Tag: Fiction

Tagged | Short Story

A baby's foot.

This is it. This is when everything changes. When emotion swamps reason, displacing priorities and rendering my previous identity pale and indistinct.

I want to feel like that. I really do, but as I look upon the child writhing on the cold scales there is nothing. It is mine; I know that. It is mine. I slept with my wife – here we are nine months later. And yet what does that ownership really mean? Every waif, every stray, every child, everywhere, has a father somewhere.

A tapeworm of doubt has been growing in my stomach, feeding upon baby name lists, nursery themes, and breast-is-best dogma. I have hollowed out and shrunk whilst my wife has swollen and bloomed.   

A plastic tag is placed around an ankle. ‘FERGUSON’, it is labelled, like a calf at market with its velvet ears punched through. The waif is already owned, restricted, subject to rules. Its bonds are physical. That is where we differ. There are no tags on me; no ties of responsibility fastened around my legs.

I wouldn’t of course, but if I chose to I could walk away from this room and never look back. It’s not like we live in the third world, after all. If I were to leave right this second, that child would still get caravanning holidays, video games, and a council house. You might argue that I’ve already provided for it, anyway. I’ve been a taxpayer all my life; never taken a penny that I haven’t earned. I’ve provided education, healthcare, and even dentistry. I’ve also fed and clothed its mother through nine months of morning sickness and baby-brain. What I’ve done isn’t nothing; maybe it’s time for someone else to take a turn in the traces. That baby is a person in its own right, by law even, and it can damn well start to pull its own weight, all seven pounds two ounces of it. Not asking much is it?

A needling cry reaches my eardrums but doesn’t penetrate any deeper. The answering call comes from across the room – my ruined, tattered, torn wife, bleating for her offspring. She’s better off where she is, though. They both are. Just let the medical staff do their jobs.

Speaking of which, a midwife is prattling in my ear. She’s suggesting that I offer the baby a bottle. I decline. They will know how best to do it. That’s what they are there for isn’t it?

Never mind, because my once beautiful wife has been bolted back together and wants to breastfeed her baby. Mother and child are duly reunited and the midwives engulf them, giving advice on latching and bonding and first contact and throwing out maternity buzzwords like confetti at a wedding. I start to gather our things together in the corner; we’ll probably be moved to the ward soon.

As it happens the baby needs no encouragement to feed. Why would it? The something-for-nothing relationship starting already. It lies there like a tick on a horse, sucking youth and beauty from my wife, hands exploring like a deviant’s. I’ve been down that route and it only leads to trouble.

Photos! The word is uttered by someone and the cry is taken up around the room. Suddenly I am remembered. I have a task to complete; the first of many. The camera is in my trouser pocket, but I lie. I tell them that in all the excitement, amidst all the love – so much love – I have left it in the car.

In a moment which feels prophetic, I am shooed out of the room to retrieve the camera by midwives, a ditzy father smitten with his child. My wife tells me to hurry and the child screeches again, inconvenienced by the interruption. I am an aside, a beast of burden.

I feign speed as I push through the delivery room door. It closes behind me with a satisfying suck – an airlock sealing. Suddenly I am free, away from the noise, the mess. Away from two decades of need.

It is still early, and the corridors of the maternity unit are quiet. Outside, the car park is bathed in early morning sunshine. I could be on the motorway in ten, at the airport in twenty, gone by tomorrow. Plenty of dads do it; I’d just be another statistic lost in the crowd. I hand the camera in to the receptionist. It seems like the right thing to do.

*’Tagged’ was first published by Soft Cartel in 2018.*

Enjoyed this? Sign up to my blog below. Recent short stories include ‘Freezer Discipline‘ and ‘Philosophising‘ Links to my published work can be found here.

Matthew J. Richardson’s fiction has appeared in publications including Golddust Magazine, Flashback Fiction, Close to the Bone, Shooter, and Idle Ink. His work often explores psychological tension, place, and the quiet edges of human behaviour. He lives in Scotland and holds a Professional Doctorate in Education.

Freezer Discipline | Short Story

Frost-covered freezer drawer filled with frozen vegetables, peas, ice cream, and packaged food

A job worth doing is a job worth doing properly. But what if it’s no longer worth doing at all? What if this is an appliance better on the kerb and waiting for the council to uplift?

This was an easy task six months ago, but with every freezer tray left slightly ajar, the frost has crept in, in the cold, in the dark, some fluffy experiment escaped from the lab/from the space between those spilled peas and that last, lonely fish finger that no-one’s ever going to eat.

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Detox | Writing News

Lenses in the lightroom of South Stack Lighthouse.

As I work away on the second draft of my novel (working title ‘Detox’), I recently had the opportunity to visit South Stack Lighthouse in North Wales.

‘Detox’ is set on a rock lighthouse, and getting a sense of the space and isolation of such a building was helpful as I look to weave the building and landscape into my plot.

South Stack sits somewhere between a shore station and a rock station; the lighthouse is accessible from the North Wales shore, but only via a set of steep switchbacks cut into the rock and a bridge over to the main island. As such, I was able to get a sense of the isolation of being an early twentieth century keeper without the hassle of going out on a boat. Weather can still get pretty wild on South Stack – our guide told us that there have been storms so severe that seawater reached the top of the tower – I wouldn’t want to traverse either the bridge or the switchbacks in such weather!

Looking northwest to South Stack Lighthouse in Wales. A white lighthouse sits upon a rugged island in the sea.

The visit gave me both plot contextualisation and ‘grace notes’ to add to my writing. The birdlife was astonishing in volume. Guillemots and razorbills were packed tightly together on the precipitous cliffs facing onto the lighthouse, whilst the lightroom itself was far more cramped than I was expecting; there was really only room for two people to nudge past each other whilst walking around the lenses. I will have to adjust the plot to suit this tighter-than-anticipated space.

Looking up at the spiral staircase of the lighthouse leading to the lightroom.

My main takeaway from the visit to South Stack was the importance of using place in my writing. This was a building steeped in drama and history, built onto bare rock and designed to weather the fiercest storms. I will have to endeavour to ensure that the prose is worthy of the place!

Enjoyed this? Sign up to my blog below. Recent short stories include ‘His the Night‘ and ‘Philosophising‘.

Matthew J. Richardson’s fiction has appeared in publications including Golddust Magazine, Flashback Fiction, Close to the Bone, Shooter, and Idle Ink. His work often explores psychological tension, place, and the quiet edges of human behaviour. He lives in Scotland and holds a Professional Doctorate in Education.

Philosophising | Short Story

Shelves holding numerous gold bars, wooden boxes labeled INGOTS, and assorted tools in a workshop

Even the boy’s parents conceded that the optics were poor.

Pages of notes in the haphazard handwriting of an eleven year-old, grime-encrusted beakers, oranged rubber piping curling across desks, and all of those phials filled with viscous, bubbling liquid…

Whether it had been a neighbour or a delivery driver who had alerted the authorities they never knew, and by the time the story took off on social media, no-one really cared. All anyone could talk about was the forensic tent erected on the front porch and the boy being taken away for interview. Then, of course, came the speculators – the Twittering, Redditing vultures happy to get creative, to opine that the boy had always been odd, that he had spent too much time on shady internet forums, or that – in an apparent non sequitur put forwards by his primary school classroom assistant – the boy had shown an unhealthy interest in science.

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Feedback | Short Story

Wastebasket containing crumpled manuscript pages with handwritten edits

Dear Ronald,

I have had the opportunity to read your submission – an opportunity I wish I had not availed myself of.

As you will no doubt be aware, flash fiction is a flexible format which authors have used in a near-limitless number of ways to tell stories. I suppose your piece meets this criteria, although it was flash fiction to me in the sense that it left the imprint of your hackneyed spelling and of a grammatical smorgasbord of dunderheadedness imprinted on the insides of my eyelids.

As for structure? I can only assume that something happened to your submission between your posting it and the document arriving in my hands. Some intra-dimensional event perhaps? Maybe it was torn apart by rabid, foam-flecked Alsatians before being hurriedly pasted back together by a well-meaning postal worker with an acute visual impairment.

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The End of the Day | Short Story

Becca is lonely. They say it like it is a bad thing, those teachers, that guidance counsellor, the parents whispering behind their hands at birthday parties. They said it as though the condition has a horrifying miasma surrounding it, some sort of accompanying social smell. Rancid, like milk gone bad.

There are worse things to be than lonely, though.

These people though, they don’t take into account the worlds that are visible only to Becca. Universes that only she can see. Walking along a school corridor, she can be anywhere inside her head. The tinny slamming of the lockers is muted, the boyish jostling becomes immaterial, the spitballs seem to arc around her, pulled out of her gravity by the mass of her imagination.

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Shift | Flash Fiction

Cold air shifts, tugged between a closed door and another, closing. Shoes shuffle against the swept floor, footsteps purposeful but never rushed. Speech is superfluous here in the mountains, amidst the thin air and underneath the morphing skies.

There are privations of course, the hardships of rock-hewn bedrooms and straw mattresses, but also the sense of paring back, of the shedding of the unnecessary.

So as the poets, the thinkers, the lost, shift past each other in the shadowed-sunstriped cloisters, do not think of them as poor or desperate. Think of them as rich – rich in spirit, in solitude, in silence.

Thanks for reading folks. Recent short stories include ‘Scale and Perspective‘ and ‘Picking your Mark‘.

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 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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