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Separation
- 16th March 2020
- Category : Uncategorised
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Our short story of the week is a story about a breakup by Matthew John Fletcher.
Matthew John Fletcher is a British writer, currently working on his first novel. His short fiction has been published in STORGY, Horla, The Fiction Pool and The First Line. As an undergraduate he studied English and German Literature, but has tried not to let this deter him from putting pen to paper, or rather, fingers to keyboard.
He started out writing poetry as a teenager. This was in the days before word processors and, thankfully, most of these early efforts – seething with adolescent angst as they were – are now lost. He then had a long break from writing – sidetracked by university and working life – and only started up again when he took a sabbatical. The break must have done him good, since he was seized by inspiration and quickly wrote around twenty stories, which he has spent the last few years polishing.
Separation follows a man who is abandoned by his discontented shadow.
Enjoy!
The afternoon sun hit the terrace at a one hundred and thirty-five-degree angle. The shadow cast on the wall by a figure about halfway through a yoga routine suddenly straightened up and stood motionless, silently observing. The figure continued with its routine, oblivious, until, reaching the floor sequence, it abruptly stopped mid-pose and turned its head to the left to look at the wall. It turned its head to the right to look at the position of the sun, then back to the wall.
‘Hmm.’ The figure expressed puzzlement.
The shadow placed two shadowy arms on a pair of svelte hips and pushed its head forward.
‘“Hmm” is the best you’ve got? After all these years, just “hmm”?’
The man who had just been addressed by his own shadow, the man whose figure had, up until recently, quite properly cast a shadow on the wall behind him when the sun was angled right, was obviously at a loss. Read more…