madd
fictional

THE MIDNIGHT EDITION

Category: Micro-Fiction Corner

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: The Tea On The New Apocalypse Is Hot

    Micro-Fiction Corner: The Tea On The New Apocalypse Is Hot

    The gossip began the way gossip always does, over fences, at checkout counters, beside mailboxes where people lingered after collecting bills. The subject happened to be the end of the world, though everyone discussed it with the delighted concentration usually reserved for a neighbor’s scandalous divorce. Apparently this apocalypse had peculiar tastes. It disliked loud restaurants, appreciated handwritten thank-you notes, and had already formed opinions about several people in town.

    The details multiplied.

    Someone heard it would arrive on foot. Someone else insisted it had rented a room above the pharmacy. A woman at the bakery claimed it preferred lemon in tea and had been asking careful questions about property lines. Each rumor contradicted the previous one in minor ways while preserving the same strange intimacy, as though everyone were describing a person encountered separately at different stages of acquaintance.

    I dismissed it until the gossip began including details about me.

    A cashier repeated an argument I’d had with my sister the previous week, laughing as she explained that the apocalypse apparently found my exact choice of words unnecessarily dramatic. Someone else knew I kept emergency cash inside an old cookbook. A man I’d never met asked whether I still woke at 3:17 every morning and listened for footsteps upstairs.

    I stopped asking where people had heard these things. The answer was always several conversations removed, a chain of friends, cousins, customers, and strangers that dissolved whenever I tried following it backward.

    Then the town began adjusting itself around the rumors.

    The café added the tea everyone said it preferred. The library placed a chair near the western window because someone heard it liked afternoon light. People stopped parking along one particular street after word spread that it disliked having its path obstructed. None of these changes was officially organized. Everyone simply seemed eager to be accommodating.

    Last Thursday, a welcome basket appeared on the steps of an empty house across from mine.

    Nobody admits leaving it there.

    The house has remained vacant for years, yet curtains appeared in the windows yesterday. This morning smoke rose from the chimney, and several neighbors waved toward it while passing, though none could say whom they were greeting.

    The latest gossip says the apocalypse finds the town charming.

    There is considerable relief about this. People seem to have forgotten that being liked by something does not necessarily mean being spared by it. In fact, judging from the way everyone now lowers their voice whenever they pass that house, I suspect the town has already decided hospitality is safer than asking what sort of ending prefers to arrive somewhere it intends to feel at home.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: A Miracle In Negative

    Micro-Fiction Corner: A Miracle In Negative

    The photographs in the old parish album had all failed in the same peculiar way. Every person appeared pale against darkened surroundings, faces reduced to luminous hollows while clothing, walls, and furniture absorbed the light around them. The parish priest called them miracle photographs when they were first taken, though nobody alive could explain what miracle they were meant to document. Later generations assumed the effect came from faulty processing and kept the album because the images were too strange to discard.

    A restoration specialist discovered the problem was more complicated.

    The original negatives were correctly exposed. People looked ordinary on the film: proper shadows, proper highlights, every face intact. She produced a new print under controlled conditions and watched the image reverse itself while developing. The chemistry was fresh. The enlarger had been tested. Yet as the photograph emerged, light withdrew from the subjects and gathered everywhere else, leaving each figure with the same spectral vacancy found in the old album.

    She began interviewing the few parishioners old enough to remember sitting for the photographer. Their recollections matched in one unsettling detail. At the instant the shutter clicked, each experienced a moment of complete emotional absence. Fear, affection, grief, hunger, even the awareness of having a body seemed to vanish for the fraction of a second required to make the exposure. Most had forgotten the sensation until asked.

    Several admitted that something never entirely returned.

    One woman had spent sixty years unable to miss anyone who left a room. Another remembered loving her children intensely while remaining incapable of worrying about them. A third described herself as permanently diminished by an amount too small to measure and too consistent to ignore.

    The specialist searched parish records and learned that the photographer had been commissioned during a winter of epidemics, crop failures, and infant deaths. Soon after the portraits were taken, the parish experienced an improbable run of recoveries.

    She has stopped printing the collection.

    There are still seventeen undeveloped rolls in the archive, each carefully dated and labeled with households that survived that winter unusually well. X-rays of the film canisters reveal no deterioration despite their age.

    What concerns her most is a final note in the photographer’s ledger. He recorded the number of exposures made each day alongside a second figure titled simply RECEIVED. The numbers never match. According to the last entry, several more things were received than photographs were ever taken.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: Beautiful But Broken

    Micro-Fiction Corner: Beautiful But Broken

    The mirror came from an estate sale, its frame carved with roses detailed enough to include individual thorns. A diagonal crack divided the glass from upper corner to lower edge, which explained why nobody else bid on it. I liked the damage. It made the object feel less decorative and more like something that had survived being used.

    For a year, nothing unusual happened.

    Then the crack began closing.

    At first I assumed the difference was lighting. Months later, photographs confirmed that the dark line had narrowed. The change happened slowly enough to escape daily notice, yet steadily enough that by spring only a hairline remained.

    One morning the glass was whole.

    That was when the reflection started behaving differently.

    The delays were small. I would lower my hand and see it remain raised for a fraction of a second. My reflection occasionally seemed to inhale before I did. Once, while passing through the hallway, I saw myself standing still in the mirror even though I had never stopped walking.

    The dealer remembered the mirror’s history reluctantly. It came from a house where a woman had died directly in front of it. According to the estate inventory, the crack appeared the same morning. Family members claimed it had been intact the night before.

    I asked whether anyone knew what caused her death.

    He said the records described no injury and no illness. She had simply been found sitting before the mirror with an expression of profound exhaustion.

    After that I began photographing the glass every morning.

    The crack has returned.

    It started as a faint line along the old path and has widened each week. I should find that reassuring. Instead, the reflection appears healthier as the glass deteriorates. Its skin has color mine lacks. Its posture is straighter. It smiles more easily.

    Yesterday I noticed the carved roses changing too. Several blossoms now face inward toward the glass. Their thorns appear longer.

    I have stopped touching the frame.

    The mirror seems to be dividing something again, and I am beginning to suspect the crack was never damage at all. It may have been the only visible sign that two versions of the same life had finally been forced apart. What I do not yet know is which side of the glass was considered the safe one.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: Every Detail But None

    Micro-Fiction Corner: Every Detail But None

    The police sketch artist spent thirty years producing composites so precise that witnesses sometimes recoiled when she turned the drawing around. She credited patience. Faces, she explained, emerged through accumulation: distance between the eyes, shape of the jaw, angle of the brow, one uncertain detail corrected by another.

    A young detective found the pattern while digitizing old case files.

    Several sketches from unrelated investigations showed the same person.

    The crimes stretched across decades and shared no obvious connection. Witnesses had lived in different cities, belonged to different age groups, and described suspects of varying heights and builds. Yet beneath changes in hairstyle and apparent age, the face remained unmistakable. A narrow mouth. Deep-set eyes. A faint scar above the left eyebrow.

    The detective brought the files to the retired artist expecting her to recognize a mistake. Instead she studied the drawings for nearly an hour.

    She remembered every interview. She remembered witnesses struggling over noses, chins, hairlines, cheekbones. She remembered drawing each detail individually. What she could not remember was ever choosing the face those details became.

    They arranged the sketches chronologically.

    The figure aged.

    Early drawings suggested someone in their twenties. Later ones showed middle age, then deepening lines around the mouth and eyes. The progression roughly matched the artist’s own career.

    The detective expanded the search. More sketches surfaced in neighboring jurisdictions. Some had been drawn by other artists. A few came from descriptions given before she entered the profession. The same face appeared there too, younger again.

    Then they found photographs.

    A blurred face in the background of a crime-scene image. A reflection in a shop window. Someone standing among spectators behind police tape. Never central. Never clear enough for identification.

    The retired artist has stopped discussing the investigation. She keeps one final composite locked in a drawer, assembled from every surviving description.

    According to the detective, the face in that drawing is elderly now.

    What bothers him most is the newest case. A witness described someone standing across the street during a burglary, watching the house with unusual concentration. The sketch artist assigned to the case produced the familiar face without ever seeing the older files.

    This time, however, the scar above the left eyebrow is gone.

    In its place is a thin pencil mark, exactly where someone might begin correcting a drawing.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: Rampire Princess Igloo

    Micro-Fiction Corner: Rampire Princess Igloo

    The children invented the game during a winter so cold the gutters froze solid. They built a snow fort at the dead end of the block, packed the walls nearly shoulder-high, and carved a throne into the center. Whoever occupied the throne longest became the Rampire Princess, a title assembled from words nobody could later trace. The game survived childhoods, moves, divorces, demolished houses, and every adult attempt to explain why no one used the name correctly.

    When I returned to the neighborhood decades later, the fort was still there.

    It had been rebuilt many times, yet the oldest section remained beneath an overgrown hedge. Even in July, when the pavement softened in the heat, a fist-sized core of ice persisted in the soil. Children still gathered around it every winter, adding fresh walls and choosing a new princess. None could explain the rules beyond the essentials: the princess sat, the others tried to remove her, and she was never supposed to leave the throne before dark.

    My mother remembered more.

    Years before I was born, a girl had refused to surrender the seat during a blizzard. By the time adults realized the children were still outside, visibility had collapsed. They found the fort intact and the other children huddled near the entrance. The girl was gone. No footprints led away.

    Afterward, parents demolished the fort. Children rebuilt it the following winter without discussing why. Every generation did the same.

    This year I watched from my mother’s window as the youngest child in the group climbed onto the snow throne. The others became unusually quiet. She sat very straight, hands folded in her lap, while frost thickened along the inside walls.

    I went outside before dusk and told them the game was over.

    None argued. That unsettled me more than resistance would have.

    The child on the throne opened her eyes and asked whether I had come to relieve her. I said yes before understanding the question. The other children immediately began dismantling the fort around us, laughing again as though released from some obligation.

    Since then, the patch beneath the hedge has finally started melting. My own hands, however, stay cold no matter how warm the room becomes, and every night I dream of sitting somewhere made of snow while generations of children wait patiently for me to decide who sits there next.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: The Scarlet Maw

    Micro-Fiction Corner: The Scarlet Maw

    The tavern had operated under that name for so long that nobody remembered whether it referred to the red door, the stained-glass windows, or some forgotten owner with theatrical taste. The current proprietor inherited the building along with its ledgers, liquor license, and several generations of unpaid repairs, and for years regarded the name as one more piece of branding nobody had bothered changing.

    During the handover, the previous owner mentioned a cellar door at the rear of the building and advised her never to open it after last call. He offered no explanation, and she assumed the warning concerned pipes, wiring, or some structural defect he hoped to avoid paying for.

    She ignored him once.

    It happened during a quiet winter night after the final customer had gone. Behind the door lay no storage room. A passage descended beyond the foundation, narrow and red, its walls ribbed with pale bands that tightened and released at long intervals. Warm air moved through it in a slow inward pull. When she leaned closer, the passage contracted slightly around the light from her phone.

    She closed the door and began noticing details she had previously dismissed. Glasses left overnight sometimes stood empty by morning even when nobody had cleared them. Regulars who spent decades drinking at the same tables seemed to age unevenly, remaining unchanged for years before suddenly appearing much older. The building itself shifted through the seasons, floorboards rising and settling with a rhythm that never matched humidity.

    She eventually tracked down the previous owner at a retirement home. He laughed when she asked about the cellar. The tavern, he explained, had always done better when crowded. It liked conversation, music, arguments, confessions, flirtations, and all the other things people released after enough drink. Owners who kept the place lively tended to prosper.

    She asked what happened to everything the building took in.

    He told her that was the wrong question to ask while still standing inside it.

    Since then she has kept longer hours. The tavern does excellent business. Customers often remark that the place feels unusually warm and intimate, especially late at night. Lately, though, the cellar door has started opening by itself just before closing, and the red passage beyond seems slightly shorter each time, as though whatever has been swallowing the noise for all these years has begun moving closer to the room where the noise is made.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: Spinner Tori’s Inner Story

    The carousel at the edge of the fairground had run on the same tinny calliope recording for more than forty years. Paint peeled from the horses, mirrors had clouded around their edges, and the brass poles wore dark where generations of children had gripped them. One horse stood apart from the others only because a small plaque at its base read TORI.

    Nobody knew who had named her.

    Children chose her whenever possible. Something in the tilt of her carved head made the expression seem different from every angle. Seen from the entrance, she appeared cheerful. From the operator’s booth, the same painted face looked frightened. Parents often remarked on how lifelike she seemed before laughing at themselves.

