Fiction from Tim Goldstone

Photo: Jez Timms

The Breakthrough

After so long enthusiastically exploring my psychological wreckage in your Californian way, “talking it all out” you loved to say—more sledgehammer than scalpel—you eventually found my black box weeks after you ceased your official excavation; and you’d actually been happier for calling off the search, calm, contented, before accidentally stumbling upon exactly what for so long you’d been desperate to dig up—one lovely English afternoon in long-shadowed late summer on the thick brown blanket, still musty despite the fresh air, previously nailed up in winter across the draughty bedroom window but now warming in the garden sun. The blanket lay over weeds and thistles, its wool covered in new and stale biscuit crumbs and used cardboard roaches. We were lying close to the red dahlias, their petals heavy with dust from the building site over the road as you were absentmindedly digging, again, although more of a listless idle scratching now, just habit, when by pure chance you discovered something in me so solid it rang out and you jumped as though scalded, and I kept talking, at last revealing all my feelings, all my secrets, and my deepest confessions, as I shed that famed British reserve you’d teased me about so mercilessly and in the background the chug of a cement mixer settled into a drowsy rhythm drowning out the sound high above us of a plane pulling a thin white scar across blue sky as I waited for you to say: “That’s Cool. That’s good. Now we’re getting somewhere. This could be a breakthrough.” But this time you didn’t. This time you left the next morning.
.

.
Tim Goldstone has roamed widely and currently writes in remote rural Wales. Published in numerous print and online journals and anthologies, including The Offing, Cafe Irreal, Flash Fiction Magazine, 11 Mag Berlin, Anti-Heroin Chic, Crannóg, The Mechanics’ Institute Review Anthology, The California Poppy Times, and is forthcoming in The Stanchion, The International Short-short Story Magazine and other venues. His prose sequence was read on stage at The Hay Festival. and his poetry presented on Digging for Wales. Scriptwriting credits for TV, radio, theatre. Twitter @muddygold