Neil Randall is
delighted to announce that his new short story The Wisdom of Empty Roads
has been published by The Leafline Literary Magazine.
Written last year, it’s story of a young
man’s struggle to process his grief following the death of his mother, and his monomaniacal
obsession with a new road that is built through his hometown.
Here are the opening
scenes from the story:
Berk Beckingham was a
peculiar infant, curious little boy, oddball teenager, and even stranger young
man. Every time a motorist passed through our town, they’d ask one of the local
folks what that scruffy transient-type in the fluorescent yellow waterproofs
was doing sitting at the side of the road with a clipboard in his hand,
scribbling out notes.
“Oh, that’s just Berk Beckingham. Ever
since his mother died, he’s taken a keen interest in the general upkeep of the
main road here.”
And that he most certainly had.
Way before first light, whether in the
height of summer or depths of winter, rain, shine, blizzard, typhoon, or
anything in between, Berk would take a fold-up canvas chair down to what we
still call the ‘new road’, attach a fresh sheet of paper to his clipboard, and
sit and observe and make note of everything and anything that happened to pass
him by.
“Why, though?”
That question was a little more difficult
to answer.
Some of the townsfolk closer acquainted
with the Beckingham family, to whom Berk was the only child, reckoned it was on
account of something he overheard Dr Titman say to his father not an hour
before his mother breathed her last.
“Why can’t you do nothing to save her,
Tobias?” sobbed Seymour Beckingham. “You’ve got a bag full of those fancy
medicines, pills, potions, and what have you. And a head full of knowledge,
years of schooling. Why can’t you make her better?”
“It’s not as simple as that, Seymour. If
a physician wanted to cure every patient of whatever ailed them, they’d have to
know everything about ’em, from birth onward. Family history, hereditary
illnesses, mental afflictions, their diets and lifestyles, whether they took to
drinking or smoking in later life, their professions, living and working
environments, what kind of air they be breathing. Don’t you see? It’s an
impossible task, ’specially where serious diseases are concerned. They found
tumours in the dinosaurs, don’t you know?”
At a local meeting a week after the
funeral, to debate the advantages of having a new main road constructed through
the centre of town, Berk witnessed his father, a quiet, mild-mannered man who
usually kept his opinions private, express himself in an impassioned way nobody
had ever seen him express himself before.
“But roads can be more trouble than
they’re worth,” said retired counsellor Gayton Blackmore. “First off, the
proposed route would tear up acres of the finest woodland in the county, an
area of outstanding natural beauty. Think of all the wildlife. Then you’ll have
the endless upheaval and disturbances, gangs of workers coming and going, heavy
machinery.
“And there’s no guarantee that a new road
would bring prosperity. Look at that shiny big motorway they constructed out in
Runt County. All they got was a gas station and a flooding problem that don’t
look like it’s ever going to go away. Talk of new houses and stores and
recreation areas and public swimming baths was pie in the sky. It simply never
happened.”
“Horse crap!” Seymour Beckingham, much
changed since his wife’s tragic passing, shot to his feet. “If we don’t get
that new road none of us will have the chance to better our lot in life. We
need to be connected to the bigger towns and cities. We need passing trade to
breathe life into this dusty old pile of nothing. If we grab this opportunity,
I can see the town being a thriving metropolis in ten, fifteen years’ time. You
hear ’bout it all over the country. New housing developments, twenty-five
thousand units. Factories, jobs, schools. Business attracts business. Money
likewise.”
It was a tight run thing in the end, the
motion passing by eighty-two votes to seventy-seven, with three abstentions.
If you like what you’ve
read so far, you can read the full story on the Leafline website.
And if you’d like to
know more about Neil Randall’s published works, why not head over to his amazonpage.
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