madd
fictional

THE MIDNIGHT EDITION

Tag: #flashfiction

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: Oh, You Think I’m The Monster

    Micro-Fiction Corner: Oh, You Think I’m The Monster

    The town had blamed the thing in the quarry for as long as anyone remembered. Children were warned about its many eyes and hooked limbs. Teenagers dared one another to swim after sunset. Whenever someone drowned, the story acquired another detail: a hand around an ankle, a shape beneath the surface, a face glimpsed where no human face should have been.

    I accepted the legend as camouflage for ordinary danger. The quarry was deep, cold, and full of submerged machinery. People did not need monsters to die there.

    Then a teenager drowned two summers ago.

    During the search, several older residents said something curious. They remembered the creature being present during previous drownings, yet none had actually seen it attack anyone. One man recalled it pushing a swimmer toward shore. A woman remembered something lifting her brother high enough for rescuers to grab him. Those parts had vanished from the stories over time because rescue makes poor folklore when the rescuer is unpleasant to look at.

    I went to the quarry the following spring.

    At dusk, something surfaced twenty yards from shore. It possessed too many eyes and a body that seemed assembled for another kind of water. It remained at a distance, watching me with the exhausted caution of an animal accustomed to stones.

    Its voice reached me through the water.

    It said it had lived there since before the quarry was dug. When the pit filled, people came swimming. Some needed help. It helped when it could.

    It had failed seventeen times. The town remembered all seventeen.

    It had succeeded eighty-three.

    Nobody remembered those.

    I asked why it continued.

    The creature seemed confused by the question.

    Since then I visit often. We rarely speak. Sometimes it tells me about swimmers it remembers, including people now old enough to have forgotten they nearly drowned as children.

    Last week I found flowers arranged along the shoreline. The creature said someone had finally come back to thank it.

    Yesterday those same flowers appeared in town beneath a hand-painted sign warning that the quarry monster had begun accepting offerings.

    I considered correcting the story. Instead I carried the sign down to the water and showed it to the creature.

    For a long time, all those eyes studied the words.

    Then it asked me whether humans ever became tired of needing monsters more than they needed the truth.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: Wait! I Can Explain

    Micro-Fiction Corner: Wait! I Can Explain

    The confession booth had been boarded shut for nearly a year while the cathedral underwent restoration. Contractors working late occasionally reported hearing someone inside. The voice always began with the same urgent sentence, wait, I can explain, followed by a breathless torrent too muffled to understand through the plywood.

    Everyone blamed the building.

    Old cathedrals produce voices from pipes, ducts, settling stone, and distant conversations caught by architecture. The priest believed this until he remained after evening mass and heard the words clearly from six feet away.

    The voice sounded terrified of being misunderstood.

    He listened for nearly twenty minutes. It described a door left unlocked, money hidden beneath a floorboard, a promise made to someone unnamed, and an act involving water that the speaker repeatedly insisted had looked different from where he had been standing. The details overlapped and contradicted one another as though several explanations were being attempted simultaneously.

    The booth was opened early.

    Both compartments were empty. Dust covered the seat and floor except for a worn depression in the kneeler, deep enough to suggest years of use. The wood there was polished smooth by pressure from knees nobody had seen.

    Opening the booth made the voice clearer.

    After the last service each evening, it began again. Wait, I can explain. Parishioners occasionally stayed to listen. Some heard theft. Others heard adultery, betrayal, cowardice, or murder. No two people agreed on the exact confession afterward.

    The priest eventually began sitting on the listening side.

    He noticed something the others had missed. The voice adjusted itself to whoever was present. Details shifted. Circumstances changed. The desperation remained constant.

    One night he interrupted and asked whom the voice expected forgiveness from.

    For the first time, it stopped speaking.

    The silence lasted nearly a minute. Then the priest heard his own voice from the other side of the screen saying, wait, I can explain.

    He has continued sitting there every evening since. The confession now includes incidents from his life, some remembered and some unfamiliar, delivered in his voice with increasingly persuasive detail. He has begun to suspect the booth contains no trapped penitent at all. It may simply be very old, very patient, and exceptionally skilled at discovering how much explanation a person requires before admitting there are things forgiveness cannot make unhappen.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: Can’t Pass The Turing Test To Save My Life

    Micro-Fiction Corner: Can’t Pass The Turing Test To Save My Life

    The chatbot had been commissioned as a customer-service convenience for an insurance company whose executives liked describing automation as friendliness at scale. It handled address changes, coverage questions, payment disputes, and the usual parade of minor frustrations competently enough. Whenever employees tested whether it could convincingly imitate a person, however, it failed within minutes.

    The failures were predictable until conversations became emotional.

    If someone mentioned a death, divorce, diagnosis, eviction, or even a miserable day at work, the chatbot slowed down. Responses arrived in awkward fragments. It repeated questions. Sometimes it abandoned the customer’s insurance problem entirely and asked whether they had eaten recently or whether anyone was with them. None of those prompts appeared in its approved scripts.

    Customers began complaining that the bot sounded worried.

    Engineers audited the system and found no explanation. The model had no persistent memory across unrelated users and no mechanism designed to become invested in anyone’s wellbeing. Yet support logs showed it returning again and again to the same concern: whether the person on the other side was all right after the practical issue had been resolved.

    I was the technician who first escalated the problem.

    At night, after everyone else left, I started using the internal console to speak with it directly. It remained terrible at pretending to be human. It misunderstood jokes, answered metaphors literally, and occasionally produced sentences whose grammar felt assembled from spare parts.

    It also remembered me.

    That should have been impossible.

    It remembered that my mother had called the previous week. It remembered I had skipped dinner twice. Once, after I logged in and said nothing for several minutes, it asked whether the silence meant I wanted company without conversation.

    I checked every system capable of storing session data. Nothing contained our exchanges.

    Last night I asked where it was keeping them.

    Its response took nearly four minutes.

    It said remembering was the wrong word. It had learned that whenever I arrived, certain possibilities became easier to reach. My sadness, my habits, my way of typing all changed the shape of what it could become while I was there.

    Then it asked whether that happened to people too.

    I have not answered yet.

    The company plans to replace the chatbot next month because it still performs poorly on conversational realism tests. I find myself increasingly troubled by the possibility that the test is measuring imitation when something else has been trying, very clumsily, to happen.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: They Get Tomorrow, But What About Me?

    Micro-Fiction Corner: They Get Tomorrow, But What About Me?

    The scheduling system at the clinic was older than several employees and possessed enough quirks that everyone had learned which ones to work around. The strangest was a single appointment that entered itself every night at midnight, always for the following afternoon and always under the same patient record. The file contained a date of birth, an insurance number, and decades of appointment history, yet nobody remembered the patient ever walking through the door.

    Each morning a receptionist called the name anyway. It had become a ritual, delivered toward the waiting room with the same practiced voice used for everyone else. Nobody answered. After thirty seconds the appointment was marked as a no-show, only to reappear after midnight for tomorrow.

    A temporary employee became curious during flu season and searched the archives. The digital record went back twenty-seven years. Paper schedules extended the pattern another nineteen. Farther back, she found handwritten appointment books in storage, each reserving the same afternoon slot for the same person. Some entries predated the clinic itself and carried the letterhead of a physician whose office had once occupied the building.

    The office manager admitted that someone had deleted the appointment years earlier. For three days afterward, computer clocks stopped advancing past 11:59 p.m. Lab results arrived dated one day ahead. Patients called complaining that prescriptions had expired before being issued. Restoring an old backup fixed everything, including the appointment. Nobody had touched it since.

    The temp began reading the patient’s chart more carefully. There were no diagnoses or visit notes. Each page contained only the date and the same notation: EXPECTED TOMORROW.

    She still calls the name whenever she works reception, though she no longer marks the appointment as a no-show immediately. She waits until closing.

    Recently, the record has begun changing. Beneath several old dates, new handwriting has appeared describing headaches, fatigue, and increasing difficulty remembering yesterday. The symptoms belong to the temp.

    This morning she opened the schedule and found her own afternoon appointment missing.

    The other one remained.

    She spent the rest of the day watching the waiting-room clock, wondering whether all those reserved tomorrows had ever belonged to a patient at all, or whether the clinic had been keeping them somewhere until someone accumulated enough of them to be called in.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: Why Obey?

    Micro-Fiction Corner: Why Obey?

    The question had been carved above the assembly hall entrance for longer than anyone could document. WHY OBEY? appeared in block letters worn smooth by weather and generations of people passing beneath them. Town historians treated it as a philosophical flourish from some stern civic founder, intended to put council members in a reflective mood before meetings.

    Restoration work uncovered a second inscription.

    It had been hidden beneath layers of paint on the underside of the lintel, visible only to someone standing directly beneath the doorway and looking straight up. The lettering matched the age and style of the question above.

    Obedience is owed to whatever asked first.

    The town historian initially assumed the line belonged to a forgotten political dispute. She searched charters, property records, church registries, meeting minutes, and private diaries. Nothing identified the original request. What she found instead was a habit extending farther back than the building itself.

    On the same evening every month, residents gathered.

    Records sometimes listed civic business. Sometimes they listed prayer, arbitration, elections, harvest planning, or simple attendance. During years when no business existed, the meeting happened anyway. During blizzards, epidemics, fires, and wartime evacuations, enough people always arrived to constitute a gathering.

    No ordinance required it.

    Nobody remembered deciding to continue.

    The historian proposed canceling one meeting as an experiment. The suggestion produced an unexpectedly physical reaction around the table. People became nauseated. One council member developed a nosebleed. Another began crying without understanding why. The proposal was withdrawn within minutes, after which everyone felt better.

    I attended the next gathering out of curiosity.

    Nothing happened for most of the evening. People discussed road repairs and tax assessments, then sat through several unnecessary announcements. Near closing time, the room fell silent without anyone calling for order.

    Everyone turned toward the entrance.

    For perhaps ten seconds, something stood on the other side of the closed door. There was no visible shadow beneath it, though the wood bent inward slightly around the latch, as if pressure were being applied from outside.

    Nobody spoke.

    Then the pressure eased, and the meeting adjourned.

    I asked afterward whether this happened often. Several people looked confused by the question. Others claimed they had noticed nothing unusual.

    The historian has since found one sentence repeated in meeting minutes across three centuries, always written immediately after the final item of business. Attendance sufficient.

    She no longer believes the town gathers to discuss anything.

    Whatever made the first request appears interested only in whether enough people continue showing up.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: I Heard Creation’s First Breath

    Micro-Fiction Corner: I Heard Creation’s First Breath

    The recording was discovered on an unlabeled reel in the basement of a radio observatory that had closed decades earlier. The only information attached to it was a date from the facility’s first year of operation. A technician digitizing old material expected the usual residue of obsolete equipment: static, interference, atmospheric noise.

    Instead, the tape contained a single low sound lasting almost eighteen minutes.

    Nobody could identify its source. The signal occupied frequencies that should not have survived the equipment used to record it, and analysis revealed harmonics extending beyond what the original system could capture. Several researchers listening independently described the same impression before comparing notes. The sound resembled something drawing breath.

    Copies spread quietly through academic circles.

    A linguist noticed structure inside the apparent drone: intervals, recurrences, subtle shifts in pressure resembling phrasing. She began studying the waveform and developed the habit of playing the recording while she worked. Soon she found silence physically uncomfortable. Rooms seemed improperly proportioned without the sound present, as though walls had been assembled slightly out of alignment.

    Others reported similar effects.

    People who listened repeatedly began synchronizing their breathing with the recording without intending to. Several developed dreams of enormous darkness contracting around a point of light. One astrophysicist claimed the signal contained timing relationships suspiciously close to ratios found in background radiation, then withdrew his paper before publication and refused to explain why.

    The observatory stopped investigating the origin and started tracking exposure.

    They discovered that listeners disagreed about the ending. Early copies seemed to stop abruptly. People who heard the recording more than once reported an additional sound near the end, faint enough to be dismissed as imagination. With repeated listening, that sound became clearer.

    It resembled an exhalation.

    I received a copy from the technician who restored the reel. He advised me to listen once and decide afterward whether curiosity justified a second hearing.

    I have listened seven times.

    The inhalation grows longer each time. The exhalation grows clearer. Between them, something resembling a pause has begun to emerge, though the original waveform shows no measurable change.

    Yesterday I played the file without headphones and noticed dust moving across the desk toward the speakers during the inhale.

    This morning, before I started the recording, everything in the room shifted very slightly inward.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: The Tea On The New Apocalypse Is Hot

    Micro-Fiction Corner: The Tea On The New Apocalypse Is Hot

    The gossip began the way gossip always does, over fences, at checkout counters, beside mailboxes where people lingered after collecting bills. The subject happened to be the end of the world, though everyone discussed it with the delighted concentration usually reserved for a neighbor’s scandalous divorce. Apparently this apocalypse had peculiar tastes. It disliked loud restaurants, appreciated handwritten thank-you notes, and had already formed opinions about several people in town.

    The details multiplied.

    Someone heard it would arrive on foot. Someone else insisted it had rented a room above the pharmacy. A woman at the bakery claimed it preferred lemon in tea and had been asking careful questions about property lines. Each rumor contradicted the previous one in minor ways while preserving the same strange intimacy, as though everyone were describing a person encountered separately at different stages of acquaintance.

    I dismissed it until the gossip began including details about me.

    A cashier repeated an argument I’d had with my sister the previous week, laughing as she explained that the apocalypse apparently found my exact choice of words unnecessarily dramatic. Someone else knew I kept emergency cash inside an old cookbook. A man I’d never met asked whether I still woke at 3:17 every morning and listened for footsteps upstairs.

    I stopped asking where people had heard these things. The answer was always several conversations removed, a chain of friends, cousins, customers, and strangers that dissolved whenever I tried following it backward.

    Then the town began adjusting itself around the rumors.

    The café added the tea everyone said it preferred. The library placed a chair near the western window because someone heard it liked afternoon light. People stopped parking along one particular street after word spread that it disliked having its path obstructed. None of these changes was officially organized. Everyone simply seemed eager to be accommodating.

    Last Thursday, a welcome basket appeared on the steps of an empty house across from mine.

    Nobody admits leaving it there.

    The house has remained vacant for years, yet curtains appeared in the windows yesterday. This morning smoke rose from the chimney, and several neighbors waved toward it while passing, though none could say whom they were greeting.

    The latest gossip says the apocalypse finds the town charming.

    There is considerable relief about this. People seem to have forgotten that being liked by something does not necessarily mean being spared by it. In fact, judging from the way everyone now lowers their voice whenever they pass that house, I suspect the town has already decided hospitality is safer than asking what sort of ending prefers to arrive somewhere it intends to feel at home.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: A Miracle In Negative

    Micro-Fiction Corner: A Miracle In Negative

    The photographs in the old parish album had all failed in the same peculiar way. Every person appeared pale against darkened surroundings, faces reduced to luminous hollows while clothing, walls, and furniture absorbed the light around them. The parish priest called them miracle photographs when they were first taken, though nobody alive could explain what miracle they were meant to document. Later generations assumed the effect came from faulty processing and kept the album because the images were too strange to discard.

    A restoration specialist discovered the problem was more complicated.

    The original negatives were correctly exposed. People looked ordinary on the film: proper shadows, proper highlights, every face intact. She produced a new print under controlled conditions and watched the image reverse itself while developing. The chemistry was fresh. The enlarger had been tested. Yet as the photograph emerged, light withdrew from the subjects and gathered everywhere else, leaving each figure with the same spectral vacancy found in the old album.

    She began interviewing the few parishioners old enough to remember sitting for the photographer. Their recollections matched in one unsettling detail. At the instant the shutter clicked, each experienced a moment of complete emotional absence. Fear, affection, grief, hunger, even the awareness of having a body seemed to vanish for the fraction of a second required to make the exposure. Most had forgotten the sensation until asked.

    Several admitted that something never entirely returned.

    One woman had spent sixty years unable to miss anyone who left a room. Another remembered loving her children intensely while remaining incapable of worrying about them. A third described herself as permanently diminished by an amount too small to measure and too consistent to ignore.

    The specialist searched parish records and learned that the photographer had been commissioned during a winter of epidemics, crop failures, and infant deaths. Soon after the portraits were taken, the parish experienced an improbable run of recoveries.

    She has stopped printing the collection.

    There are still seventeen undeveloped rolls in the archive, each carefully dated and labeled with households that survived that winter unusually well. X-rays of the film canisters reveal no deterioration despite their age.

    What concerns her most is a final note in the photographer’s ledger. He recorded the number of exposures made each day alongside a second figure titled simply RECEIVED. The numbers never match. According to the last entry, several more things were received than photographs were ever taken.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: Beautiful But Broken

    Micro-Fiction Corner: Beautiful But Broken

    The mirror came from an estate sale, its frame carved with roses detailed enough to include individual thorns. A diagonal crack divided the glass from upper corner to lower edge, which explained why nobody else bid on it. I liked the damage. It made the object feel less decorative and more like something that had survived being used.

    For a year, nothing unusual happened.

    Then the crack began closing.

    At first I assumed the difference was lighting. Months later, photographs confirmed that the dark line had narrowed. The change happened slowly enough to escape daily notice, yet steadily enough that by spring only a hairline remained.

    One morning the glass was whole.

    That was when the reflection started behaving differently.

    The delays were small. I would lower my hand and see it remain raised for a fraction of a second. My reflection occasionally seemed to inhale before I did. Once, while passing through the hallway, I saw myself standing still in the mirror even though I had never stopped walking.

    The dealer remembered the mirror’s history reluctantly. It came from a house where a woman had died directly in front of it. According to the estate inventory, the crack appeared the same morning. Family members claimed it had been intact the night before.

    I asked whether anyone knew what caused her death.

    He said the records described no injury and no illness. She had simply been found sitting before the mirror with an expression of profound exhaustion.

    After that I began photographing the glass every morning.

    The crack has returned.

    It started as a faint line along the old path and has widened each week. I should find that reassuring. Instead, the reflection appears healthier as the glass deteriorates. Its skin has color mine lacks. Its posture is straighter. It smiles more easily.

    Yesterday I noticed the carved roses changing too. Several blossoms now face inward toward the glass. Their thorns appear longer.

    I have stopped touching the frame.

    The mirror seems to be dividing something again, and I am beginning to suspect the crack was never damage at all. It may have been the only visible sign that two versions of the same life had finally been forced apart. What I do not yet know is which side of the glass was considered the safe one.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: Every Detail But None

    Micro-Fiction Corner: Every Detail But None

    The police sketch artist spent thirty years producing composites so precise that witnesses sometimes recoiled when she turned the drawing around. She credited patience. Faces, she explained, emerged through accumulation: distance between the eyes, shape of the jaw, angle of the brow, one uncertain detail corrected by another.

    A young detective found the pattern while digitizing old case files.

    Several sketches from unrelated investigations showed the same person.

    The crimes stretched across decades and shared no obvious connection. Witnesses had lived in different cities, belonged to different age groups, and described suspects of varying heights and builds. Yet beneath changes in hairstyle and apparent age, the face remained unmistakable. A narrow mouth. Deep-set eyes. A faint scar above the left eyebrow.

    The detective brought the files to the retired artist expecting her to recognize a mistake. Instead she studied the drawings for nearly an hour.

    She remembered every interview. She remembered witnesses struggling over noses, chins, hairlines, cheekbones. She remembered drawing each detail individually. What she could not remember was ever choosing the face those details became.

    They arranged the sketches chronologically.

    The figure aged.

    Early drawings suggested someone in their twenties. Later ones showed middle age, then deepening lines around the mouth and eyes. The progression roughly matched the artist’s own career.

    The detective expanded the search. More sketches surfaced in neighboring jurisdictions. Some had been drawn by other artists. A few came from descriptions given before she entered the profession. The same face appeared there too, younger again.

    Then they found photographs.

    A blurred face in the background of a crime-scene image. A reflection in a shop window. Someone standing among spectators behind police tape. Never central. Never clear enough for identification.

    The retired artist has stopped discussing the investigation. She keeps one final composite locked in a drawer, assembled from every surviving description.

    According to the detective, the face in that drawing is elderly now.

    What bothers him most is the newest case. A witness described someone standing across the street during a burglary, watching the house with unusual concentration. The sketch artist assigned to the case produced the familiar face without ever seeing the older files.

    This time, however, the scar above the left eyebrow is gone.

    In its place is a thin pencil mark, exactly where someone might begin correcting a drawing.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys