Tag: Scotland

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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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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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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Storm and Song | Haiku

What appears to have been the Scottish ‘summer’ is now apparently at an end. The first of what I imagine will be plenty of Autumn haiku are below…

Rain running down a window

Storm

Violent spatter

Against a square of slate sky.

Bulbous autumn storms.

Fire embers glowing

Song

An empty grate, yet

That smell of red embers, of

Songs sung, lilted verse.

*Thanks for reading, folks. Images courtesy of David Wagner and Peakpx. My recent short stories include ‘Rendered Soft‘ and ‘Across the Glassine‘.

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.