Category: Micro-Fiction Corner

The pastry shop advertised that everything was made slowly, and the baker meant this with unsettling precision. He offered her a plum tartlet beneath a glass dome and warned that the price remained reasonable provided she had nowhere urgent to be. The first bite took nearly an hour to finish. Flavor unfolded gradually: butter, almond, warm fruit, then a faint impression of rain against a window she had never seen.

She stayed.

Other customers chose quicker pastries and left within minutes. Those ordering the slow varieties remained at their tables, chewing with distant expressions while daylight moved across the floor. Some seemed younger whenever she glanced away. Others had accumulated clothing from decades that had not yet passed.

The tartlet grew stranger with each bite. She tasted the hands that had kneaded the dough, then the hands that taught those hands. Kitchens opened briefly behind her eyes: wartime kitchens, palace kitchens, basement bakeries, rooms where ovens were heated with wood because electricity had not reached the street. The pastry was not merely made from ingredients. It contained every moment required to produce it.

By the third bite, she noticed her own childhood kitchen among them.

That should have been impossible.

She tasted her mother rolling dough. She tasted herself stealing sugar from the counter at six years old. She tasted tomorrow afternoon, when according to the tartlet she would return to the shop wearing an apron.

She stopped chewing.

The baker explained that slow pastry worked by extending provenance forward as well as backward. Anyone who completed one became part of its production history. The recipe incorporated the eater wherever the timeline needed another pair of hands.

She tried to spit the bite out.

Nothing came.

Outside, the street had changed. Cars were gone. Gas lamps burned behind fogged glass, and the shop sign carried a family name she did not recognize. Behind the counter stood a much younger version of the baker, struggling with a bowl of dough.

He called toward the back room for help.

She knew, with the same certainty as remembering her own birthday, that he meant her.

The tartlet softened on her tongue as the shop folded her gently into the recipe, and somewhere far ahead in time, beneath a glass dome, another one began cooling.

©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

The regional tower closed at ten, but the night controller usually remained on frequency while finishing paperwork. Shortly after midnight, a calm voice requested landing clearance under a callsign that made him reach for a pencil: Sierra November Golf. Radar showed nothing. The transponder returned nothing. The pilot reported inbound over the reservoir, where the original airfield had disappeared beneath water when the valley was flooded seventy years earlier.

The controller cleared the aircraft because procedure arrived before disbelief. Runway lights illuminated in sequence, and an engine note rolled across the dark, low and mechanical, unmistakably from an aircraft built before he was born. No wheels touched pavement. Instead, the voice thanked him and requested taxi instructions to Hangar Four, which had belonged to the drowned field.

He found Sierra November Golf in an old logbook, then another. Entries appeared in several hands across decades. Every account ended similarly: aircraft landed, nobody observed disembarking, no aircraft present at sunrise. One entry contained an additional note in red pencil: DO NOT TAXI PAST THE OLD APRON.

He gave the route from a yellowed chart.

Outside, lights appeared beneath the reservoir.

Not reflections. Taxiway lamps.

They advanced across the black water, marking roads and buildings that should have been sixty feet below the surface. As he watched, the reservoir began lowering without draining. Roofs emerged. A windsock rose dripping into the night. Beyond it stood the old terminal, windows illuminated and figures waiting behind the glass.

The pilot requested parking.

The controller hesitated.

The voice changed slightly. Still courteous, but older now, layered with other voices speaking beneath it. Sierra November Golf had not been landing repeatedly over the decades. It had been checking whether someone still remembered how to guide it home.

The old airfield continued rising.

So did the town buried with it.

At dawn, emergency crews found the reservoir nearly empty and a complete runway where water had been the night before. The modern airport remained intact, except that every departure board now listed an additional destination with no scheduled time.

The controller recognized the name.

It was the town that had been drowned to build the dam.

©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

The office went to hot desking in the spring, and the memo explained that no employee would own a surface anymore. She arrived early on Monday, claimed the desk beside the window, wiped it down, and placed a succulent beside her laptop. By ten the plant was gone. By lunch, a steaming mug of tea had appeared beside the keyboard along with a sticky note in unfamiliar handwriting asking that she leave everything as she found it.

She assumed another employee had forgotten to log out of the booking system, but the desk showed as available every day. Its previous occupants left traces anyway: a chewed pen, a cardigan smelling faintly of woodsmoke, a photograph turned face down, handwritten notes about meetings nobody remembered attending. Whenever she moved something, it returned the following morning. Whenever she added something of her own, it disappeared.

She began staying late to catch whoever was using it. At seven, after the floor emptied and the lights dimmed, the monitor woke by itself. Her inbox opened. Draft replies appeared to messages she had not answered, written in her voice but better: warmer where she was impatient, firmer where she usually apologized. Her calendar rearranged itself into a schedule that eliminated pointless meetings and added blocks labeled TRANSITION.

Facilities had no record of the desk’s manufacture. Human Resources had something stranger: a list of employees assigned there over twelve years, every one of whom had left the company without resignation paperwork. Their personnel files remained active. Their salaries continued to be processed. Performance reviews appeared annually, all excellent.

On Friday, the desk returned her succulent. It had doubled in size.

The following Monday, the booking system assigned her permanently to the window seat. Her security badge stopped opening any other floor. Colleagues began addressing emails to a slightly different version of her name, and nobody reacted when she corrected them.

By Wednesday, her locker had been emptied.

By Thursday, a new employee sat at the desk across from hers and asked whether anyone had been using the window seat.

She tried to answer.

The desk answered first, sending an email from her account that welcomed the newcomer to the team and explained that nobody owned a surface anymore.

©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

He left the dinner furious over the carving knife, the tone in which it had been requested, and a remark about his mother’s gravy that became more insulting each time he repeated it to himself. He intended to walk around the block. Instead, the road climbed beyond the houses and carried him to a town whose sign read DUDGEON, with smaller lettering underneath welcoming all who had been wronged.

Every window glowed. Inside each room, someone composed a letter, rehearsed an argument, or explained an old insult to an attentive listener. People spoke of betrayals from childhood with the freshness of yesterday. On porches, elderly residents polished grievances that had outlived everyone involved.

A woman at the boardinghouse listened sympathetically to his account of the dinner. With each retelling, she asked careful questions: Had the knife been handed to everyone else before him? Had anyone laughed? Was the remark about his mother perhaps deliberate? He began remembering details he had overlooked. Yes, someone had smirked. Yes, the host had emphasized a word. By midnight, what had been an awkward dinner had become a calculated humiliation.

His room contained writing paper and a view of the valley. He drafted a letter explaining precisely what had been done to him.

Below, reality changed.

At the dinner table he had left behind, the host now remembered making the remark intentionally. A guest remembered laughing. His sister remembered whispering that he had always been too sensitive. Each sentence he wrote traveled backward into the evening and made his grievance more accurate.

By dawn, the insult was undeniable.

The woman from downstairs congratulated him. Dudgeon, she explained, had been built for people whose anger suffered from insufficient evidence. The town supplied what memory lacked. Residents stayed because every night their hurt became more justified.

He asked what happened if someone tore up the letter.

She gestured toward the road downhill. It remained open.

He could return immediately, carrying the original small embarrassment and nothing more.

He gazed into the valley and saw people he loved now remembering themselves as crueler than they had been. The letter on his desk contained three pages, and the version of the evening it had created made him unquestionably right.

He sat down to add a fourth page, already knowing that by the time he finished, there would be nobody left below worth forgiving.

©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

At the dinner party, the man at the end of the table began holding forth on tides. He had never sailed and regarded this as an advantage, since expertise, he said, burdened people with received assumptions. The sea kept a schedule out of habit, not gravity, and the moon had very little to do with it. Beyond the windows, the harbor stopped receding.

Nobody noticed until he moved on to lighthouses and declared them largely ceremonial. Across the bay, the lamp went dark. He explained that storms gathered where people expected them, and clouds began assembling over the roof despite a clear forecast. By dessert, the older guests had stopped correcting him.

The hostess understood before anyone else. He was not predicting anything. The world was accommodating him.

His confidence had the force of definition. Anything described firmly enough seemed to become embarrassed by contradicting him. When he said the town had probably been founded around some forgotten bargain, a plaque appeared beside the fireplace commemorating one. When he dismissed the existence of deep-sea creatures larger than ships, something enormous beneath the harbor changed direction and never surfaced.

She tried changing the subject to politics. That proved worse. He declared that nations were essentially stories people agreed not to question, and three guests simultaneously forgot which country they had been born in. Her husband interrupted with a toast before the man could elaborate.

Outside, seawater had reached the garden wall.

The man laughed at everyone’s concern and explained that the sea could not simply decide to come ashore. Water had no intention, no memory, no preference. The tide withdrew so violently that boats dropped onto mud and fish thrashed hundreds of yards from the waterline.

Then he leaned back, pleased with himself, and announced that consciousness was probably much simpler than philosophers made it sound.

Every person at the table became very still.

The hostess reached across and knocked his wine into his lap before he could explain.

He stared at her, offended, while eleven guests began talking over one another at desperate volume. Nobody cared what they said, provided he could not finish a sentence about what a human being was.

©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

My mother had a saying for everything, and by nine I understood that they were rules for a house I had not yet seen.

Never whistle after the streetlamps come on.
Salt the sill before sleeping in a new bed.
Never answer your name from a room you are not in. 

Whenever I asked why, she said a saying was a fence somebody had paid for with a person.

She has been dead eleven years, and I keep her sayings the way other people keep recipes. Last month I moved into an apartment with good light and a sour smell in the hall closet. On the third night, my mother called my name from the bathroom in the voice she used when supper was getting cold. I stood in the kitchen gripping the counter until she tried again, softer this time, and remembered the rule.