    The longtime operator told me that Tori had always moved slightly out of time with the carousel. Each rotation she lagged perhaps half a second behind the other horses. The mechanism should have made that impossible, yet maintenance crews never found a fault. Riders sometimes stepped off disoriented, insisting the ride had lasted much longer than the three minutes shown on the clock.

    Eventually the operator showed me a hidden panel beneath the saddle.

    Inside the hollow body lay a folded scrap of paper. Most of the writing had faded beyond recognition, though one line appeared to contain a woman’s name different from Tori and a date nearly twenty years before the fairground opened. The ink changed subtly whenever anyone tried to copy it. Letters shifted places. Numbers reversed. Once, the operator photographed the note and discovered that the image showed a completely different date.

    She stopped opening the panel after that.

    The carousel began slowing near the end of her final season. Motors tested normally. Bearings were replaced. The other horses kept perfect time while Tori drifted farther behind each night.

    Children riding her started telling similar stories. They described seeing another fairground during the turns, older and dimmer, where adults rode the carousel instead of children. Some said a woman stood beside the operator’s booth counting rotations. One child claimed the woman kept asking whether anyone remembered her real name.

    After closing, the calliope now continues faintly for several minutes after the power is cut. Only one set of hoof mechanisms moves during those extra rotations.

    The operator retired last week and left instructions for her replacement. Keep the panel closed. Never repaint the horse’s face. If Tori completes one full turn after the rest of the carousel has stopped, do not restart the ride until morning.

    She did not explain the final rule.

    Yesterday, the new operator called to tell her Tori had stopped lagging.

    For the first time in decades, the horse is moving slightly ahead of the others. The operator said it feels less like the mechanism has been repaired and more like whatever has been circling inside finally knows where it wants to arrive.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: The Wisdom of Rice

    Micro-Fiction Corner: The Wisdom of Rice

    My grandmother threw rice at every wedding she attended well into her nineties. Long after guests switched to bubbles, bells, flower petals, and biodegradable confetti, she arrived with a small cloth pouch and ignored anyone who warned her about birds. Rice remembers things bubbles cannot, she would say, as though the explanation were obvious.

    After she died, my mother found shelves of glass jars in the pantry. Each contained a handful of dried rice labeled with a wedding date and the names of the couple. Some went back more than seventy years. Folded inside every jar was a small square of paper bearing one of several marks: a circle, a slash, a pair of parallel lines, occasionally something resembling a knot.

    We assumed it was sentimental record keeping until my mother began comparing the jars with family history.

    The slashes belonged almost exclusively to marriages that ended early. Circles marked long unions. Parallel lines appeared beside couples who stayed married but lived largely separate lives. The knotted symbol was rare. Every marriage bearing it had survived circumstances that should have destroyed it: disappearances, affairs, prison sentences, decades of resentment, even one case where the couple divorced and remarried each other three times.

    My grandmother apparently knew which symbol to draw by watching the rice fall.

    My mother began testing the method at weddings. A wide scatter that bounced freely across the pavement usually meant the couple would grow apart without catastrophe. Rice that landed close around their feet suggested endurance. Grains that struck one person and avoided the other entirely corresponded disturbingly well with later illness or abandonment.

    Then came my wedding.

    My mother used rice from my grandmother’s old supply, throwing it as we left the ceremony. Her face changed almost immediately. She gathered several grains from the pavement before anyone could step on them and sealed them in a napkin.

    She has refused to tell me what pattern they made.

    Months later I found her new collection of jars. Mine sat on the top shelf with no symbol on the paper inside. Instead, the rice itself had arranged into a narrow ring against the glass, leaving the center completely empty.

    I asked her what it meant. She admitted she did not know because my grandmother had never recorded anything like it.

    Since then, my spouse and I have both started dreaming of the same room: a long table covered with white cloth, two empty chairs at the far end, and rice falling continuously from somewhere above. My mother has begun checking our jar every morning because the ring keeps tightening by a few grains at a time, though nobody has opened the lid.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: Hell, If This Ain’t Heaven

    Micro-Fiction Corner: Hell, If This Ain’t Heaven

    The retirement home sat beside a wide bend in the river, beautiful enough that families repeated the same phrase whenever they first toured the grounds. Hell, if this ain’t heaven, they would say, relieved by the gardens, the sunlight on the water, and the absence of everything they had feared a nursing facility might look like. Staff heard the remark so often that it eventually became background noise.

    Residents began saying it too.

    A newly hired nurse noticed the pattern because she worked nights and paid attention to strange repetitions. People nearing death often used the phrase within a day or two of passing. They said it while gazing toward the river, usually in late afternoon when sunlight reflected off the bend and filled the rooms with a pale gold haze. Some smiled. Others sounded surprised. One resident who had been mostly unresponsive for a week sat upright, spoke the sentence clearly, then asked whether someone had remembered to open the gate.

    There was no gate.

    The nurse began keeping records in a notebook hidden behind her locker. Room number, time of day, weather, exact wording, date of death. She discovered that the phenomenon followed the light rather than the residents. During summer, when the sunset angle shifted, the affected rooms changed accordingly. People housed away from the river rarely said anything unusual until they were moved temporarily into a room with the proper view.

    Then she heard herself say it.

    She was alone in the supply closet on an ordinary Tuesday, folding towels with no window nearby. The words came out softly in a voice she recognized only after hearing it. It belonged to a resident who had died the previous winter.

    After that, she started avoiding the riverside corridor during late afternoons. The avoidance lasted three days. On the fourth she found herself standing before the largest window on the floor with no memory of walking there.

    The river below looked unusually still. Reflected sunlight formed a bright path across the surface, ending exactly beneath the building. For several seconds she thought she could see figures standing along that path, shoulder to shoulder, facing upward.

    The facility has since installed blinds in every riverside room. Residents complain about them constantly and somehow manage to raise them shortly before sunset, even those who cannot leave their beds unaided.

    The nurse has stopped trying to prevent it. Her notebook now includes another column labeled VISITATION, because several residents who spoke the phrase did not die afterward. They simply became calmer, as though reassured by something they had seen.

    She finds that possibility more unsettling. Death would at least explain why the river seems to be calling. Whatever appears in the light may instead be convincing some of them that they already know the way back.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: Shook By A Graveyard Look

    Micro-Fiction Corner: Shook By A Graveyard Look

    The cemetery caretaker had a phrase for the expression certain visitors acquired after standing too long over a grave. He called it the graveyard look and claimed he could recognize it from half a field away. Ordinary mourners shifted their weight, wiped their eyes, checked the time, eventually remembered the living world waiting beyond the gates. Someone with the graveyard look became perfectly still, the face emptied of everything except attention.

    He taught me to spot it during my first week on the job. The dead, he said, grew accustomed to familiar company. Visit often enough and they learned your shape. Stand still long enough and they occasionally mistook you for something that belonged there permanently. His remedy was simple: approach noisily. Scuff gravel. Cough. Say something ordinary about rain or traffic. Give whoever was being watched a reason to remember they still occupied a body.

    I treated this as workplace folklore until the widow in section nine froze beside her husband’s stone one October afternoon. She had visited every Sunday for three years, always leaving chrysanthemums and talking quietly for twenty minutes before going home. That day she remained motionless for nearly an hour.

    Even from the maintenance shed, something about her posture felt wrong.

    I crossed the path dragging my boots through the gravel and called out that frost was expected overnight. She jerked hard enough to drop her handbag and drew several sharp breaths, as though surfacing from deep water. When I asked whether she was all right, she said she had been listening to her husband explain how lonely the cemetery became after closing.

    She stopped visiting regularly after that.

    Since then I have noticed other things. People wearing the graveyard look sometimes face the wrong headstone. Fresh flowers appear beside markers belonging to families who moved away decades ago. More than once I have heard my own name spoken from behind me while working alone.

    The caretaker retired last winter. On his final day he gave me his keys and advised me never to count how many people remained on the grounds after sunset. I understood the warning only recently.

    Some mornings, before leaving for work, I catch the graveyard look on my own face in the hallway mirror. The stillness arrives before I realize I have stopped moving, and my eyes seem focused on something several feet behind my reflection. I scuff my boots against the floorboards until the feeling breaks. Lately, though, the sound has been answered by another scrape from somewhere inside the mirror, slightly delayed and growing more confident each time.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys