madd
fictional

THE MIDNIGHT EDITION

Category: Micro-Fiction Corner

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: Cluck and Grunt

    Micro-Fiction Corner: Cluck and Grunt

    The diner had served the same breakfast special for longer than anyone could remember. CLUCK AND GRUNT remained written across the chalkboard above the grill in lettering polished smooth by decades of grease and steam. Regulars ordered it with affectionate embarrassment, the way people repeat an old family joke long after forgetting why it was funny. Two eggs, ham, potatoes, toast. Nothing complicated.

    I began eating there after my divorce because the booths offered a kind of anonymity my apartment did not. The special was cheap, filling, and always arrived before I had finished unfolding the newspaper. The eggs were unusually rich, the ham thick and slightly mineral at the center, with a flavor that reminded me of rain on iron. I never asked about it. Every diner keeps one mystery alive by refusing to explain the kitchen.

    The cook finally mentioned the history after I had been coming for nearly a year. The building, he said, stood on land that had been pasture long before the town reached it. The first owners struck an arrangement after a winter when livestock died faster than they could replace them. What had grazed there would continue providing, provided breakfast was served daily and the old name remained on the board.

    I assumed he was joking until he showed me the storage room.

    There were no cartons of eggs. No wrapped hams. The refrigerator held condiments, milk, and several empty shelves. Along the back wall stood two wooden feeding troughs filled with fresh straw, though nothing occupied them. The cook explained that food appeared only when someone ordered the special. He had tried changing the wording once, replacing the old phrase with ham and eggs. Nothing came through for three days, and during those three nights something walked around the diner hard enough to leave hoof marks in the kitchen tile.

    I still order it most mornings. Most regulars do. We have learned to ignore the soft clucking behind the grill and the heavy breathing beneath the floorboards that begins whenever several orders come in at once. The arrangement seems stable as long as everyone follows the terms.

    Lately, however, the portions have been growing larger. The eggs arrive with shells faintly warm beneath the plate, and the ham sometimes carries coarse dark hairs along one edge. Yesterday the cook erased the price and replaced it with a question mark. This morning, before anyone had ordered, five plates appeared on the counter by themselves.

    There are only four customers in the diner.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: Moo Juice

    Micro-Fiction Corner: Moo Juice

    The vending machine in the break room had always offered the usual assortment of soda, water, and an iced tea so unpleasant that abandoned bottles accumulated beside the sink. Then one Monday morning someone taped a handwritten label over an unused button. MOO JUICE, it said in thick black marker. Nobody admitted making the sign, and nobody remembered the button being there before.

    The new hire tried it first. The machine accepted exact change and dispensed a plain white carton cold enough to gather condensation immediately. He said the drink tasted mostly like milk, though sweeter, with an aftertaste he described as the feeling of being praised by someone whose opinion mattered too much. Within half an hour he had stopped complaining about the workload. By lunch he was smiling at emails that would normally have sent him pacing around the floor.

    Soon everyone wanted one. The effect was subtle and deeply appealing. Deadlines felt negotiable. Petty insults lost their edges. People stayed late without resentment and volunteered for tasks they had previously avoided. Productivity rose enough that management began stocking disposable straws beside the machine, though nobody could explain where the cartons came from or who was paying for them.

    Facilities eventually investigated. The machine was not connected to power. Its cord entered a wall outlet that led nowhere, and the refrigeration unit inside had been removed years ago. The technician opened the rear panel and found no bottles, cans, or tubing. He did find a warm, flexible membrane stretched across the empty interior, pulsing very slowly behind the coils.

    He drank a carton before filing his report.

    After that, nobody seemed especially interested in investigating further. The office became calmer. Arguments ended quickly. Sick days declined. Several people stopped going home on time because the break room felt more comfortable than their apartments. The machine began offering larger cartons at no additional cost, and eventually someone moved a chair beside it.

    I drink two a day now. Most of us do. The flavor has changed slightly over the past month, becoming richer and almost savory, and the cartons feel warm for several seconds before cooling in our hands. The machine has also started making a low sound after closing time, something rhythmic and contented that carries through the ventilation system.

    Yesterday the handwritten sign fell off. Beneath it, printed directly on the machine in lettering none of us remember seeing, were two words: HERD PROGRAM. Someone taped the old label back over them before the morning shift arrived. It seemed kinder that way, and by then we were all thirsty.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: That’s My Hell

    Micro-Fiction Corner: That’s My Hell

    Everyone in the office had a private version of the phrase. A jammed printer was one person’s hell. Another reserved the expression for meetings scheduled after four. Someone in accounting used it whenever the microwave smelled like fish.

    They said it with theatrical misery, a little declaration of harmless suffering exchanged across cubicle walls, and over time the phrase became part of the office language, as ordinary as good morning or see you tomorrow.

    I never had a particular use for it until renovations moved my desk beside the rear stairwell. The door there never latched completely, and every afternoon a cold draft slipped through the gap carrying the faint medicinal smell of a hospital corridor I had not entered since childhood.

    The first time it happened, I said the phrase aloud simply because everyone else did. Something inside my chest tightened with the precise sensation of a lock accepting the correct key.

    After that, the smell began appearing elsewhere. It drifted through the conference room during budget meetings and followed me into the elevator. The copy room acquired the same waxed-floor odor at the exact hour my father once finished visiting hours. Each time I recognized it, the phrase rose automatically into my mouth. Each repetition seemed to strengthen the memory.

    Details returned that I had spent decades losing: the green stripe painted along the corridor wall, the vending machine with one burned-out button, the squeak of rubber soles beyond a curtain nobody would let me cross.

    Then my coworkers’ complaints began changing too. The woman who hated printer jams started finding paper caught in machines that had been unplugged. The man who dreaded late meetings received invitations from managers who had left the company years earlier. Someone who joked about elevators began taking the stairs after one ride stopped between floors and opened onto a hallway she refused to describe.

    We still use the phrase, though less lightly now. The office seems to remember every declaration and treats repetition as authorization. This morning the stairwell door opened before I reached my desk. The corridor beyond was longer than the building could contain, lit by fluorescent panels with the same missing panel I remembered from childhood. Several coworkers stood at other doors along its length, each facing a place they had once described jokingly as theirs.

    No one has crossed the threshold yet. We are all pretending to work, answering email and checking the time, while the doors remain open and patient.

    The difficult part is that the corridor keeps supplying details only we could know, and with every familiar sound it becomes harder to remember whether we named these places because we feared them, or whether naming them was how they first learned where to find us.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: Boys Night

    Micro-Fiction Corner: Boys Night

    They had been playing together since college, the same four men every third Thursday, carrying the same scarred card table through apartments, houses, marriages, divorces, and enough jobs to make the years seem less orderly than the game. The ritual survived everything. Beer changed brands. Stakes rose and fell. One of them quit smoking and another started again. The fifth chair always remained empty, a courtesy seat for someone who might join someday, though nobody ever did.

    Then someone did.

    He appeared one October carrying nothing, sat in the empty chair, and played as though he had been coming for years. He knew when to fold, laughed at the old stories before their endings, and helped gather the chips when the night was over.

    Nobody remembered inviting him.

    By the third month, that seemed less important than the fact that he belonged there. The table looked balanced with five around it, though nobody could explain why they had ever bothered keeping a spare chair.

    What made them uneasy were the things he knew. He mentioned a debt one man had hidden from his wife, the name of a doctor another had not yet called, and the exact sentence spoken during an argument that had ended a marriage ten years earlier. He offered these details casually, with the warmth of an old friend correcting a story everyone already knew. No one asked how he knew. The questions felt impolite in a room built around familiarity.

    In January, one of the original four missed the game. The others noticed only when the first hand was dealt, and even then none could agree who was absent. They remembered someone laughing too loudly at bad jokes, someone always sitting nearest the stairs, someone who cheated when drunk. His face refused to settle in memory. The newcomer suggested they keep playing, since the table had the right number anyway.

    Another chair was empty last month.

    Tonight there are four men at the table again, though the framed photographs along the basement wall show gatherings none of them recognize. In every picture the same smiling guest sits among them, while the faces around him change from year to year.

    There is still a fifth chair waiting near the wall.

    One of the players mentioned bringing a friend next time, and the newcomer smiled with such genuine pleasure that everyone agreed it had been far too long since they welcomed someone new.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: Gives a Body the Flesh Creep

    Micro-Fiction Corner: Gives a Body the Flesh Creep

    My aunt used the phrase for anything mildly uncanny: a stranger holding eye contact too long, a house changing owners three times in a year, a song appearing on the radio while she was humming it. She said it lightly, almost cheerfully, and usually rubbed both arms afterward as though encouraging the sensation to finish its work.

    I inherited the expression along with her house and used it the same way for years without wondering what the words were meant to describe.

    The house supplied an answer gradually. Certain rooms cooled at the same time each evening, beginning upstairs and progressing toward the kitchen. The temperature change lasted exactly fifty-three minutes. During that period the skin along my arms and neck tightened and rose in waves, sometimes moving against the direction of the draft. I blamed old windows until I said my aunt’s phrase aloud one evening in the hallway and heard it repeated from the room behind me.

    The voice had her cadence. It sounded worn with age, gentle and faintly impatient, as though she had already explained something many times. For several weeks I treated the response as a haunting. I waited in the hall at the usual hour and spoke to her.

    Sometimes the house answered. Sometimes only my skin reacted, the gooseflesh traveling slowly from wrist to shoulder in narrow bands. Eventually I noticed that the patterns were repeating.

    I began recording them. Three raised patches followed by one smooth interval. A long ripple across both arms. Two quick bursts along the neck. The sequences changed when I asked questions. They changed again when I stopped speaking altogether.

    By winter I could recognize a handful of recurring patterns, although I could not translate them. My aunt’s voice appeared less often after that, as if speech had been only a temporary accommodation.

    Last night the chill arrived early. I stood in the hall with my sleeves rolled up and watched my skin rise in lines that traveled across both arms with deliberate precision. The pattern continued over my shoulders and down my back until I felt it reaching places I could not see. For nearly an hour the sensation repeated, faster each time, while the house remained completely silent.

    I finally understood one sequence because it was the same one my aunt used to tap against the kitchen table whenever she was waiting for me to answer a question. The recognition brought back a memory I had misplaced for years: her telling me, shortly before she died, that houses were full of things without mouths and that a person should be grateful when one of them found another way to speak.

    The message has continued all day. Every few minutes the skin along my forearms rises in the same pattern, even outside the house.

    Whatever learned to communicate through her appears to have decided I am ready to carry the conversation farther.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: Full of Moist

    Micro-Fiction Corner: Full of Moist

    The basement had always been damp. Boxes softened at the corners, door frames swelled every summer, and pale gray blooms returned to the concrete regardless of bleach, fans, or dehumidifiers. We called it the swamp and treated it as one more defect of an old house.

    The contractor was the first person to use another word. He crouched beside the foundation wall, pressed two fingers to the concrete, and said the structure was full of moist. He pronounced the final word slowly, almost professionally, then wrote something on his clipboard and angled it away when I tried to read.

    He refused to elaborate. He recommended removing everything from below ground level and suggested we avoid sleeping directly against exterior walls. When I asked whether we had mold, seepage, or a cracked foundation, he said those would have been easier. He left without giving us an estimate and never returned my calls.

    Within weeks the dampness started climbing. Wallpaper loosened along the stairwell in long vertical strips. The upstairs linen closet began smelling of tide pools. My husband’s winter coat developed droplets along the inside lining, although the room remained dry and cool.

    The moisture itself behaved strangely. It gathered where bodies spent time. His side of the bed stayed clammy beneath the sheets. The fabric on my reading chair darkened each evening into the shape of someone sitting there before I arrived.

    We ran three dehumidifiers continuously. Their tanks filled faster every day. The water inside was always several degrees warmer than the surrounding air and faintly cloudy, with threadlike particles that disappeared when exposed to sunlight. Eventually I stopped emptying them outside after noticing that grass grew thick and dark wherever the water touched soil.

    The house now makes sounds at night that plumbing cannot account for. Something moves through the walls with the slow pressure of water squeezed through cloth, followed by a soft internal shifting that travels room to room. Yesterday one section of drywall flexed inward when I leaned against it, yielding like skin over something swollen.

    This morning the stairs were soft beneath my feet. My heel left a shallow depression that gradually filled itself level again. The upstairs hallway smells strongly of the sea now, and every framed photograph has developed condensation behind the glass. In several pictures, our faces are becoming blurred while the rooms around us remain sharp.

    The contractor finally answered my call this afternoon. He sounded surprised that we were still inside the house. When I repeated the phrase he had used during the inspection, there was a long silence, followed by the sound of papers being moved. He corrected my pronunciation very gently.

    The word, he explained, was not moisture. It was a plural.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: Pretzel-Bender

    Micro-Fiction Corner: Pretzel-Bender

    The bakery opened in the narrow storefront that had once housed a shoe repair shop, and within a month people were lining up before sunrise. The attraction was supposedly the dough, although everyone knew the real reason.

    The woman behind the counter could bend pretzels into shapes that seemed unwilling to remain in three dimensions. Some had five or six interlocking crossings. Others looped through themselves in ways that made the eye lose track of which strand passed over and which passed under. They emerged from the oven golden, glossy, and structurally impossible.

    Regular customers developed theories. A pretzel with two tight inner loops supposedly helped with indecision. A broad knot with one open side was said to bring someone back into your life. Nobody agreed on what the shapes meant, though people came in carrying breakups, job offers, illnesses, court dates, and private hopes as if the bakery had become an unofficial clinic. The woman never confirmed anything. She simply chose from the trays and watched each customer take the first bite.

    I started going twice a week and soon found reasons to go daily. Simpler shapes produced easy days. Complicated knots seemed to entangle everything around me. Meetings shifted times without anyone admitting they had been changed. Conversations repeated with slightly altered wording.

    Once, after eating a pretzel twisted through itself nine times, I arrived home to discover I had already been there for several hours. My coat was on the hook and the kettle was warm, though I remembered walking directly from work.

    Eventually she began reserving one for me each morning. My initial appeared on the paper in flour even though I had never told her my name. The shapes grew increasingly dense. One contained a center knot so tight the dough had split and fused again while baking. That day I felt a steady pulling sensation behind my ribs, accompanied by memories of decisions I was certain I had never made.

    This morning the paper held a smooth, unbroken loop. No crossings. No visible beginning. The woman watched me turn it in my hands and asked whether I had been sleeping better. I said I had, though lately my dreams had become repetitive: the same apartment, the same morning, the same walk to the bakery, with tiny details changing each time.

    She seemed relieved. She explained that most people arrived knotted by accident and spent years tightening themselves through habit. Some eventually needed loosening. Others had become too complicated to undo safely, so the best she could offer was a cleaner arrangement.

    When I asked what kind mine was, she glanced toward the ovens, where several identical loops were browning on the middle rack. I noticed then that each paper sleeve beside them carried my initial, and that through the bakery window the street outside appeared to curve gently in both directions until its far ends met behind me.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: Whooperups

    Micro-Fiction Corner: Whooperups

    The old men on the porch used the word without ever explaining it, the way people do with weather, debt, or grief. They said the whooperups were bad this year, said you could hear them working the field edges after dark, low and rolling like something turning over in its sleep.

    As a child, I assumed it was another name for wind passing through the grain, the particular sound of a poor crop year announcing itself before anyone wanted to admit what was coming.

    My grandmother corrected me only once. Near the end of her life, when sleep and memory had started taking turns with her, she said the fields kept accounts. Every harvest removed something, and every planting promised it back. Most years the balance carried forward quietly. Some years, she said, the land decided it had waited long enough.

    The whooperups were what you heard when the account was being collected, moving from field to field with the slow confidence of people who already knew what they had come for.

    I forgot the story until this September, when the eastern rows emerged pale and brittle while the rest of the corn stood healthy. The dogs refused to cross the tree line after sunset.

    A week later the sound began, low and almost too deep to hear, with a repeating cadence that suggested conversation. Sometimes one rolling note would travel the length of the field and another would answer from the far side. Fence posts vibrated. Water in the livestock trough formed rings even when the air was still.

    Last night the sound reached the house. I remembered enough of my grandmother’s instructions to leave every light off and keep my feet on the floor. The porch boards hummed beneath my palm while something circled the house twice, pausing beneath each window. Then the sound changed. I could not understand the word it formed, though my body recognized it with the same unpleasant certainty that comes when someone calls you by a childhood nickname no stranger should know.

    At sunrise the eastern rows stood taller than the others, straight, green, and heavy with perfect ears. The soil beneath them was black and rich enough to stain my hands. Nothing else appeared disturbed until I checked the family cemetery beyond the orchard and found every stone sunk several inches deeper into the ground.

    Since then, the fields have continued improving by the hour. Fruit has returned to dead branches, blight has vanished from the lower pasture, and the well tastes sweeter than it has in decades.

    I am beginning to understand why my grandmother never described the whooperups as evil. She only said that when they made a place prosperous again, someone living there should start wondering what had been entered into the ledger under payment.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: Butter and Egg Man

    Micro-Fiction Corner: Butter and Egg Man

    The cart came before the birds, its wheels whispering over the cobbles and a single lantern swinging from the rear. Nobody ever saw the driver clearly. By sunrise every doorstep in the district held the same delivery: butter wrapped in waxed paper and eggs arranged in a shallow tin lined with straw.

    No invoices appeared. No money changed hands. The custom predated the oldest residents, the renumbering of the houses, and apparently the houses themselves. People accepted the food because their grandparents had accepted it, and because there is little incentive to investigate fresh butter that arrives free.

    The counting was discovered by accident. An elderly woman who kept household ledgers noticed that every tin contained one egg for each person sleeping beneath that roof. Visitors counted. Infants counted before their mothers had told anyone they were pregnant. A nephew who arrived unexpectedly at three in the morning was accounted for by dawn.

    More troubling were the occasions when the cart seemed to know of departures in advance. One household received six eggs on Monday, five on Tuesday, and held a funeral on Friday. After enough such incidents, people stopped discussing the numbers openly.

    They developed customs instead. Nobody broke an egg belonging to someone else. Nobody carried a neighbor’s tin indoors. Families with one fewer egg behaved gently toward one another until midnight, though they rarely admitted why.

    Some tried sleeping elsewhere when the count dropped. The cart adjusted. Others brought relatives into the house, hoping to confuse whatever arithmetic governed the deliveries. The additional eggs appeared without changing the absence everyone feared.

    This morning our tin contained four. Five people slept here last night. I counted the eggs twice, then examined the shallow hollow in the straw where another seemed to have rested before being removed. The butter beside it was unusually warm and folded into a neat parcel with the corners tucked carefully underneath.

    Upstairs, the house had begun waking in its ordinary sequence: pipes knocking, floorboards creaking, someone coughing behind a closed door. I counted four sets of movements, then five, then became uncertain whether I had included myself.

    By breakfast everyone was present, irritated by my staring and eager to get on with the day. Nobody felt ill. Nobody had plans requiring travel. The fifth egg remained absent.

    Near dusk I finally understood what had been bothering me. The cart always came once, before dawn, and continued down the lane without returning. Yet its lantern was standing outside our gate again, perfectly still in the gathering dark. No horse was attached to the shafts, and no driver waited on the seat.

    Inside the cart lay a single egg in a nest of straw, still warm, while from somewhere upstairs one of us called down to ask why there were only four plates on the table.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: Annie Aperitif

    Micro-Fiction Corner: Annie Aperitif

    The bottle occupies the highest shelf behind the bar, where the streetlights turn its amber glass almost luminous after dusk. Its label depicts a woman in three-quarter profile rendered in the elaborate engraved style of another century. Beneath her portrait curls a name in faded script, though the lettering changes depending on how long you stare.

    Nobody orders the drink. The bartender pours it only for regulars, usually before their food arrives, one narrow glass placed on the counter with the solemnity of an invitation that cannot politely be repeated.

    The first sip tastes of bitter orange and rainwater collected from stone. The second contains a kitchen I have never visited. Sun falls across yellow tiles, a radio murmurs somewhere near an open window, and my hands are peeling apples with the practiced irritation of someone preparing dinner for a person who is late again.

    By the third sip I remember an entire summer beside a river whose name I cannot supply. I remember a lover’s habit of whistling through their teeth. I remember forgiving them for something terrible. When the glass empties, the memories remain with the stubborn emotional weight of experience.

    Regulars describe the aperitif differently, although everyone eventually uses the same phrase: it tastes like an evening you were owed. Several drink it nightly. They speak lovingly of childhood bedrooms, marriages, funerals, journeys and reconciliations that appear nowhere in their actual histories.

    One man has acquired memories of three daughters despite never having children. A woman who has lived above the laundromat for twenty-six years insists she once kept goats on a hillside overlooking the sea. Neither seems troubled by the discrepancy. Their real lives have become the stories they tell with less conviction.

    I received my first glass last week. Since then, pieces of my apartment have begun losing familiarity. Yesterday I stood outside my own bathroom waiting for someone to finish bathing before remembering I live alone.

    This afternoon I found an old photograph in a drawer showing the kitchen from the drink, complete with the yellow tiles and the open window. Someone had written a date on the back in my handwriting, forty-three years before I was born.

    Tonight the woman on the label has my mouth. Her hair is becoming mine as well, though the engraved face still appears older each time the bottle turns beneath the light.

    The bartender has started addressing me with a familiarity I cannot place, and when he reaches for the bottle, I feel an absurd flicker of homesickness for the high shelf.

    Around me, the regulars raise their glasses with the serene expressions of people who have remembered themselves successfully.

    I am beginning to suspect the drink contains no one’s past.

    It may simply be making room for one.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys