madd
fictional

THE MIDNIGHT EDITION

Category: Micro-Fiction Corner

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: If You Can’t Blind Them With Brilliance…

    Micro-Fiction Corner: If You Can’t Blind Them With Brilliance…

    He had built an entire career on the second half of the old saying long before hearing it phrased so neatly: If you can’t blind them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit. Confidence read as competence to almost everyone, and he had enough confidence to supply a small nation. Job interviews, sales pitches, municipal hearings, contract negotiations—whenever knowledge failed him, vocabulary stepped in wearing a hard hat.

    He discovered the trick accidentally during a zoning hearing. Cornered about a drainage problem he did not understand, he invented the phrase retrospective hydrological displacement. Everyone around the table nodded. By morning, the floodwater behind the development had vanished. So had three months of complaints, two photographs, and the memory of a councilman who distinctly recalled standing ankle-deep in it.

    After that, he experimented.

    Deferred material fatigue made cracks disappear from a parking garage. Nonlinear occupancy compression transformed an illegally overcrowded building into one that records insisted had always contained twelve additional apartments. Whenever expertise failed, he supplied terminology complicated enough to embarrass anyone who questioned it. Reality seemed unwilling to contradict a phrase nobody wanted to admit they did not understand.

    The bridge made him rich.

    A junior engineer warned that the load calculations were dangerously wrong. He responded with six paragraphs about dynamic infrastructural harmonics and removed the engineer from the project. The bridge opened fourteen months later.

    It collapsed during evening traffic, resulting in eleven deaths and multiple nonfatal casualties.

    At the inquiry, he came prepared.

    He described anomalous stress migration, cascading load redistribution, and post-event structural reinterpretation. Panel members nodded uneasily. Lawyers took notes. Reporters repeated the phrases.

    Then the dead began changing.

    Eleven became nine.

    Nine became six.

    Death certificates revised themselves. Families remembered funerals for relatives who were suddenly alive and relatives who had never existed. News footage showed cars falling into the river, but fewer vehicles appeared each time someone replayed it.

    The former junior engineer arrived carrying the original calculations. “You’re erasing them.”

    He smiled patiently. “I think you mean the casualty metrics are undergoing evidentiary reconciliation.”

    That engineer disappeared before reaching the witness table.

    Two years later, the governor appointed him chair of the National Infrastructure Integrity Commission.

    At the announcement, a reporter asked what the bridge disaster had taught him.

    He spoke for six uninterrupted minutes, and by the time he finished, there had never been a bridge collapse at all.

    There had only been a highly successful emergency load-transition event.

    And according to every available record, nobody had died.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: My Daddy Raised Me In Outlaw Culture

    Micro-Fiction Corner: My Daddy Raised Me In Outlaw Culture

    The lessons started before anyone bothered to call them lessons, folded into ordinary conversation the way other families folded in manners or grace before meals. Keep your word, no matter the cost of it. Never leave a debt hanging, whether it was money or a favor or a grudge. Know which roads the deputies used on which nights, and know the difference between ordinary silence and the kind that meant somebody outside was listening a little too carefully. By thirteen, there were skills that felt like nothing more than family tradition, the same way other kids learned to bait a hook or bake bread, and school called that behavior suspicious while home called it simply being raised right.

    There were rules, though, spoken about with more conviction than most people reserved for scripture. No stealing from anyone poorer than yourself. No frightening children, ever, for any reason. Nobody touched money collected for a funeral or a hospital bill or a church roof, and the family broke plenty of other laws without a flicker of guilt while defending those particular lines like they were the only ones that mattered. That contradiction made perfect sense at the time and only became strange once there was enough distance to look back on it clearly.

    Distance came eventually, the way it does. A legitimate job, taxes taken out automatically, neighbors who borrowed tools and actually returned them, a mailbox that never held anything requiring urgent destruction. The old instincts went dormant, embarrassing in the way inherited habits get embarrassing once you’ve built a different kind of life, useful only for fixing a stubborn engine or catching somebody in a lie they hadn’t bothered to make convincing.

    Then the phone rang after midnight, a younger relative in trouble serious enough to matter and foolish enough to sound painfully familiar. The old training came back without being asked for. Find out what had actually been seen. Find out who had already talked. Get a lawyer in the room before anyone tried to be brave for its own sake. Bring cash. Bring food. Promise nothing that couldn’t be delivered.

    On the drive home afterward, the younger one asked whether the old stories about how they’d all been raised were true, and got a careful answer back: some of them. Asked whether it had been a hard way to grow up, and got a longer silence before the reply came. It was home. That answer sat in the car the rest of the drive, heavier than either of them wanted to say out loud.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: There Was an Old Woman

    Micro-Fiction Corner: There Was an Old Woman

    She lived alone at the edge of the county in a house too big for one person, and the neighbors had long since stopped wondering why she’d never remarried after her husband passed, assuming it was grief or stubbornness or simple contentment with her own company. What they didn’t know was that she’d been working on a solution for years, methodical about it in the way she was methodical about everything, canning vegetables and mending fences and, in the evenings after the chores were done, copying old recipes out of a book that had come to her through her mother’s side of the family, recipes that had nothing to do with food.

    The conjuring took the better part of a decade to get right, not because the working itself was difficult but because she was particular about the result, unwilling to settle for anything less than exactly what she wanted after forty years of marriage to someone who hadn’t listened well enough. She used flour and salt and rainwater collected in a specific basin, thread pulled from her late husband’s good coat, and words that felt less like a spell and more like a very long, very specific order placed with someone patient enough to fill it correctly.

    What arrived on the porch one October morning was a man of reasonable height and pleasant disposition, capable of good conversation and better silences, who liked her cooking and remembered her birthday without being told and never once suggested she was too particular about how the towels got folded. The neighbors assumed he was a cousin visiting from out of state, then a boarder, then eventually just accepted him the way small towns accept anything given enough time and no better explanation offered.

    She never told him what he was, and for many years he never asked. Then one spring morning, while she was folding towels, he told her he preferred them done another way. She nearly dropped the stack.

    After that came other things. He wanted tomatoes planted along the south fence instead of beans. He stopped pretending to like one of her stews. He took long walks without explaining where he had been. None of it was cruel. None of it was even unreasonable. That made it worse.

    One evening he found the recipe book.

    She watched him turn the pages until he reached the one written in her hand.

    “Did you make me?”

    She could have lied. Forty years of marriage had taught her what happened when people failed to listen, and ten years of conjuring had taught her the danger of imprecise instructions.

    What she had never learned was what to do when the thing she made began asking for a life of its own.

    The book contained another recipe beneath his.

    For correction.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: Mack and Syl

    Micro-Fiction Corner: Mack and Syl

    They’d been caving together for six years, long enough to trust each other blind in the dark, literally, headlamps failing more than once in that time and neither of them panicking because the other one was there counting steps and calling out the shape of the walls from memory. This particular cave was supposed to be an easy one, a known system with a mapped main chamber, good for a Saturday when neither of them wanted anything more ambitious than mud and echoes.

    The crawlspace that wasn’t on any map opened up behind a rockfall that shouldn’t have been loose enough to move, and Mack found it first, calling Syl over to look at a draft coming from somewhere that had no business having a draft at all. They told each other it was worth a quick look, the kind of decision cavers make constantly and mostly get away with, and they got maybe forty feet in before the walls stopped being rock in any sense either of them recognized, warm and faintly pulsing under gloved hands, lit by a reddish glow with no visible source.

    Neither of them said the word out loud for a long time, mostly because saying it felt like it would make the situation worse somehow, more permanent. Syl kept insisting it was some kind of geothermal formation, bioluminescent minerals, anything with a name that belonged in a textbook, and Mack kept nodding along because the alternative was standing in a tunnel that smelled like sulfur and old smoke, listening to something like distant screaming that might have just been wind moving through rock formations shaped wrong on purpose.

    They found their way back out by following the draft in reverse, which shouldn’t have worked and did anyway, emerging into ordinary daylight eleven hours after they’d gone in, though both their watches insisted only two had passed. They never told anyone what they’d seen, partly because nobody would have believed it and partly because they weren’t sure themselves what they were supposed to call it. They still cave together most weekends. They stopped going anywhere near unmapped crawlspaces, and neither of them has ever needed to explain to the other one why.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: Hey Twiddle Riddle

    Micro-Fiction Corner: Hey Twiddle Riddle

    The cat had been coming to the pub longer than any of the current regulars could account for, sitting on the same stool at the end of the bar like it had been carved into the wood specifically for that purpose, and it asked its first riddle to anyone who made the mistake of buying it a saucer of cream. The riddles were always simple-sounding at first, the kind of thing you’d hear from a child, what has a face but never smiles, what runs but never walks, and the trick of it was that the obvious answer was always wrong, and the cat would tilt its head at a wrong answer with an expression that managed to look almost sympathetic.

    Getting a riddle wrong cost you nothing, officially. The cat never demanded payment, never threatened anything, only asked the next riddle, patient as anything, willing to sit there all night if that was what it took. The trouble started with the third or fourth wrong answer, when people began noticing that the riddles had started referencing details they hadn’t told anyone, a childhood dog’s name, a fear they’d never said aloud, small private things stitched into the wording so casually that you almost missed it until the answer clicked into place and left you cold.

