Dark Faith: Invocational Devotional – Richard Wright

RICHARD WRIGHT has been writing strange, dark fictions for over a decade. Currently living with his wife and daughter in New Delhi, India, he is the author of the novels Cuckoo and Thy Fearful Symmetry, and the novella Hiram Grange and the Nymphs of Krakow. His stories have been widely published in the United Kingdom and USA, most recently in anthologies such as World’s Collider and Wildthyme in Purple. Craven Place, his new novel of hauntings and murder, will be published in the summer of 2013. More information on all this (as well as sundry blogging on running, life in India, and more) can be found at his website and by Twitter updates – www.richardwright.org or @richard_wright.

Richard is the author of “The Sandfather.”

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Who are you?

I’m an English author of strange dark fictions, living in India with my wife and daughter. I’ve been fortunate enough to have many short stories published in various places over the last decade and a half, and even luckier that this is my second entry in the Dark Faith series. 2012 was a busy year for writing about faith. As well as “The Sandfather,” I also published my novel Thy Fearful Symmetry, a big apocalyptic novel which is really a very small, personal story about faith in all its myriad definitions.

Tell us about your story.

“The Sandfather” is, in all the ways that count, a true story. I do have a son, somewhere. I’m also an alcoholic, though a recovering one thankfully. The story was written about those things, in a single day, in a lined notebook, using a Mont Blanc pen. It exists because Jerry Gordon liked my story “Sandboys” (which he bought for Dark Faith) enough to ask me for something for the second volume, and because “The Sandfather” is too good a title not to do something with.

How does your story tie into the concept of faith?

As with “Sandboys” before it, this isn’t a story about faith in a religious context. It’s about faith in simpler, plainer things. It’s about the hope we all have that tomorrow will be better.

Every year, Maurice Broaddus throws a convention in honor of himself (Mo*Con). How do you feel about this fact?

That’s fine. All the best people do it. I hold one too. I just don’t invite anybody else.

Excerpt from “The Sandfather”:

The bastard boy played in the sand pit, and the hole inside him deepened. Sometimes the hole made his heart run faster and his breath draw short. Today he was pretending to ignore it.

A wind blew through the play park, scraping litter across the ground. There was a strange scent on the breeze, a saltiness that didn’t belong. He stopped his excavation, sitting up like an urban meerkat to scan his surroundings.

The big boys played by the swings, bossing around a chain gang of younger kids. It was the big boys who had brought the word bastard into his life, though for a long time he had not known what it meant. Later, a girl in his class had told him, sneering at his ignorance. The word was right though. Why the big boys used it as a means of torment was a mystery, but he had learned to pretend that it upset him. When he forgot, they found other ways to hurt him.

The biggest boy had a knife, and would wave it in front of the bastard boy’s face. The knife was a small thing, but it had many mysterious blades tucked into its handle. The biggest boy said that each was for a different torture that he knew how to do. The bastard boy was terribly afraid of the tortures, because he had nobody to protect him from them. There was his mummy, but she worked late all the time, and there wasn’t enough of her left over for him. He didn’t want to spoil his time with her by talking about sad things.

Buy a copy of Dark Faith: Invocations from one of our retailers.

Look for Jennifer Pelland’s devotional about her story “Sacrifice” Friday.

If you’ve missed any of our past devotionals, here’s your chance to catch up.

Katerina Stoykova-Klemer