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.

Picking Your Mark | Short Story

Picking your mark is important. This is no smash and grab. This is no crime of opportunity. This is tradecraft.

You look for sloppiness, for laziness. Expensive bikes left in back gardens. Hopper windows ajar. Packages left hanging from letterboxes. Easy pickings.

You look for signs of opulence, of wealth. How expensive are a person’s drapes? What car is parked in their driveway? Does security lighting protect their wealth?

Lastly, you look for patterns. When do they leave in the morning? Are their hours regular? Are there neighbours twitching at drapes?

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Scale and Perspective | Short Story

The house on the mountain. It was as good a name as any.

There was a path, such as it was, cutback atop cutback, gouged into the loose soil and the scree on the side of the rockface. The sun spooled out over the mountain face within which the house was crammed for only a few hours every day, fewer in winter. When the pale warmth hit the face, the ice thawed and rocks fell like teeth from blasted gums, hurtling down to threaten anyone foolish enough to be climbing. In the summer, meltwater eddied and gushed from on high, thrumming down and beating upon the weathered rock. What stone and stream did not deter, terrain made fools of. Air and wind yawned around the bare faces; only trembling wildflowers and feather-bustled birds were brave enough to cling on.

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Shadow and Light | Short Story

A highly detailed, high-resolution image of a front door with coloured glass in its windows. The door is from 1940s Britain and is in deep shadow at night. There is an air of mystery about the door.

Keep the home fires burning; that was what the troops had sung in the Great War. And she does, never going out without a carnival glass lamp switched on to welcome her home, its warped, lead-lined shapes throwing up a kaleidoscope of shapes against the wallpaper.

Locking the front door behind her, she starts the Morris and lets it tick over, still glancing through her front window at the bright, coloured glass. The blackout is still in force, of course, but no German bomber is going to release its cargo based upon seeing a carnival glass lamp from twenty-thousand feet. She pulls away from her front door, the gravel crunching beneath the Morris’s thin tyres.

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2025 in a Flash | Short Story

Front cover of the magazine '2025 in a Flash'. Lightning bolts across a background of blue

My flash fiction piece ‘Listen‘ has been published in an anthology called ‘2025 in a Flash’ by Scars Publications, available here.

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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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Ribbons in the Valley | Short Story

The smell of coal smoke hangs low in the valley, skeined in ribbons of mauve and grey. As the nights draw in, it is the smell which welcomes the men home, filthy and goggle-eyed.

Straight to the outdoor tap, where mountain-cold water brings new aches to already weary bones. Hands move slowly, deliberately, the joints already worn from a day’s work. They will not be allowed in to eat until they are immaculate.

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Passing Traffic | Short Story

The lay-by is one of many on the A82, hidden from the trunk road by a line of winsome, non-native pines and looking out on the sometimes grey, sometimes Mediterranean Loch Lomond.

It is not a place in its own right, not really. No-one says to their spouse, I’m away for an afternoon at that lay-by north of Luss. You remember, the one with the overflowing dogshite bin and the vicious, hypodermic stinging nettles. Still, it is a waypoint for lives, a parallax for the moments of peoples’ existences.

In the spring there are the young lovers, cloistered by the everyone-knows-everyone villages and emancipated by those pines. Steam rises up windows and tinny, unsatisfying bass sounds from within the Vauxhall Corsas and the Seat Ibizas. Young love is born in the lay-by, only to be set aside days or weeks later.

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A Shadow World | Short Story

A shadow world, drawn long. It grows after the sun has crested, seeping out from the church spire and the echoing viaduct. Slow at first, it crawls across the cobbles, pushing against the midday glare.

It advances, just as it retreated. The gloom reaches long-fingered down alleys and into closes – pre-dusks slinking eagerly behind the gable-end and the high, dusty hornbeam. Up drainpipes and across windowsills the shadow slips, glazing no bar to its progress.

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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.

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