    By the fifth riddle, most people stopped answering at all, which the cat seemed to consider an answer in itself, nodding slowly and moving on to a new question anyway, one that somehow required a response even from silence. The ones who stayed the whole night, who kept answering out of stubbornness or pride or the simple human inability to leave a puzzle unfinished, tended to leave a little different than they’d arrived, quieter, prone to answering questions with questions of their own, laughing at pauses in conversation as though they’d heard a joke nobody else had told.

    The pub kept the cat around because it was good for business, in its way, and because nobody had figured out how to ask it to leave without risking one more riddle on the way out. Regulars learned early to buy their round, listen politely, and never, under any circumstances, be the one who answered correctly, since nobody who’d ever gotten a riddle right had stayed to explain what happened next.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: Incy Wincy Cider

    Micro-Fiction Corner: Incy Wincy Cider

    The first barrel began singing three days after it was tapped, a faint melody bubbling up through the spigot at closing time, something between a harvest song and a marching chant, and by the weekend half the regulars were humming it without realizing they’d learned the tune at all. The cider picked up verses the way a child picks up words, first a line about apples, then a line about autumn, then a whole cheerful chorus about the wisdom of ordering another round, and the chorus was catchy enough that strangers who’d never spoken before found themselves linking arms across tables to sing it properly.

    Business became extraordinary almost overnight, and nobody thought much about the pale threads growing beneath the foam, or thought about them just long enough to find a comfortable word for them. The brewer called it sediment. The health inspector, on his one visit, called it fungal contamination and made a note to follow up that never got followed up on. The cider itself, by the fifth verse, had started calling it family, and by then enough of the pub was singing along that the word passed without anyone really hearing it.

    The fungus was cordyceps, more or less, though no strain any laboratory would have recognized, content in alcohol instead of insects, communicating through fermentation instead of spores, and it had developed, as far as anyone could tell, strong and specific opinions about sobriety. People who drank enough of it grew sociable and thirsty and strangely unwilling to leave before the final chorus. When the bartender finally tried pouring the barrel down the drain, the whole room objected at once, cheerfully rather than angrily, lifting their glasses into a new verse while thin white filaments crept out from under their collars and the singing got louder to cover the sound of it.

    By midnight there was dancing on the tables. By dawn the barrel had been rolled into the street and was being pushed, gently and communally, toward the next pub down the road, and nobody present could have said whose idea that had been. Recordings of the song turned up online weeks later with no clear source, and people who listened to them too many times in a row reported an odd craving for apples and company. The original pub is closed now. On quiet nights, something is still said to slosh beneath the floorboards, and if the street outside is quiet enough, the chorus can be heard asking, gently, whether you fancy one more.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: Nah Nah Black Death

    Micro-Fiction Corner: Nah Nah Black Death

    The tune had started, as far as anyone could trace it, in a village that lost most of its people in a single terrible season, back when death moved through households like weather and nobody had the luxury of grieving one loss before the next arrived. The survivors needed something to do with their hands and their fear, and what they landed on was a song, sung low around the fires at night, half plea and half performance, the kind of thing that could pass for a joke if anyone asked what it meant.

    Nah nah, black death,
    Give us one more night to breathe,
    Nah nah, black death,
    We're not quite ready yet to leave.

    It wasn’t a hymn, exactly. It didn’t ask for mercy in any grand sense, didn’t promise faith or virtue in exchange. It just asked for time, a little more of it, phrased casually enough that singing it didn’t feel like admitting how frightened everyone actually was.

    The song outlived the outbreak that produced it, passed down the way songs do, sung at bedsides during ordinary illnesses long after the original terror had faded into distant history, sung half-jokingly by people who no longer remembered why the words were phrased quite so strangely. Families would sing it to a grandparent running a bad fever, to a child recovering slowly from something the doctor called nothing serious, always with the same rhythm, the same small, stubborn refusal dressed up as a lullaby.

    Nobody could say whether it had ever worked, whether the extra nights it had once been sung for had actually been granted or would have happened regardless, and by now that question mattered less than the singing itself, a habit worn smooth by centuries of use, still murmured at bedsides in language soft enough to sound like comfort rather than the small, old fear it had first been built from.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: Crow, Crow, Crow, You Quote

    Micro-Fiction Corner: Crow, Crow, Crow, You Quote

    The children in the valley grew up learning the song before they learned much else, taught by parents who’d learned it from their own parents, a simple call-and-response meant to be sung to the crows that gathered every morning on the fence line at the edge of the orchards.

    Crow, crow, crow, you quote,
    Tell us what the old ones wrote,
    Sing it plain and sing it true,
    We'll believe whatever comes from you.

    It was meant as a game, mostly, a way to keep small children entertained during the long chore of orchard work, watching the birds tilt their heads at the sound of small voices and pretending the tilts were answers.

    Except the crows in that valley had always seemed a little too responsive for comfort, arriving at exactly the moment the song started, leaving at exactly the moment it ended, and every so often, rarely enough that it never quite became undeniable, one of the older birds would let out a series of calls that didn’t sound like ordinary crow noise at all, clipped and rhythmic in a way that made the children go quiet and the adults find some sudden reason to be elsewhere.

    Nobody in the valley would say outright that the crows understood the song, or that the strange rhythmic calls meant anything, because saying it outright would mean deciding what to do about it, and it was easier to let the tradition continue exactly as it always had, a children’s game that everyone privately treated as something closer to a agreement. The orchards did unusually well, year after year, better than the soil or the weather should have allowed, and nobody wanted to be the one who stopped singing and found out whether that had anything to do with it.

    The children grew up and taught their own children the same song, the same tilt of the head expected from the birds, and if any of them privately wondered what exactly the old ones had written, and how the crows had come to know it, they kept that wondering to themselves the way their parents had.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: Dock-a-Bay Baby

    Micro-Fiction Corner: Dock-a-Bay Baby

    The fishermen who worked the early hours told the story so often that it had stopped sounding like a story and started sounding like weather, something you mentioned in passing without expecting anyone to doubt it. Somewhere between three and four in the morning, the hour when the water goes flattest and quietest and even the gulls seem to know better than to call out, a basket would appear at the end of one of the docks, and in the basket, a baby, calm and dry despite the damp, never crying, only watching the sky with an attention that unsettled anyone who looked too long.

    Nobody had ever caught the moment it arrived. Boats came and went all through that hour, lines checked, engines idling, and still no one had seen a boat pull up to leave it, no one had seen footsteps on the dock boards, no one had heard so much as a splash. By the time someone noticed the basket, the baby was simply there, wrapped in cloth that smelled faintly of salt and something sweeter underneath, like driftwood left too long in the sun.

    The old song the dockworkers sang to it while they waited for someone official to come had been passed down so many times nobody remembered writing it, soft and rocking, rock-a-bye, dock-a-bay, out where the deep tide rolls, when the boat comes in, we’ll bring you home, back where the water knows. The baby never cried during the singing, only blinked slowly at whoever held it, patient in a way that infants weren’t supposed to be.

    By sunrise, every single time, the basket and the baby were both gone, no trace left on the dock boards, no cloth, no smell of salt and sweetness, just the ordinary business of boats coming in with their catch. The workers stopped trying to explain it to newcomers after a while and simply taught them the song instead, the way you teach someone the words to something they’ll need to know eventually, whether they believe in it yet or not.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: Blinkle, Blinkle, Brown Dwarf Star

    Micro-Fiction Corner: Blinkle, Blinkle, Brown Dwarf Star

    The station had been broadcasting the same lullaby to the colony ships for three generations, a soft, warbling recording meant to soothe children through the long dark stretches between waypoints, and somewhere along the way the words had drifted from the original, worn smooth by distance and repetition until they became something the crew’s own. Blinkle, blinkle, brown dwarf star, how we wonder where you are, the recording went, sung by a voice nobody could remember recording, and the children who grew up listening to it never questioned why the lyric didn’t match the songs their ancestors had once sung about a small yellow sun back on a world most of them would never see.

    The star at the center of their system had been dimming for longer than anyone alive had been keeping track of it, a slow reddening that the older engineers still called a temporary phase out of habit, though the instruments told a plainer story every cycle. The colony had built its whole rhythm of living around that fading light, harvesting what warmth it could before the long cold stretches, teaching children to layer their sleeping mats and keep their voices low during the dimmest hours, as if quiet itself could be conserved along with the heat.

    At night, when the recording played through the station’s speakers, the children would ask their parents why the star sounded worried in the song, and the parents, most of whom had grown up asking the same question, would say only that all stars grow tired eventually, and that tired didn’t mean gone, not yet, maybe not for a long while.

    The lullaby always ended the same way, soft and unresolved, the star never quite located, never quite named as safe or finished, just held there in the last line like a held breath: blinkle, blinkle, through the black, someday, love, we’ll send you back. Nobody knew what that meant either, only that the smallest children always fell asleep before the final note.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys