Property for Sale – Grym-on-Wye | Short Story

Corroded metal bolt on an old wooden door

Arryn Road, Grym-on-Wye

£30,000

Flat

1 bedroom

1 bathroom

40 sq. m

Tenure: Freehold

Greys Estate Agents is pleased to present a rarely-available investment opportunity. The property requires substantial renovation and updating. Buyers are advised to take this real estate opportunity at face value. Local newspaper articles often exaggerate, and a professionally-produced home report is available on request.

Property description

The accommodation comprises entrance vestibule, combined kitchen and lounge, bathroom, and bedroom.

Entrance vestibule

Extensive security measures on the front door bely what is now a very safe neighbourhood. Visitors are advised to ignore the smell. The key to the property will be underneath the door mat in the common close. Prospective buyers are asked to show themselves around the flat.

Combined kitchen and lounge

Albeit without modern amenities, the kitchen is surprisingly well appointed. Extensive cupboard space is complimented by an antique double range – unusual for a property this size. The range is in excellent condition, despite having seen much use. There is some damage to the room in the form of carvings in the skirting boards and what appears to be a symbol in faded paint upon the floor. A decorator is needed as a matter of urgency. The room comes appointed with excellent quality blackout blinds and, unusually, sound-proof insulation.

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Frost and Fight | Short Story

Dirty mattress and discarded clothing on an urban street

There’s no tradition here, no mistletoe or icing the cake. Frost does however come right through my mattress, through three fleeces and two jackets.

Warmth comes in cups – lentil today. The volunteers have bloodshot eyes and worn chatter. They’re smiling, and fighting.

Fighting against more than just a cold wind.

*Thanks for reading, folks. Image courtesy of Flickr. My recent short stories include ‘In the Ribboned Fog‘ and ‘The Dead Don’t Moan’.

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 and tweets at https://twitter.com/mjrichardso0

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The Dead Don’t Moan | Short Story

The dead don’t moan.

Dirt-packed and clod-mouthed, they stare silent at earthen skies.

Rain gutters down the slate tiles and the stained-glass windows. It bubbles down into the drain gratings, down through the salt-leached soil. down amongst the dead, where it sits brackish black and silent in the cheapening pine boxes.

Yew roots curl around the sleeping dead, whose wayward ivory pates are held soft in wooden elbow crooks and bark fingers. The shifts and shivers of the topmost branches do not trouble the subterranean silence.

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Cook’s Matches, Lentils, and Sofa Stuffing | Short Story

Siren’s wail and loudspeaker’s bark are dampened as Adam closes the door against the night. One, two, three padlocks go on. Two deadbolts scrape across the pitted iron of the doorframe. The smell of the flat welcomes him home – mildew and rusty water.

Adam lights a candle using the box of Cook’s matches. A man at the food line had told him that, pound-for-pound, matches were now worth more than gold. The expectation had been that Adam would have been impressed, or even disbelieving, but who had use for gold anymore?

The candle is placed atop the cardboard box that serves as a table, and Adam uses its guttering light to place plywood over kitchenette and bedroom windows. It doesn’t stop the wind whistling through the blown insulation, but it might persuade the after-darkers to move on to the next house. The next target.

A dinner of cold lentils, soaked all day, is eaten. Adam’s eyes never leave the guttering, tremulous flame. The wax is cheap. It runs down the sides of the candle and pools, translucent, on the cardboard. The candle occasionally pops and fizzes as it burns, like fireworks.

Adam glances covetously at the book he is halfway through, but he knows he cannot spare the wax. Licking the tips of his thumb and forefinger, he pauses, and then pinches the flame out. The lumpen, darken shapes that he knows so well immediately rush into the grey. The sofa, stuffing removed to supplement his duvet. The bank of bottled water that has to last until spring. The squat radio in the corner – his one link with what now passes for civilisation. Adam only switches on at 5pm Sunday for the emergency broadcast.

It was alright, he thought, picking a lentil from between his teeth. The Prime Minister’s budget would get people working again.

*Thanks for reading, folks. Images courtesy of Flickr and Wikipedia. My recent short stories include ‘Snatched‘ and ‘A Kind of Magic‘.

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Snatched | Short Story

Moving across a room is more of a challenge than it used to be. Mark has given up waiting for his sea legs – landlubber ones will have to do. He opens the door to find the first mate about to knock again. The man doesn’t even bother to sneer at Mark’s seasickness anymore.

‘We’re here.’ The man looks warily at Mark as though worried he might shortly be wearing his guest’s breakfast. ‘Although why anyone would want to be is another matter.’

Mark nods and begins to follow the sailor up the narrow corridor, arms braced against the corridor walls like a drunkard. His lifejacket puffs up in front of him ridiculously, and the first mate opens the door at the end of the passage for him.

The wind, whose fingers had already been tendrilling through the broken seals in the door, seizes the opportunity and heaves through the doorframe, salt-spittle-flecked and cold. The first mate does not waste any more words in the squall. He mimes that Mark should remain clipped in whilst on deck, and through a wagging finger the fact that no-one will be coming after him if he does go overboard. Mark nods and clips in.

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A Kind of Magic | Short Story

Morning everyone,

I was lucky enough to have my short story ‘A Kind of Magic’ published by The Wild Word magazine this week.

Read it here.

Picture courtesy of Andrea Music.

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The Road | Short Story

Beginnings everywhere, like tributaries. The barely-there footpaths over the needled forest floor, the slightest heelprint in the wet sand moments before the tide arrives. Beginnings everywhere, and nowhere.

The path begins to become more cultured, more knowable. Towpaths trail obediently canalside. Lines of scree wind up Bens Lomond, Vane, Ime, slowing only to slip underneath footworn styles or to dip beneath the scurried, hurried surfaces of highland burns.

Soon, the little country lanes with thick, sunblock hedgerows, honeysuckle woven over the threads of sunlight that have made their way through. The pitch-dark laybys overhung with blackberries and sloes, indigo fruits on an indigo road under an indigo sky.

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A Spaceman Came Travelling | Short Story

Morning folks,

I’ve been lucky enough to have a short story picked up by Idle Ink. ‘A Spaceman Came Travelling’ is an odd little piece that went through several iterations in my head before eventually making its way onto laptop screen. I’m not sure it fits comfortably in any particular genre, but I’m reasonably pleased with how it turned out.

Read it here.

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Water Memory | Short Story

They say that the Pacific has no memory. Whoever they are, they say this in such a way as to invoke images of old men looking wistfully across sun-beaten bays, and of winsome young girls with sea-grey eyes walking on beaches, their shoes dangling from one hand. What is says to us, to my brethren and I, is that the Pacific is a body of water in its dotage.

Subject to vicious mood swings? Sure.

Hiding her fair share of secrets? What grand old lady isn’t?

Where I’m from, memory is muscle. Without it we are formless, foetid water, stilled in a dip in the ground.

We provincial rivers remember. We remember the low-lying expanse of flood plain waiting to be crept across. We remember the imperceptible shift in the levee during the last spell in spate, the fingertip journey through crowded gabion.

To rely upon brute distance a la Point Nemo is clumsy – girth is no guarantor of fear. I have people looking up at bruised, pregnant skies with fear written large on their faces. Villagers listen to the thrumming on their roofs whilst in their minds already clambering on to those same roofs. My tributaries of threat steal across minds like capillaries over brains.

The river has burst its banks trills some bedraggled reporter, her umbrella tugging at her hand. Surely your forebears taught you that I have no banks, no boundaries. I wend my way through rock and soil as I will, as I have willed since the crushing darkness of mile-thick ice carved out the routes I follow still. Memories are made this way.

*Thanks for reading, folks. Image courtesy of Piqsels. Recent stories of mine include ‘Something Borrowed, Something New‘ and ‘Alder, Beech, Hawthorn, and Hazel‘.

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, 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 and tweets at https://twitter.com/mjrichardso0

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Something Borrowed, Something New | Short Story

Thimbles are old hat. As are hatpins, come to that.

We don’t skirt along wainscots anymore – linoleum and robot vacuum cleaners have made that too dangerous. Nor do we abseil down curtains – blinds are not nearly so conducive to a silent descent. And the pets…People still talk about Eggletina having been eaten by a cat, a story whose horror is not in any way reduced by its being apocryphal, but in modern Borrower life the Human Beans are far more eclectic in their tastes. Ferrets, parrots, tarantulas…my cousin Dimmer swears he had to squeeze through a letter box brush to escape a fucking micro pig. These days it is ventilation grilles, wood burners, and shimmying down USB cables.

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