My short story “A Walk to the Pier” – a surreal tale of memory, guilt, and telephones – is now up on my Patreon. An excerpt:

With almost a week gone by, Seymour Groves was regretting his retirement. Everyone had said that moving to Etcham-on-Sea would be just the thing to do, a kind of neverending holiday. What they hadn’t mentioned is whether a neverending holiday was really desirable. After frequenting the music halls, the buffets, the toffee shops, and the boardwalk, Groves had decided in the negative. Part of it was boredom. The amusements of his youth looked more tired than ever. He couldn’t, in all dignity, ride the bumper cars again, nor frequent the clubs and bars that had so enticed him in the summers of his early adulthood. Everything was sagging, rust-lined, smelling of piss. The beach huts stood in a silent line, all quite beyond repair. His own small flat was hardly more than a bedsit with a couple faded posters that shouted “Etcham! Poseidon’s Paradise in the North!” Perhaps it had been so, once. But as he was alone, he would have to find something to do. Groves had never married – had, in fact, lost the one woman whom he ever loved, Mona Deane, on the rocky shore of Etcham. He had not come back since that night so many decades ago.

“A Walk to the Pier,” by Rick Yoder (your humble blogger)

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