Rendered Soft | Short Story

A dank green. Blink. The far side of the loch, bulbous and warped. Blink. A yachtsman sliding across, issuing silent commands to his crew. Blink.

The woman removes the glass from her eye. The bottom of a bottle, maybe. Perhaps the bubbled lens from a pub window, popped from between corroded lead beading. What matters is that the glass is old. The relentless grind and smash of waves has dulled the shine and made the surface rough and scarred.

There is less romance in the newer glass. Jagged edges and see-through, it is redolent of bar fights and shattered lights. There is less mystique about the modern glass. The light shines through it too readily, blinding the beachcomber.

The woman moves on, across the kelp-strewn beach and onto the bigger rubble, where flies dart around the drying seaweed and bulbous jellyfish lay dying in the morning sun. She must return to the house before long, to where the windows shine bright and to where the edges have not yet been dulled. Her pace does not quicken.

The pee-whit, pee-whit of oystercatchers’ alarm fills the air. The woman is walking past their nest and they are protecting their young. Defending their home. She walks along this stretch of beach each morning, and each morning the oystercatchers scream with alarm as she passes. Lovely, to be able to protect one’s family in such a manner.

There, in the damp sand. Pale blue glass, soft and mottled, with only the barest trace of some thick-set writing on its base. One for the top of the garden wall. The woman pockets the glass and twists her wedding ring; some sand has worked its way between gold and skin. ‘Till death do us part was right, and she has fulfilled her side of the bargain. It’s not wrong, she tells herself. It’s not wrong to wish for the most recent renderings – of bedpans and pain and of blue-veined hands gripping tight – to become scored and dull and rough. It’s not wrong to know that when she reaches into her pocket, later in the empty house, her fingers will find those mottled curves.

*Thanks for reading, folks. My recent short stories include ‘Travelling‘ 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.

Eyes Wide | Short Story

Pebbled flames running along those age-darkened timbers. The stabs of orange issuing from the shattered windows. A peeling of something – Wallpaper? Paint? – amidst billowing sheets of fire.

And the smoke. Thick, broiling, greasy smoke, pouring out from behind doors and seeping from underneath roof tiles.

Watching a house burn is no easy task; the heat hisses and snipes as the brothers watch. They swivel their eyes in sockets drawn wide to keep them from drying out. They don’t stop looking, though.

The flames roar guttural over those dark floorboards, sucking over the cracks where secrets had sunk quietly. Curtains drip with flame where once they were drawn fast, leaving windows staring wide and mute.

The brothers watch, eyes glazed against the heat, not looking away.

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Travelling | Short Story

In Hong Kong there exists such a thing as a ‘coffin apartment’. Relative poverty and a live-to-work ethos have resulted in people existing in 18ft-squared apartments with plywood walls and shared bathroom facilities. One imagines flickering strip lighting, warped walls, and the sound of muffled sobs during the long nights.

Frank’s bedsit is nowhere near this bad, but neither is it much better. The square footage is bigger but there is, Frank imagines, the same sense of claustrophobia, the same feeling of a life built on foundations too flimsy.

Frank puts down his briefcase and his samples and empties his carrier bag onto the formica sideboard. A sweaty ready meal, a dog-eared Metro, and a £4.99 bottle of white wine.

He feels around for his mobile phone and places it on the worktop. No messages, no voicemails, no missed calls. The screen stares blankly back at him, as does the microwave clock and the light on the television. All on standby.

Frank is dog-tired, his suit wrinkled from hours spent in his car, his clutch foot aching. Frank knows that he should call, that the kids’ bedtimes are fast approaching and that Christine won’t answer the phone to him after eight o clock. He knows he should call.

Something stops him, though. It is the same thing that makes him pause every night. Frank looks forward to the calls, he really does, but he can’t help but feel that within those conversations – in Jack’s recounting of spelling test glory and in Penny’s eaten-all-up dinner – there is a fading, a distancing. Frank can’t help but feel that each call reinforces his not being there, that each conversation is imperceptibly more forced, more stilted.

It has grown gloomy in the kitchenette as evening draws in, but Frank’s tired eyes are tugged by crows’ feet and his mouth curves suddenly as the phone buzzes to life and the walls of the apartment melt away.

*Thanks for reading, folks. Image courtesy of pxhere. My recent short stories include ‘The Young Man from Number Twenty-Seven‘ and ‘Sense of Community‘.

Sense of Community | Short Story

These flats were quite the thing when they were first built – waiting lists as long as your arm, polite enquiries with people whose cousins’ brothers worked at the council and might be able to put a word in. These flats were the place to be back ten – kids running up and down the hallways and in and out of each other’s houses. Everyone looking out for one another.

Of course, nothing stays the same for ever. People move on and people move out; at least, people moved out around Irene. The folks next door had a family, and once Tommy started working on the rigs, Sheila wanted something to show for looking after the kids herself. Out they went to Clarkston or Eaglesham or some other swanky place on the south side. Raymie and Mags left for the Costa del sol when his retirement money came through. There was talk of letters and twice-yearly visits, but apart from a postcard twice a year nothing came of it. Plenty had dies, of course. Irene had lost count of the funerals she had attended at the church down the road; she was on nodding terms with the minister despite not being a great believer herself, and knew what sandwiches to avoid at the funeral dos afterwards.

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The Young Man from Number Twenty-Seven | Short Story

Half a mile in and the bed-borne grogginess is starting to wear off. The frost is laid thin on the ground, not much more than a translucent smear on the pavement, and certainly not enough to slow his stride.

Trainers hitting tarmac provide the only real noise of the pre-dawn – muffled thumps on top of that unearthly, silent roar of a day not broken, of a world not yet roused from sleep. The man’s fingertips are numb, but already the pleasant ache of muscles working warms him from the inside.

Black and white photograph of a man jogging on a road

The real warmth, however, comes from the few dull, window-warped ensuite lights shining out into the darkness. It comes from the odd car ticking over in a driveway, pluming exhaust fumes into the morning as the frost creeps back from the windscreen, from the flickering blue light playing onto drawn living room blinds as some night owl slumbers in front of MTV-left-blaring.

It comes from the knowledge that he, and he alone, runs the streets at this hour.

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Plausible Deniability | Short Story

Bobbing, just down there to the left.

It’s the time of the day that I resent. I need to finish walking the dog in fifteen, leave the house in twenty-five, be at the train station for six-thirty, into the office and at my computer for eight.

That’s enough, Charon.

There will be questions, that’s the problem. People following procedure, people showing initiative-

Enough, I said.

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Night Out | Short Story

Eight bells, and stepping out of taxis, the sharpeners, the cashpoint visits, nervous chittering and you look fabs, and backslaps, bouncing on the balls of their feet as they wait for some straggler.

Nine, and the rush of warm air from the pub, the I’ll get us a tables, and this one’s on mes, and at the table it’s coats on the backs of chairs and seat swapping and the tacky surfaces, the beer mats flipped and everyone finding their places in conversations.

By ten the latecomers have arrived with embarrassed excuses and never mind you’re here nows, the finding of extra chairs and sorry is anybody sitting here, the tray of shuddering shot glasses that someone’s ordered on the sly, the this is how it started last time, the bonhomie a little less forced.

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Little Daily Miracles | Short Story

Parting a sea is rather ostentatious.

I’ve no need to drown a pursuing Egyptian army, nor feed thousands of people with two loaves and a couple of battered haddock. Isolating dark matter can wait, and my polytechnic didn’t equip me to get into the quantum computing field.

I’m simply hoping to get down to the shop on Colliery Street.

Fifty-eight steps, four kerbs, four door openings, a bastard of a level crossing, and – worst of all – the chip and pin machine at the counter: the tasks rear up in front of me – cold, shadowy, and forbidding.

The problem, of course, is cartilage. No-one is going to waste a miracle on replacement cartilage, are they? Mine’s gone, anyway, worn and rubbed raw until my bones come together with all the lithe grace of a wean using chopsticks for the first time.

There.

Down off the kerb and onto the crossing. Gritting my teeth muffles all but the smallest whimper. Aye, sound your horn all you want, mate. I can’t go any faster, and my nervous system is reacting to far more persuasive stimuli than your tantrum behind the steering wheel.

Up…the opposite kerb, and eas-sy does it. Every touch of the walking stick against the pavement sends a jolt of pain through my gnarled pork joint of a hand and up through my shoulder. For a horrible, horrible moment it feels as though I will overbalance and fall backwards onto the road, my bones splintering and crunching on the tarmac. I catch myself, though, my centre of gravity righting itself like a mast on a choppy sea.

The shop is right in front of me and – thank whoever’s up there for small miracles – a man is leaving and holding the door open for me. I shuffle through, cringing away from him in case I accidentally brush against his jacket. Thank you. Thank you.

The jingle of the door announces my achievement amongst the aisles of canned goods and questionable frozen produce. I catch my breath in the queue, inching closer to requests for twenty Marlboro Light or an ounce of Drum. Soon enough, a downwards-looking cashier asks what she can get me. Lucky dip, hen. I hardly even flinch when the chip and pin machine with its stiff, grime-encrusted buttons is pushed towards me. Little daily miracles do happen, and there’s no harm in hoping for the bigger ones.

*Thanks for reading, folks. image courtesy of Geograph. My recent short stories include ‘The Lamplighter‘ and ‘Those Abroad‘.

Those Abroad | Short Story

Chalky water lying low amidst the reeds, the bullrushes easing to and fro in the wind. Crickets chirp in the gloom before being silenced by some animal shuffle, some errant footstep.

Voices carry over the water, but those abroad at this hour have a desire for secrecy in common. No-one wants their confidences told, nor to tell others’.

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The Lamplighter | Short Story

The greasy cobbles make life difficult, and the man spends several seconds ensuring the feet of the ladders have adequate purchase before stepping up. It is not unknown for back-alley scamps to try to knock the ladders out from underneath him but this evening the streets are quiet, the rain from earlier already starting to freeze on the slates.

The well-oiled lamp casing swings open easily, and the hiss of gas seems loud in the silence. The man reaches his pole towards the jet and covers his nose with a handkerchief. It is quite the bouquet – coal gas, tannery piss, and the Thames. A greenish light flares across the cobbles and the blank, grimy windows. It is as though the street is recoiling from the sudden intrusion.

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