After hours of rummaging, he found the key taped to the back of his mother’s favourite watercolour. He rushed to the safe – no cash, no jewellery, just a handwritten note: “Disorderly postmen I’d paint, or something you learn to live with (14).” He’d always enjoyed anagrams, but this produced disappointment.
Andy Hedgecock’s disappointing inheritance is a name that doesn’t lend itself to the creation of anagrams. He is a freelance writer and obsessive cruciverbalist from Nottinghamshire, UK.
Beneath a brochure blue sky, listless waves scrape the slipway as sunlight dapples the hull of a bobbing sloop. From a hotel balcony across the bay, your binoculars focus on the headsail, pan down to the foredeck, and fixate on the corpse. Contract fulfilled.
You transfer the payment, as arranged.
“Biographical notes are fine,” said Andy Hedgecock, “unless they use contrived exposition to reveal the subject is, for example, a freelance writer from Nottinghamshire, UK.” commapress.co.uk/authors/andy-hedgecock.
At daybreak, skyscrapers are silhouetted against the horizon’s halo of orange and paradise pink. Light pierces shreds of grey stratus cloud, falling on shattered glass, twisted steel and pavements perforated by roots. Shadows retreat, exposing crumbling brickwork and cars colonized by rust, lichen and moss. Yet another dawn goes unwitnessed.
Andy Hedgecock is a freelance writer, researcher and editor from Nottinghamshire, UK. In 2014, after 30 years of writing nonfiction, he was enticed into storytelling by inspirational publisher Ra Page (Comma Press). When not being lured into unsettling new activities, Andy wanders post-industrial landscapes with Drake, his Staffordshire Bull Terrier.
Refugees from closing time without change for the meter. Emergency candle lit with a zippo. Wine. Chatter. Laughter.
The flame dies. Silence. Quivering kisses.
Four decades later, my hand trembles in a church’s vaulted gloom as a zippo’s flame kisses the wick of a tealight. And I remember another candle.
Andy Hedgecock lives and works in rural Nottinghamshire, UK, close to an Iron Age earthwork, the remains of a Roman fort, a decommissioned coalmine, and a disused railway line. It’s a place of scars, erasures, and stories.
Paper crinkles as she walks over a mosaic of manila and white envelopes in her hallway – bills, warnings and notices.
Outside, on the way to the bar, she is ambushed by moonlight and reflects that banks, bosses and former lovers will all be obliterated before Neil Armstrong’s bootprints. She smiles.
Andy Hedgecock lives and works in rural Nottinghamshire, UK, close to an Iron Age earthwork, the remains of a Roman fort, a decommissioned coalmine and a disused railway line. It’s a place of scars, erasures and stories.