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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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.

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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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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.