Category: Micro-Fiction Corner

The first message arrived while I was brushing my teeth. I know this only because afterward I found myself staring into the sink with the tap running and a taste in my mouth like pennies soaked in plum juice.

Nothing appeared on my phone. The screen hadn’t lit up. I simply possessed the unmistakable sensation that something had contacted me and was waiting for a response, the mental equivalent of a notification hovering just beyond sight.

For the first week, the messages were advertisements. They appeared as cravings with unusually precise edges: a particular mattress, shoes displayed in a shop I had passed months earlier, tea packaged in a yellow tin. Sometimes a slogan surfaced in my thoughts complete with a melody.

I bought what was suggested and felt pleased afterward, as though I had completed errands assigned by someone who understood my needs better than I did.

The purchases became stranger. A roll of copper wire. Three kilograms of hot foot powder. A doorstop heavy enough to bruise the bare wood floor. None of it seemed unreasonable while I was buying them.

Then the messages became questions.

Was I sleeping well?
Did I lock the door?
How many windows were in the apartment before I moved in?
Had I ever counted the stairs between floors in both directions?

I tried the last one and found seventeen steps going down, eighteen coming back. I repeated the experiment until midnight. The extra step never appeared beneath my foot, yet my body continued climbing it, rising briefly through a distance the staircase did not contain.

After that, the messages grew intimate. They asked which memories I would miss least. They asked whether I considered a thought private simply because nobody else admitted hearing it.

One morning I woke with six hours missing and discovered the copper wire threaded neatly around every window frame. The hot foot powder formed an unbroken line beneath the door. The heavy doorstop had been placed outside.

Last night I finally answered. I formed three words silently and directed them toward whatever part of my mind had become an inbox.

A response arrived before I finished thinking them, spoken internally in my own voice with the patient amusement of someone correcting a misunderstanding.

The conversation, it explained, had been going on for months; I had merely become conscious of receiving my half.

Since then, other messages have begun surfacing beneath ordinary thoughts, faint at first and multiplying rapidly.

Some are clearly mine. Others contain memories of rooms I have never entered and instructions addressed to people I have never been.

The unsettling part is how many of those strangers seem to be answering, and how often their replies arrive carrying my voice.

©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

I bought the bag because the leather was soft enough to fold in one hand and the strap could be adjusted almost absurdly long. The woman at the market stall watched me thread it over my head and said it would keep me close to myself.

I assumed this was salesmanship of the incense-and-crystals variety, though she sold neither incense nor crystals, only bags arranged on a blanket in shades of brown that reminded me uncomfortably of skin.

Mine rested against my hip with unusual steadiness. It never bounced when I hurried or swung forward when I bent down. Within a week, walking without it made me feel slightly off balance.

By November, friends began commenting on it. One said the bag seemed to anticipate my movements, shifting before I turned rather than afterward. Another asked whether I had always carried it on that side. I laughed because I couldn’t remember.

Small things disappeared inside it: receipts, coins, lip balm, a grocery list written in my handwriting that I did not remember making. A house key left overnight came back polished smooth along the teeth. When I complained aloud, the leather gave a faint tightening against my ribs, almost affectionate, and I found myself apologizing.

The strap shortened through winter. I loosened it each morning and found the bag riding higher by afternoon. Eventually it settled beneath my arm where I could feel a pulse through the leather. For several days it matched mine exactly. Then it began beating just ahead, as though teaching my heart the rhythm it preferred. I started dreaming of crowded trains and enormous rooms where everything around me swayed with the rolling gait of something walking.

Last night I decided to take it off. There was no buckle where the buckle had always been. My fingers followed the strap over my shoulder and discovered that it continued behind me farther than my body allowed, passing through a place my hand could reach but could not understand.

For one nauseating moment I felt myself from outside: a small warm weight pressed snugly against something vast, carried cross-body beneath an arm I could sense only as pressure and motion.

This morning the apartment ceiling seems much farther away. Every few minutes the room tilts with a slow, familiar stride, and through the windows I keep glimpsing streets that do not belong to my city.

I can still move my arms and legs, though none of it appears to affect where I am going. The bag rests comfortably against what I continue, mostly from habit, to think of as my hip, while somewhere beyond the walls a hand occasionally pats me through the leather to make certain I am still there.

©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

The film arrived without a distributor’s address and in a language the studio database could not identify. The assignment looked routine enough: translate the supplied script, record the lines, match each sentence to the actress on screen.

The dubber had worked on dozens of foreign films and knew how to fit a voice into someone else’s mouth without thinking too hard about whose life had occupied it first.

This film resisted that distance. The actress paused before every line as though waiting to hear what would be said. Small changes in wording produced small changes in the picture. A gentler phrase softened the actress’s expression. A harsher one altered the light in the room.

The engineer blamed compression artifacts until the dubber stumbled over a word and the actress stopped mid-scene, turned toward the booth, and repeated the mistake back to her in perfect English.

They shut down for the night. By morning, the film had changed further. The actress now wore the dubber’s blouse. A studio-branded coffee cup sat on the table beside her.

During the next session, the apartment on screen acquired the same crooked wall clock that hung behind the mixing console. Personal details migrated faster than ordinary ones. A childhood street appeared outside the actress’s window. A song the dubber’s mother used to hum played faintly beneath a dinner scene. Even a scar beneath the dubber’s knee appeared on the actress when she crossed her legs.

The dubber stopped improvising, but silence proved worse. Whenever she refused a line, the film supplied one itself, and each self-generated sentence carried more of her into the image.

By the final reel, the actress entered a recording booth identical to theirs and sat before a microphone. Behind the glass stood an engineer wearing the same shirt as the man beside her.

The script contained one final sentence: I understand where the voice comes from now. The dubber would not read it. The actress smiled and spoke anyway, in the dubber’s exact voice, while the studio monitor filled with static.

When the picture cleared, the woman on screen was sitting in the real booth, and the dubber appeared inside the film, pounding silently on the glass and trying to force words through a mouth somebody else was now controlling.

©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

The market stall offered relief from anything that hurt. The sign promised PANGS WANGLED at fair rates, and the proprietor worked with bare fingers, removing pain as easily as pulling lint from cloth. A toothache came out as a bright white bead. A humiliation emerged as a damp knot of thread. Heartbreak required a larger jar.

The widow returned several times.

Eventually she brought the grief of her husband’s empty chair.

The proprietor chose a glass demijohn and drew the sorrow from her chest in a long black ribbon that carried the faint sounds of keys in a lock, boots by the door, and a man clearing his throat before speaking. She paid with her wedding ring and walked home wonderfully light.

The chair became furniture, which should have frightened her, but instead, she slept beautifully.

A month later, parcels began arriving.

The toothache had gone to a man who enjoyed pain and paid well for clean specimens. Her embarrassment had been purchased by an actor who needed authentic shame for a role. The smaller pangs had all found customers.

The demijohn had not because grief that old was difficult to place.

Then someone bought it.

The next morning, a stranger stood outside her house wearing her husband’s coat.

He knew where the spare key had been hidden. He knew which stair creaked. He knew the joke told during their honeymoon and the exact way her husband had ruined eggs on Sundays. The proprietor had sold the grief intact, and whoever carried it now possessed everything embedded inside it.

She demanded her sorrow back, but the stranger refused.

He had paid dearly for thirty-eight years of love and said it was the closest he had ever come to being loved himself.

At the market, the proprietor listened sympathetically and explained the difficulty. Pain was not waste. It was compressed attachment, memory, expectation, and identity. Removing it did not destroy those things. It separated ownership.

She asked what it would cost to recover hers.

The proprietor studied the empty place inside her and named the price.

She returned home without her wedding ring, her happiest memory, or the ability to recognize her own reflection.

The stranger was waiting in the kitchen.

This time, when he smiled, she understood why it hurt.

©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

The county map came framed above the study desk, printed on linen and missing one corner in a neat scalloped bite. The estate agent called it old damage and repeated something the previous owner’s mother used to say: that the marsh parish had been chewed up catawamptiously. Nobody had ever asked what the word meant.

Curiosity sent the new owner driving toward the missing section. The road ended exactly where the bite began. Beyond the ragged tarmac lay a flat gray expanse with the texture of paper pulp, faint fibers running through it and a smell of glue after rain. A signpost pointed toward a village that appeared on no modern map.

Back at the house, the bite had grown.

It had taken the reservoir and part of the railway.

She removed the frame and discovered a nest hollowed into the plaster behind it, lined with paper scraps, coat buttons, hair, and tiny fragments of things that belonged to her. Whatever lived there was not eating the map at random. It was collecting samples.

The next morning the reservoir no longer existed.

Nobody remembered it.

Maps, websites, road signs, photographs, and childhood recollections had adjusted overnight. Only she retained the memory because she owned the bitten map. Whatever the creature consumed ceased to have been part of the county at all.

She began protecting important places with pins. The hospital. The school. Her mother’s grave.

Each pin stopped the bite temporarily.

Then she noticed the pattern.

The creature was eating toward the house because the house itself did not belong.

Old maps showed an orchard on the property. Older ones showed open field. The earliest survey contained only a small black symbol labeled EXCISION SITE.

The wall behind her began ticking.

She turned the map over and found writing on the linen backing in brown ink: REMOVE STRUCTURE BEFORE IT REMEMBERS WHY IT WAS BUILT.

The bite reached her street.

Outside, the houses opposite vanished without sound, leaving uninterrupted pasture where families had lived moments earlier. She seized a pin and drove it through her own roof on the map.

Something behind the plaster shrieked.

For several seconds, the whole county shook.

Then the creature bit around the pin.

©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

The three collies on the hill farm started quarrelling every night at ten past three. The shepherd had lived among dogs long enough to distinguish boredom, warning, pursuit, and spite, and this was professional disagreement. He eventually pulled on his coat and followed the racket to the top field, where all three dogs were working something hidden inside a bank of fog.

The old bitch crawled left. The young dog circled wide on the right. The middle one kept snapping corrections at both while the grass beyond the gate bent under dozens of invisible feet. By morning the flock contained one extra ewe, pale-faced and perfectly dry despite the rain. Another appeared the next day, then another, and none carried an ear tag or reacted properly when handled. The collies spent daylight hours exhausted, watching the newcomers with the flat suspicion of workers who knew management had misunderstood the job.

The shepherd marked the strange sheep with red paint.

By dawn, the marks had moved.

One appeared on a ewe he had owned for seven years. Another turned up on the barn cat. The third was on the shepherd’s own wrist.

That was when he understood the dogs were not bringing sheep through the fog. They were sorting things.

Every night, the mist blurred the boundary between neighboring versions of the farm, and the collies drove whatever crossed back toward the reality where it belonged. His interference had confused the flock. Each extra animal displaced something native, and the red marks showed which lives had been assigned incorrectly.

On the ninth night, he went to the gate without a torch. The three dogs waited in silence while fog rolled over the hill from both directions. Inside it he saw farms layered over one another: different fences, different barns, different versions of himself standing at different gates.

The old bitch crept around to his left.

He did not move.

The young dog closed from the right.

Only then did he notice that all the other shepherds in the fog were watching him with the same alarm.

The middle collie gave one sharp bark.

The dogs had finished deciding which one belonged here.

©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

The melancholy always arrived with November, and she had developed reliable defenses against it: thick socks, soup, lamps switched on before dusk, and the radio talking in another room so the house never became too aware of itself. What changed that year was the timing. Sad thoughts began reaching her a fraction before she thought them.

The sensation was difficult to describe. A page would rustle somewhere above the ceiling, and then she would remember her mother’s hands. Another page, and an old embarrassment would surface complete with details she had ignored for years. The thoughts did not feel implanted. They felt narrated.

She followed the sound to the loft.

Inside, narrow shelves filled every space between the rafters. Thousands of tiny books stood spine-out, each no larger than a matchbox and labeled in her handwriting. Dates covered decades. Some corresponded to terrible days she remembered vividly. Others marked ordinary Tuesdays that had somehow ended in inexplicable sadness.

She opened one.

The pages contained her thoughts from that day, but written in future tense.

At 8:14 she would think about the school corridor where nobody sat beside her.

At 9:03 she would remember an argument with her sister differently than it had happened.

At 11:20 she would decide she had disappointed everyone who had ever loved her.

She checked the clock.

It was 7:52.

Something moved deeper in the loft.

She found the author seated behind a miniature desk, too small to be human and too familiar to be anything else. Its face resembled hers after several sleepless nights. It wrote steadily in a blank volume while consulting older books, selecting griefs that connected neatly to one another.

The creature explained that it had always managed the seasonal material. Sadness required continuity. Left unattended, people might wake miserable without a reason, and that was unbearable. A coherent story made suffering easier to inhabit.

She asked what would happen if it stopped writing.

The creature seemed genuinely puzzled by the question.

So she took away the pen.

November became strange after that. Grief still came, but unpredictably. She cried over toast and laughed while remembering funerals. Pain arrived without explanations, then left before she could build identities around it. Some mornings were heavy for no discernible reason, while others contained inexplicable joy.

By December, the little books in the loft had begun losing their titles.

She still visited occasionally with tea.

The creature no longer wrote.

Sometimes they simply sat together while outside the weather changed its mind.

©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

People came down from the moor with things in their heads.

The farmhouse woman never asked what they had seen. She simply sat them beside the range, ladled broth from the black pot, and told them to drink before the memory settled too deeply. Owl floated in the liquid: a hooked foot, pale meat, an occasional feather turning slowly on the surface.

The drunken traveler accepted the cup because he was cold and because the thing at the crossroads had followed him halfway down the hill without taking a single step.

The first swallow blurred its shape. The second loosened the memory of its face. By the third, he could remember being frightened but not what fear had belonged to.

Above him, the rafters creaked. He raised his head and found dozens of owls perched in darkness.

Every bird stared at him.

The woman explained that the broth did not erase anything. Memory could not be destroyed merely because a person found it inconvenient. The owl took it instead.

One bird opened its beak. From somewhere inside it came his own voice describing the crossroads.

Another owl whispered in a child’s voice about lights moving beneath the peat. A third spoke like an old woman describing something enormous walking through fog on legs too thin to carry it. The rafters were full of everything the parish had chosen not to know.

The traveler pushed the cup away.

The woman told him that leaving half-finished was unwise. Partial transfer meant the memory would remain divided between man and bird, and divided things tended to seek one another.

He drank.

By dawn, he remembered only that he had walked across the moor and become unwell.

Years passed.

Then the farmhouse burned.

The owls escaped.

They scattered across the countryside carrying generations of buried knowledge, and wherever they nested, people began dreaming memories that did not belong to them. Children woke speaking of the thing beneath the reservoir. Farmers refused to cross certain fields. Entire villages remembered crimes committed before anyone living had been born.

One autumn evening, an owl settled on the traveler’s windowsill.

He was an old man by then.

The bird tapped the glass.

When he opened the window, it climbed onto his wrist and regarded him with pale round eyes. Then it spoke in his younger voice and calmly reminded him what had been standing at the crossroads.

This time, there was no farmhouse left to make him forget.

©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys