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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The Silver-Lined Ridge | Short Story

I’ve been lucky enough to get another story published by the fine folks at Literally Stories.

‘The Silver-Lined Ridge’ is a tale of one man’s journey up Everest, but Ralph Nilsen is no ordinary mountaineer…

Read it here.

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Deposition | Short Story

There is something about English woodland. Real English woodland, I mean. Not that close-bound, imported Scandi stuff.

I don’t want to be that person who marvels at lonely clouds or tries to catch falling snowflakes, but there is always something happening in every square inch of the forest, from the macro down to the micro. There is the beauty of the overlapping leaves – the razored alders, the elegant crab-apples, the waxen oaks. Then there are the sounds – branches shifting above him, furred bows rubbing against bark strings and a subtle, tenor groan from some ageing monolith deeper in the copse.

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The Worst Part | Short Story

In the beginning I dropped messages onto the street.

I tipped anything I could find out of the hopper window – bottle caps with biro skating across the shiny plastic, bank statement envelopes upon which my writing was cramped around the cellophane window, used paper napkins flapping drunkenly through the cold air. My messages skittered, swooped, fluttered down onto the slush-banked pavements where they lay amongst the other festive detritus.

I could only open the window briefly – he wakes if there is a chill in the air. The danger of the illicit window isn’t the worst part though. The worst part is quietly pulling the window handle up and feeling it click. The worst part is knowing that the Christmas lights playing against the glass are all the pedestrians down below can see. The worst part is looking at them all, scarves at their mouths and collars pulled high around their ears, looking down not at my paltry epistolary offerings, but at the phones, urgent and needy.

Thanks for reading, folks. Recent short stories include ‘Drip, Drip, Drip‘ and ‘Listen‘.

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.

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‘.

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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