madd
fictional

THE MIDNIGHT EDITION

Category: Micro-Fiction Corner

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: A Certain Style

    I noticed her the way you notice weather changing, gradually and then all at once. For nearly a year she appeared two rows ahead of me at every wedding I attended, always in the aisle seat and always turned slightly toward the couple exchanging vows. She possessed the particular composure of someone who had attended hundreds of such ceremonies. Her smile arrived at exactly the right moments, and whatever she wore seemed perfectly chosen for the season, the venue, even the flowers.

    For months I assumed we moved in overlapping circles. By the fourth wedding I started counting. By the sixth I began asking questions. None of the couples knew her. Her name appeared on no guest list. Photographers found her in their pictures, sometimes seated prominently enough that forgetting her seemed impossible, yet nobody remembered speaking to her at the reception. One bride studied a photograph for nearly a minute before saying the woman’s dress was exactly what she herself would have worn if she had been attending instead of marrying.

    At the seventh wedding, the woman caught me watching. Her usual ceremonial smile changed into something warmer, almost relieved. She inclined her head slightly, acknowledging that I had finally understood enough to be interesting.

    She attended my wedding the following spring.

    Her dress matched a shade I had privately considered for the flowers and never mentioned to anyone. During the vows she watched me more closely than she watched my intended. Once, our eyes met, and for several seconds I became acutely aware of how I was standing, where my hands rested, how wide I was smiling. I adjusted all three without deciding to.

    Afterward, photographs began troubling me. In every picture my posture resembled hers. Within months I caught myself using her restrained smile during arguments, funerals, even moments alone. My marriage changed too, though I cannot identify a single event that changed it. We simply began behaving like two people remembering how married people ought to behave.

    Then the invitations started arriving.

    Some were addressed to strangers. Others contained no names at all, only dates and locations. I attend anyway. Nobody questions me when I take an aisle seat two rows back. I always seem to own the appropriate clothes, though I no longer remember buying them.

    Recently I have noticed certain guests watching me with growing concentration. When one finally catches my eye, I find myself smiling more warmly than the occasion requires. There is satisfaction in that moment, accompanied by the strange certainty that whatever I inherited was never interested in weddings themselves. It requires only ceremonies where people promise to become something, because promises apparently leave enough room for another shape to enter.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: Bleak of Dawn

    Micro-Fiction Corner: Bleak of Dawn

    The phrase first appeared in the logbook of a fishing vessel that vanished for eleven days and returned with fuel tanks nearly full, nets empty, and its crew physically unharmed. Every sailor used the same expression when interviewed: bleak of dawn. None remembered learning it from the others. Each insisted it was simply what those mornings had been called.

    According to navigation instruments, the boat remained in familiar waters. There was no major storm, no recorded fog, and no mechanical failure sufficient to explain the disappearance. The crew remembered something different. For eleven days, the sun attempted to rise and never completed the task. The horizon brightened to a gray, exhausted half-light and remained there. Watches continued running. Meals were eaten. Night arrived eventually, yet morning never advanced beyond that colorless threshold.

    They also agreed that something was observing them through the light.

    Nobody saw a figure or object. The sensation came from the dawn itself, an awareness directed toward the deck whenever someone stepped outside. One crewman described it as waiting for an answer to a question he could feel but never hear. Another believed the light was measuring how long they could tolerate uncertainty before somebody declared that full daylight would never return.

    On the eleventh morning, one of them finally did.

    Accounts diverge sharply after that. Some remember him shouting. Others remember him whispering. One insists he merely thought the words. Within minutes the sun rose normally, the engines started without assistance, and the harbor appeared on the horizon several hours earlier than navigation should have allowed.

    Most of the crew never went to sea again.

    Years later, their memories have begun changing. Two now insist there were twelve mornings. Another remembers someone aboard whose name appears nowhere on the manifest. The man who supposedly broke the silence denies doing so and says the others have assigned him that role because every ordeal eventually demands a person to blame for ending it.

    The vessel still works the same waters under different ownership. Its current crew maintains a private dawn log, recording cloud cover, brightness, and the exact minute sunlight clears the horizon. Recently, several entries have been marked with the same phrase despite perfectly ordinary weather.

    The captain has ordered everyone to stop using it. He says language encourages patterns, especially at sea. Even so, each morning the crew gathers on deck a little earlier, waiting to see whether daylight will finish arriving before anyone feels compelled to say that it will not.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: Eschaton is Going to be a Fine Day

    Micro-Fiction Corner: Eschaton is Going to be a Fine Day

    The preacher on local access television had announced the end of the world every autumn for thirty years. He was small, cheerful, and relentlessly specific, standing beneath a hand-painted sign while naming a date in October and assuring viewers that whatever arrived would do so under pleasant conditions. People watched for entertainment. Restaurants ran specials. Someone once printed T-shirts reading SEE YOU AFTER ESCHATON when the predicted Tuesday passed uneventfully.

    A graduate student digitizing the broadcasts noticed something nobody else had. The dates changed each year, yet every one corresponded with the mildest clear afternoon recorded locally that autumn. Thirty predictions matched thirty unusually fine days: low humidity, little wind, comfortable temperatures, excellent visibility. The weather archive confirmed the pattern closely enough that the student’s advisor checked the calculations twice before asking where the preacher obtained his forecasts.

    By then he had retired from broadcasting.

    When contacted, he seemed amused by the question. He said people had misunderstood him from the beginning. Eschaton, he explained, concerned unveiling, completion, the removal of whatever prevented one thing from being seen as another. He had never promised explosions, trumpets, graves opening, or cities burning. Those embellishments belonged to viewers.

    Asked how weather entered into it, he replied that an unveiling was important enough to deserve decent conditions.

    This year’s date had already been chosen.

    Since the announcement, meteorologists have become increasingly uncomfortable. Forecast models that usually diverge beyond a week now agree with unusual precision. Next Tuesday will apparently be mild, cloudless, and almost windless across an area hundreds of miles wide. Competing models produce nearly identical temperatures.

    Other things have begun aligning as well. Sunrise and sunset times listed by separate services differ by less than a second. Migrating birds have altered course toward the region. Amateur astronomers report several stars appearing fractionally brighter each night, though observatories dismiss the measurements as calibration errors.

    The former preacher has reserved a folding chair on a hill outside town. He plans to bring sandwiches and has advised anyone joining him to wear comfortable shoes. When asked what exactly will be unveiled, he smiled and said that knowing beforehand would spoil the purpose.

    Tuesday’s forecast remains perfect. What troubles me is Wednesday. Every weather service I check now displays the same blank space where the forecast should be, and none of them appears able to explain why.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: Wouldst Me Marry Thee?

    Micro-Fiction Corner: Wouldst Me Marry Thee?

    The question appeared carved into the oak at the edge of the churchyard in lettering old enough to send the vicar searching through reference books. Wouldst me marry thee? was the closest translation anyone agreed upon. Nobody knew who had carved it. The bark had healed smoothly around the letters, and an arborist estimated from the growth that the words must have been cut while the tree was still young, despite parish records making no mention of them.

    For a while, the inscription became harmless local folklore. Couples posed beneath it. Ribbons appeared around the trunk. Teenagers dared one another to answer yes after dark. The amusement faded when a groom collapsed during a wedding in the adjoining field on the same afternoon every leaf on the oak turned brown and fell at once.

    His bride later admitted she had answered the carved question when she was sixteen.

    She remarried within a year. That marriage has lasted.

    The vicar began examining older parish records and discovered a pattern he preferred not to discuss publicly. Weddings conducted within sight of the tree often failed quickly, sometimes through infidelity or simple incompatibility, sometimes through accidents that left no marriage to preserve. Couples in which one partner had previously answered the oak aloud remained together with extraordinary consistency. Some were miserable. A few lived separately for decades. None divorced.

    The distinction troubled him enough that he started redirecting wedding photographs to the far side of the church.

    Last spring I stood beneath the oak alone and answered yes. I had no partner and no romantic prospects. It was curiosity, perhaps loneliness, perhaps the kind of foolish impulse that feels safest precisely because nobody is there to witness it.

    Three months later I met the person I am marrying this June.

    Everything about the relationship has unfolded with unnerving ease. Our preferences align where they should and differ where difference remains interesting. Our families get along. Even arguments resolve with suspicious efficiency. Sometimes my future spouse wakes from dreams about the churchyard despite never having visited it.

    Last week, while sorting through old photographs, I found one taken at a parish picnic decades before either of us was born. The oak stands in the background, smaller then, its inscription already visible. Beneath it are two blurred figures whose faces cannot be made out. One is wearing the ring currently on my hand.

    I have stopped wondering whether the tree predicts marriages. I am more interested now in when the proposal actually occurred, and how many generations we have spent making our way toward an answer already given.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: Do As Eternity

    Micro-Fiction Corner: Do As Eternity

    The phrase was stitched into a sampler that had hung in the hallway of every house my family owned for as far back as anyone bothered tracing. The linen had yellowed, the thread had gone brown, and the words formed a careful oval around an empty center. There were no flowers or houses or little moral scenes of domestic virtue, only the sentence circling itself. My mother called it an old blessing about living well enough that eternity would have no complaint with you, which satisfied me until the sampler became mine.

    After her death I hung it in my hallway and noticed that the words possessed no obvious beginning. There was no capital letter, no punctuation, nothing that established where the instruction should start or finish. Following the stitching eventually returned the eye to the same word, and reading from there produced another complete circuit. I stood before it far longer than I intended, tracing the sentence until the shape of it seemed to continue somewhere behind my thoughts.

    Repetition entered my days gradually. I would walk into the kitchen, forget why, return to the living room, and perform the same sequence again with identical movements. Pages of books repeated themselves although the page numbers advanced. Twice I received the same telephone call several days apart, complete with the same cough from the caller and a truck passing outside at precisely the same moment.

    My daughter noticed before I admitted anything was wrong. She asked why I sometimes greeted her twice in the morning and why, on certain evenings, I seemed surprised to find dinner already eaten. I began marking events on a calendar. Soon several dates contained two sets of notes in my handwriting, describing the same day with tiny variations.

    I considered destroying the sampler until I found photographs of older family homes. In every hallway it hangs in the same position. In one picture my grandmother stands beside it as a young woman. Another, supposedly taken thirty years later, shows her in different clothing but with exactly the same expression, one hand raised toward the same stitch.

    The sampler remains on my wall. Taking it down now feels strangely premature, because I am beginning to remember mornings that have yet to occur. Eternity, I think, may be less concerned with endless duration than with perfect recurrence, and my family has spent generations practicing one small domestic version of it until the pattern learned how to continue us.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: Hwalas ðec herigað

    Micro-Fiction Corner: Hwalas ðec herigað

    The chapel had been abandoned for nearly seventy years before the historical society restored it. Salt had softened the carvings, storms had taken most of the roof twice, and the parish records survived only in fragments. Above the altar remained a single inscription translated on the visitor placard as the whales praise you, though the smaller text admitted uncertainty about who, exactly, the original builders believed deserved the praise.

    Old accounts described whales approaching the shore each winter during the chapel’s first century. They came in groups far larger than normal migration patterns could explain and stranded themselves on the rocks beneath the seaward window. The congregation apparently considered the events auspicious. Surviving journals mention bells, hymns, processions, and quantities of oil rendered afterward, though none describe attempts to return the animals to the water.

    The beachings stopped around the same time regular services ended.

    I joined the final tour of the autumn season. Halfway through the guide’s talk, her radio crackled with a message from a sightseeing boat several miles offshore. A pod had broken from its usual route and was moving toward the chapel in a remarkably straight line. Another report followed. Then another. Different species were converging from opposite directions.

    The guide became visibly unsettled. She asked us to leave while staff closed the building, though before I stepped outside I heard something beneath the waves that sounded less like whale song than a sustained note answered from inside the chapel walls.

    The society reopened the building privately two nights later.

    Nobody would say who authorized the service. Residents reported hearing the old bell despite its rope having been removed decades ago. Several dozen whales gathered offshore but did not beach. They remained beyond the breakers throughout the night, aligned toward the chapel while voices inside sang hymns reconstructed from surviving fragments.

    Since then, the guide has been studying the old language and searching parish archives in neighboring towns. She believes the inscription has been translated too simply. The verb, she says, may imply praise, proclamation, or acknowledgment, depending on context.

    What concerns her is a newly recovered page from an eighteenth-century register. It lists every winter when the whales failed to come and records, beside each absence, some disaster suffered by the village before spring. The chapel may never have been built to summon them. Its congregation appears to have gathered each year to determine whether the sea had answered.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: Swa breþel seo, swa þystel

    Micro-Fiction Corner: Swa breþel seo, swa þystel

    The phrase appeared in my great-aunt’s notebook between a recipe for seed cake and instructions for removing rust from garden tools. Beside it she had written a rough translation about worthless things growing wherever they were allowed to root. A thistle filled the margin, traced repeatedly in black ink until the paper had worn almost transparent along the stem.

    The spring after she died, thistles emerged along the old property line. They came up weeks before anything else and followed the boundary with surveyor’s precision, turning at corners long since obscured by hedges and crossing beneath a gravel drive without breaking formation. When I checked the original deed, I discovered the line matched a strip of land she had sold forty years earlier after a dispute with the neighboring family.

    The plants behaved unlike ordinary weeds. Cutting them produced two stalks by morning. Herbicide darkened the leaves for several hours before they returned greener than before. Digging out the roots revealed pale runners descending deeper than I could follow, all angled toward the neighboring property.

    Her notebook contained additional entries once I knew what to search for. She had recorded arguments, encroachments, missing fence posts, and livestock allowed to wander across the boundary. Over the years the tone changed from anger to maintenance. She noted when the thistles first appeared, where they weakened, and which sections required reseeding. The final pages treated the border with the practical attention other people give gutters or furnaces.

    I stopped pulling the plants after finding the last entry. She had written that boundaries neglected too long eventually forget what they are protecting and remember only that they must hold.

    Since then I have walked the line every evening. The thistles remain thick and orderly, though their flowers now turn toward me as I pass. Last week several stalks appeared ten feet inside my property, forming a second boundary that encloses the house itself.

    I checked the notebook again. Beneath the old thistle drawing, faint enough to miss before, she had sketched two concentric lines around a small square marked HOME. I still do not know whether the outer growth was meant to keep something from crossing onto our land or whether the inner one is preparing for the possibility that it already has.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: Soð bið swicolost

    Micro-Fiction Corner: Soð bið swicolost

    My grandmother used the phrase whenever someone became too pleased about exposing a lie. Soð bið swicolost, she would say, then translate it loosely as truth is the most treacherous thing. To us it sounded like another of her inherited cautions, alongside advice about weather, strangers, and never trusting a door that opened too easily. Only during her final week did the words acquire a different weight.

    After the funeral, three relatives gave me accounts of her death. Each spoke with the calm certainty of someone describing events personally witnessed. One remembered her lucid until the end, sitting upright and asking after everyone by name. Another described a difficult final night in which she recognized nobody and repeatedly tried to leave the bed. A third recalled a long private conversation that, according to the others, occurred several hours after she had stopped speaking.

    No one appeared confused. Dates matched. Nurses remembered all three relatives being present. Hospital records supported details from each version while quietly contradicting the others.

    I began testing smaller truths afterward. I asked two people about dinners we had attended together, then compared their recollections with mine. Rooms changed shape. Conversations migrated between evenings. People remembered wearing clothes still hanging unused in their closets. Photographs occasionally supported whichever version I examined first, then seemed subtly different when I returned to them later.

    The effect eventually reached my own days. I told a coworker I had spent Sunday at home, and while describing it I remembered the entire afternoon clearly. Later I told my sister I had gone hiking and possessed an equally complete memory of mud on my shoes, cold wind, and a sandwich eaten beside a stream. My phone contained photographs from both days, timestamped within minutes of one another.

    I have stopped trying to determine which account is original. That question assumes truth begins somewhere stable and becomes distorted afterward. My grandmother seems to have understood something less comforting: perhaps truth accommodates the person receiving it, growing a shape each mind can carry without ceasing to be true.

    Her final expression returns to me differently depending on when I remember it. Sometimes she looked frightened. Sometimes amused. Increasingly, I remember recognition in her face, as though she had been waiting for the moment when I could finally inherit more than the phrase.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: þa cwom semninga sunnan beorhtra Lacende

    Micro-Fiction Corner: þa cwom semninga sunnan beorhtra Lacende

    The line was carved into the standing stone at the edge of the pasture, shallow enough that rain had nearly erased it. The farmer who owned the land dismissed it as decoration whenever visitors asked, something commissioned by an ancestor with more money than judgment. He had repeated that explanation for so many years that he delivered it without hesitation, despite the cattle refusing to graze within thirty feet of the stone and the pale circle of scorched grass around its base returning every spring with exactly the same circumference.

    I was staying nearby during the summer the light came. Everyone who witnessed it later described something different: a falling star, sheet lightning, a flame descending from a clear sky. I remember brightness arriving just after dusk with impossible speed, stopping directly above the stone and spreading across the pasture until every fence post, blade of grass, and frozen animal possessed edges sharper than daylight could produce. For several seconds I could see through my own hands well enough to make out the bones.

    The farmer found me afterward and seemed less surprised than tired. His family kept records, he admitted, though never where outsiders could find them. The light returned once every generation or two and always appeared while a woman from the household or its immediate circle stood nearby. Those who saw it clearly tended to live strangely afterward. Their bodies aged slowly, wounds closed too cleanly, and illnesses that should have taken months sometimes passed in days.

    The family had once treated this as a blessing. Eventually someone noticed the arithmetic.

    Each unusually long life corresponded with shortened ones elsewhere in the family. Children died in accidents. Healthy spouses developed sudden illnesses. People who had never seen the pasture seemed to lose years in ways nobody could predict. The records contained no proof, only enough repetition to make gratitude uncomfortable.

    Thirty-two years have passed since that evening. My face has changed little. Friends younger than I am have acquired white hair, grandchildren, artificial joints, and the careful movements of age while I continue receiving surprised looks from doctors comparing me with old photographs.

    I visit the stone occasionally at dusk. The scorched ring has widened by several inches since my last visit, and recently another woman from the neighboring farm has begun walking there in the evenings. I have considered warning her. What stops me is the growing suspicion that the light never chooses anyone at random, and that whatever accounting governs its visits may already have included the warning.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: Traitor Baiter

    Micro-Fiction Corner: Traitor Baiter

    Every unit has one, the old sergeant told me during my first posting. Nobody appoints him. Nobody lists the duty on paper. Eventually somebody becomes the person who notices when another soldier’s answers come half a second too late, when a joke lands strangely, or when a man starts giving away possessions without explaining why.

    Ours was a quiet older soldier who slept less than anyone I knew. The others called him the traitor baiter when he was out of earshot, although betrayal was only one of the things he seemed able to detect. He knew who was planning to desert, who was stealing, who had decided to hurt someone, and who was considering something even they had not yet admitted to themselves.

    He never accused anyone directly.

    Instead he appeared at inconvenient moments carrying coffee or cigarettes. He sat beside you and asked questions that sounded harmless until several minutes later, when you realized the conversation had somehow arrived at the one decision you were trying hardest to conceal. People who spoke with him usually changed course. Those who did not sometimes disappeared from the roster, transferred suddenly or were escorted away without explanation.

    I avoided being alone with him for nearly two years.

    He finally found me packing during the week I had decided to leave. I could no longer stomach the assignment waiting for us, and disappearing seemed preferable to carrying it out. He sat on the end of my bunk and told me he had no intention of stopping me. He only wanted to know whether I had imagined the entire road beyond the gate or merely the relief of taking the first step.

    We talked for almost an hour. I stayed.

    He retired several months later. During his farewell, he pressed a packet of cigarettes into my hand despite knowing I did not smoke. I thought it was a joke until I noticed that the package felt unusually heavy. Inside were twenty cigarettes and a tiny brass disk with no markings.

    Years have passed, and I still carry it.

    Sometimes the disk warms in my pocket around certain people. I have learned that resisting the sensation only makes it hotter. Eventually I find myself sitting beside whoever triggered it, offering one of those cigarettes and asking a question whose wording arrives before I decide what to say.

    The packet never empties.

    What unsettles me most is how rarely the person I approach is actually contemplating treason. Some are planning to run. Some intend violence. Others are preparing to betray promises nobody in the service would consider important. The thing passed down to me appears to recognize betrayal in a much broader sense than any military regulation does.

    Recently the disk has started warming when I am alone.

    I have spent several nights examining my choices, searching for the intention it has detected. So far I have found nothing certain, though I now understand why the old soldier rarely slept. Whatever this duty identifies, it seems capable of noticing a betrayal before the person committing it has decided which loyalty will be broken.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys