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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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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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.

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Sunset Hours | Short Story

The mountainside gloams around the man. He sees it in the dulling of the red-brown autumn heather. It is in the greying, the blueing of the chill air. It is in the sound of the ben quietening.

The man already knows what the evening, what the night will look like; he has seen it once before. Umber and steel and fathomless blue and breeze and movement and yawning space. The man also knows that he will not see nights beyond the one approaching.

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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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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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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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