My flash fiction piece ‘Listen‘ has been published in an anthology called ‘2025 in a Flash’ by Scars Publications, available here.
Continue reading “2025 in a Flash | Short Story”2025 in a Flash | Short Story
Tag: Fiction
The Kinmount Straight | Short Story
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
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.
Continue reading “The Clacks | Short Story”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.
Continue reading “A Prompting at Greysteer House | Short Story”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.
Continue reading “Deposition | Short Story”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
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.
Continue reading “Drip, Drip, Drip | Short Story”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.
Continue reading “Bellahouston | Short Story”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.
Continue reading “Echoes | Short Story”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.
Continue reading “November Cold | Short Story”
Matthew Richardson 