without his elbows ever lifting from the plastic tabletop where they prop up his phone. Dad vanishes in a carriage busy with beery, jostling men talking to him about Killie’s injury crisis and whether I am his wee lassie.

In the pub Dad stands pint in hand, watching the horseracing. I’m given a packet of Quavers and the barmaid asks what time my mum is getting back from her Girls Night Out. Then, the weary walk through the terraced houses as the gloom gathers and the November cold creeps. Dad holds my hand loosely as the pavements become crowded.

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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.

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Crib Stuck | Short Story

One can always tell by the calves. There they are, facing away from the arete. They are hiker’s calves – seemingly hewn from volcanic rock and looking set to erupt out of the socks encasing them. No mere holiday walker, he. An athlete he might be, but calves don’t lie and this pair, high up on the arete, are spasming in the summer heat.

He’s crib stuck, the lad. Not unusual, particularly on this lonely arm of Snowdon. The boy – young man really – has got it bad. White-cuticled fingers clawing at the top of the knife-edged ridge, chest pressed as low to the mountain as possible, eyes wild and with pupils dilated like discuses. He’s looking for security, for the wide open wind to stop battering at his kagool. All nine-hundred metres of near-vertical drop yawns behind him, whilst ahead and over the crest of the ridge lies only more space, more air. This is about as bad a case as I’ve seen, and not made any better for the lad being alone on the mountain.

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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.

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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.

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