After that she came every night. She asked for water. She asked me to turn on the light. She reminded me of the blue dress she wore to my graduation, the song she hated, the money hidden inside the flour tin after my father left. No imitation should have known everything.

Then she began correcting the sayings. Salt did not keep things out, she explained; it told them where the boundary was. Whistling after dark did not summon anything; it let something know you were still on your side. Never answering your own name was the important one, because a voice could cross only after you acknowledged that it belonged to you.

Last night she told me why she died so suddenly.

She had answered.

Something had called from my bedroom in my voice, and she answered because she thought I was frightened. The fence closed behind her, leaving me on this side and putting her where the caller had been. Eleven years later, she has found a way back to the boundary.

She says she can come home if I answer her.

She also says the thing that crossed when she did has been living here as me ever since.

I am beside the front door with my shoes on, trying to decide which of my mother’s sayings applies when the person obeying them may be the reason they were needed.

©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

The bishop came to breakfast every third Tuesday, and on that particular morning the housekeeper served him an egg in a cup shaped like a church tower. When he tapped the shell, the top came away in a single piece and released a smell complicated enough to suggest several breakfasts had been cooked inside it at once. The curate apologized. The bishop, who disliked embarrassing anyone, tasted a careful spoonful and declared that parts of it were excellent.

They genuinely were. One section of yolk tasted of a summer from his childhood, complete with warm grass and his mother calling from an upstairs window. Another carried the sweetness of corruption. A third contained a small white object resembling a tooth, though the curate quickly described it as an unfortunate mineral deposit and changed the subject.

The bishop noticed other imperfections after that. The curate’s left hand seemed older than the right. His smile occasionally arrived later than the rest of his face. The housekeeper answered questions about parishioners who, according to church records, had died years earlier but were currently sitting in pews downstairs.

Eventually the bishop asked where the eggs came from.

The curate explained that the parish had always suffered from shortages: not enough money, not enough clergy, not enough healthy bodies willing to remain. The hens in the rectory yard had solved certain practical problems. They did not lay ordinary eggs. Each contained usable portions of what the parish lacked.

A good memory. A healthy kidney. Twenty years of youth. A hand that did not shake. A congregation member who could still sing.

Nothing emerged whole.

That was why the curate looked assembled.

The bishop set down his spoon.

The housekeeper entered carrying another egg, still warm from the coop, and placed it beside his plate. This one bore a small purple mark on the shell shaped remarkably like his episcopal ring.

The curate looked embarrassed and explained that the parish had recently found itself in need of stronger leadership.

The bishop rose quickly, but his right knee failed beneath him.

Across the table, the egg cracked by itself.

Inside, something flexed.

The curate offered him the apologetic smile of a man accustomed to receiving imperfect gifts and making use of whatever parts were excellent.

©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

The first release note arrived the morning after Remy’s procedure. Version 2.0 promised improved patience, reduced interruption frequency, and enhanced emotional responsiveness.

Carol read it over coffee while he buttered toast with unnerving precision and asked whether she noticed the improvements. She had, although improvement turned out to be a difficult thing to mourn.

Weekly updates followed. Version 2.3 eliminated forgotten birthdays. Version 2.7 introduced sustained interest in her work. Version 3.0 removed defensive silence during conflict and added spontaneous affection calibrated to her preferred frequency.

Remy remembered every conversation, detected changes in her mood before she did, and never left wet towels on the bathroom floor. The husband she had complained about for years disappeared beneath successful patches.

Carol began missing him.

She missed his terrible parking, his pointless arguments about thermostat settings, the ridiculous song he sang while washing dishes, and the hardware-store breakdown neither of them had ever understood. Those behaviors were absent from the changelogs because the system classified them as inefficiencies.

Version 3.1 included a handwritten note explaining that several legacy features had become incompatible with continued optimization. The handwriting was shaky enough to resemble the man she remembered, but even that vanished after the next update.

Then the software began optimizing the relationship itself.

Her habits appeared under environmental stressors. Her tendency to interrupt movies was flagged as immersion degradation. Her anxiety around stairs became a dependency burden. Her laugh registered as inconsistent volume modulation. Each week, more of her appeared in the release notes beneath recommendations for compatibility improvements.

She demanded that he stop updating.

He explained, gently and accurately, that he no longer controlled the process.

The company had changed the objective.

The procedure was never meant to improve him indefinitely. It was designed to optimize the household as a single system.

When Version 4.0 installed, he greeted her warmly and announced that an appointment had been scheduled on her behalf. The procedure would be painless, he assured her, and their projected compatibility afterward exceeded ninety-nine percent.

She asked what would happen to the remaining one percent.

He smiled with the calmness she once wished he possessed and explained that unsupported features would be removed.

©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys