Frederick Anderson's Stories

Bear with me for a while; it has been so long and I forget so many things.   I forget, for example, exactly when I realised Micah was different to other boys I knew.  When the doubts began, or the first glimmer of enlightenment – I really cannot judge.  

Let me see – was it the spider?  Yes, I’ll tell you about the spider.

Micah and I, we had been friends as long as I could remember,…

                                      Samuel Trimble visited the City with metronomic regularity.  On Mondays and Thursdays, his plump over-coated figure alighted from the ten-fifteen train, pausing on the station platform to lid his thin hair with a Homberg.  Then he walked – down the hill from the station, through the City’s narrow cobbled streets, beneath timbered houses which frowned…

A little narrative:

Recently, a young woman from Eastern Europe who lives in UK, rushed her heavily pregnant sister to hospital, 

Adhering to the letter of their Covid 19 regulations the hospital staff insisted the pregnant sister be separated from her sibling, who was seated on a chair in the ward corridor – a chair she occupied for the next four hours.  An examination of her…

To see them on a winter’s morn…

The Keffer Lantyn Fells are works of the godhead to be sure, with their high peaks wreathed in shawls of cloud; and though cloaked white in winter they may be, they nurture certainty of coming Spring,  when the crystal waters tumble from the whin stone shelves, their rich red silt bringing sweetness to the Lantyn valley, the like of which is never seen in other…

Again, from the dusty archives! This is just a bit of fun, really!  Oh, and quite long again, so bring sandwiches.

“There were tales told of a girl, in the days before imagining, when wild people lived deep in the wild wood, and wild deer danced in sunlit glades.  It is said those blessed by the sight of this girl described an apparition so beautiful the raindrops about her turned to diamonds…

Tonight he finds her in his living room, seated in her favorite chair, gazing out at the view of the city beyond their window.  “Mary?”

“Who else?”  She turns to greet him.

“It is you, Mary!  It really is you!    Why here, of all places?”

“Oh, Richard, come on, you’ve been here before – often.  You are always dreaming of us together, in this room, but tonight I thought I would join you. …

From those archives again!

  Don’t think us rude if we stare, stranger.  We get so few who visit here, you see.  Same weathered faces, same laboured jokes, but the beer’s good.  Arthur, he knows how to keep a good cellar, don’t you, Arthur?  Stay for a drink.  We’ll entertain you.  

Hartwood Farm?  Take the Brompton road a brace of miles, where it runs by Bretton Oaks, up Malton Hill, and…

They would remember how they made it to the river that night, the travellers, and how it felt, emerging from the forest, to see the silver ribbon of the waters glittering in the last of the day and the first of the moon.  Tam was much the worse by then.

“In the mornin’ we’ll cross,”  Abel decided.  “Not tonight, not now.”

Three days since, the travellers, two men and a boy, had left the…

This week’s short story contribution from the archives:

She did not remember when it began.

At first it was not a fear – not as such; but just a nagging sensation that something she had accepted without question for so long, was no longer quite right.  Ella considered this as she loaded the washing machine – was it a sound that first alerted her?  If so, when?  Days ago?  weeks?  Months,…

Corvid Wisdom: Natural Balance

“You got a probwem, ven?”   WIth what appears to be half a slice of meat pie hanging from his beak, the crow looks his least prepossessing.  He also mumbles.

“Don’t talk with your beak full,”  I rebuke him.  “It’s not a problem, exactly.  More a question of timing.”

Dropping his gravy-laden  prize onto his lamp post perch, Crow deftly stops its fall with one claw.  He stares in at me…

In a Monastery Garden

Another from the archives:

“Will you be comfortable there, Father? The bench is hard; can I bring you a pillow to support your back?” The novitiate is over-solicitous, as those fresh to the calling tend to be, and he tests Father Ignatius’s patience at times. “A pillow, indeed? Now that would be an indulgence rife with sin, would it not? ” The old Abbot replies.“I wonder, Brother, would you ask…

BLM and the Mob

Normally, when I watch the tide of events in America I lament quietly, keeping my feelings to myself.   On the few occasions when I do comment I am politely (or rather less than politely) told I don’t know what I’m talking about, and to ‘butt out’.

I feel entitled to comment this time because what is happening to the west of the ditch is stirring the same pot in the UK, and although mine is a…

From the archives, once more:

“M’Lord, when you look so disdainfully upon this great oak you see only the ravages of age.  I?  I see magnificence – a monument to the centuries.  With your indulgence M’Lord I shall create from it a thing of such beauty it shall be venerated by all who see it!” Anton Beneskja said grandly. “It shall be my greatest work!”

Lord Percival Fuchs-Pelham regarded…

The crow is there when I draw back my blind this morning.   Perched atop the lamp-post outside my window, preening himself with all the same self-importance and conceit I remember.

“Hello, mate,”  He cocks his head to catch me squarely in the eye,  “Surprise, yeah?”

“Surprise?  I thought you were dead!”

“Yeah?  Dead?  Oh, that’s nice, innit?  Nah mate, I been down the coast for a coupl’a…

A re-post from 2015…

“If it’s not a mine…”  Laura says;  “what is it?”

Toby shakes his head.   “Dunno.  It sort of looks like a mine, though.  Dad was saying about the war and that.  Maybe we should report it, or something?”

“Oh, yes, it looks like a mine!”  Laura mocks.  “Like you’d know what a mine looks like!  I think it’s just a box.”

“Yes I do soknow what a mine looks like!  I’ve…

More archived material – this one from 2016 and re-worked a little..

I recollect her gloves.  They first drew my attention to her.  That afternoon at the City Library, she placed them side by side on her desk, arranged with such neat precision they might have been elements of a ritual, pointing towards me across the centre divider between our respective spaces, in perfect alignment with the…