madd
fictional

THE MIDNIGHT EDITION

Tag: #flashfiction

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: Rampire Princess Igloo

    Micro-Fiction Corner: Rampire Princess Igloo

    The children invented the game during a winter so cold the gutters froze solid. They built a snow fort at the dead end of the block, packed the walls nearly shoulder-high, and carved a throne into the center. Whoever occupied the throne longest became the Rampire Princess, a title assembled from words nobody could later trace. The game survived childhoods, moves, divorces, demolished houses, and every adult attempt to explain why no one used the name correctly.

    When I returned to the neighborhood decades later, the fort was still there.

    It had been rebuilt many times, yet the oldest section remained beneath an overgrown hedge. Even in July, when the pavement softened in the heat, a fist-sized core of ice persisted in the soil. Children still gathered around it every winter, adding fresh walls and choosing a new princess. None could explain the rules beyond the essentials: the princess sat, the others tried to remove her, and she was never supposed to leave the throne before dark.

    My mother remembered more.

    Years before I was born, a girl had refused to surrender the seat during a blizzard. By the time adults realized the children were still outside, visibility had collapsed. They found the fort intact and the other children huddled near the entrance. The girl was gone. No footprints led away.

    Afterward, parents demolished the fort. Children rebuilt it the following winter without discussing why. Every generation did the same.

    This year I watched from my mother’s window as the youngest child in the group climbed onto the snow throne. The others became unusually quiet. She sat very straight, hands folded in her lap, while frost thickened along the inside walls.

    I went outside before dusk and told them the game was over.

    None argued. That unsettled me more than resistance would have.

    The child on the throne opened her eyes and asked whether I had come to relieve her. I said yes before understanding the question. The other children immediately began dismantling the fort around us, laughing again as though released from some obligation.

    Since then, the patch beneath the hedge has finally started melting. My own hands, however, stay cold no matter how warm the room becomes, and every night I dream of sitting somewhere made of snow while generations of children wait patiently for me to decide who sits there next.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: The Scarlet Maw

    Micro-Fiction Corner: The Scarlet Maw

    The tavern had operated under that name for so long that nobody remembered whether it referred to the red door, the stained-glass windows, or some forgotten owner with theatrical taste. The current proprietor inherited the building along with its ledgers, liquor license, and several generations of unpaid repairs, and for years regarded the name as one more piece of branding nobody had bothered changing.

    During the handover, the previous owner mentioned a cellar door at the rear of the building and advised her never to open it after last call. He offered no explanation, and she assumed the warning concerned pipes, wiring, or some structural defect he hoped to avoid paying for.

    She ignored him once.

    It happened during a quiet winter night after the final customer had gone. Behind the door lay no storage room. A passage descended beyond the foundation, narrow and red, its walls ribbed with pale bands that tightened and released at long intervals. Warm air moved through it in a slow inward pull. When she leaned closer, the passage contracted slightly around the light from her phone.

    She closed the door and began noticing details she had previously dismissed. Glasses left overnight sometimes stood empty by morning even when nobody had cleared them. Regulars who spent decades drinking at the same tables seemed to age unevenly, remaining unchanged for years before suddenly appearing much older. The building itself shifted through the seasons, floorboards rising and settling with a rhythm that never matched humidity.

    She eventually tracked down the previous owner at a retirement home. He laughed when she asked about the cellar. The tavern, he explained, had always done better when crowded. It liked conversation, music, arguments, confessions, flirtations, and all the other things people released after enough drink. Owners who kept the place lively tended to prosper.

    She asked what happened to everything the building took in.

    He told her that was the wrong question to ask while still standing inside it.

    Since then she has kept longer hours. The tavern does excellent business. Customers often remark that the place feels unusually warm and intimate, especially late at night. Lately, though, the cellar door has started opening by itself just before closing, and the red passage beyond seems slightly shorter each time, as though whatever has been swallowing the noise for all these years has begun moving closer to the room where the noise is made.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: Spinner Tori’s Inner Story

    The carousel at the edge of the fairground had run on the same tinny calliope recording for more than forty years. Paint peeled from the horses, mirrors had clouded around their edges, and the brass poles wore dark where generations of children had gripped them. One horse stood apart from the others only because a small plaque at its base read TORI.

    Nobody knew who had named her.

    Children chose her whenever possible. Something in the tilt of her carved head made the expression seem different from every angle. Seen from the entrance, she appeared cheerful. From the operator’s booth, the same painted face looked frightened. Parents often remarked on how lifelike she seemed before laughing at themselves.

    The longtime operator told me that Tori had always moved slightly out of time with the carousel. Each rotation she lagged perhaps half a second behind the other horses. The mechanism should have made that impossible, yet maintenance crews never found a fault. Riders sometimes stepped off disoriented, insisting the ride had lasted much longer than the three minutes shown on the clock.

    Eventually the operator showed me a hidden panel beneath the saddle.

    Inside the hollow body lay a folded scrap of paper. Most of the writing had faded beyond recognition, though one line appeared to contain a woman’s name different from Tori and a date nearly twenty years before the fairground opened. The ink changed subtly whenever anyone tried to copy it. Letters shifted places. Numbers reversed. Once, the operator photographed the note and discovered that the image showed a completely different date.

    She stopped opening the panel after that.

    The carousel began slowing near the end of her final season. Motors tested normally. Bearings were replaced. The other horses kept perfect time while Tori drifted farther behind each night.

    Children riding her started telling similar stories. They described seeing another fairground during the turns, older and dimmer, where adults rode the carousel instead of children. Some said a woman stood beside the operator’s booth counting rotations. One child claimed the woman kept asking whether anyone remembered her real name.

    After closing, the calliope now continues faintly for several minutes after the power is cut. Only one set of hoof mechanisms moves during those extra rotations.

    The operator retired last week and left instructions for her replacement. Keep the panel closed. Never repaint the horse’s face. If Tori completes one full turn after the rest of the carousel has stopped, do not restart the ride until morning.

    She did not explain the final rule.

    Yesterday, the new operator called to tell her Tori had stopped lagging.

    For the first time in decades, the horse is moving slightly ahead of the others. The operator said it feels less like the mechanism has been repaired and more like whatever has been circling inside finally knows where it wants to arrive.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: The Wisdom of Rice

    Micro-Fiction Corner: The Wisdom of Rice

    My grandmother threw rice at every wedding she attended well into her nineties. Long after guests switched to bubbles, bells, flower petals, and biodegradable confetti, she arrived with a small cloth pouch and ignored anyone who warned her about birds. Rice remembers things bubbles cannot, she would say, as though the explanation were obvious.

    After she died, my mother found shelves of glass jars in the pantry. Each contained a handful of dried rice labeled with a wedding date and the names of the couple. Some went back more than seventy years. Folded inside every jar was a small square of paper bearing one of several marks: a circle, a slash, a pair of parallel lines, occasionally something resembling a knot.

    We assumed it was sentimental record keeping until my mother began comparing the jars with family history.

    The slashes belonged almost exclusively to marriages that ended early. Circles marked long unions. Parallel lines appeared beside couples who stayed married but lived largely separate lives. The knotted symbol was rare. Every marriage bearing it had survived circumstances that should have destroyed it: disappearances, affairs, prison sentences, decades of resentment, even one case where the couple divorced and remarried each other three times.

    My grandmother apparently knew which symbol to draw by watching the rice fall.

    My mother began testing the method at weddings. A wide scatter that bounced freely across the pavement usually meant the couple would grow apart without catastrophe. Rice that landed close around their feet suggested endurance. Grains that struck one person and avoided the other entirely corresponded disturbingly well with later illness or abandonment.

    Then came my wedding.

    My mother used rice from my grandmother’s old supply, throwing it as we left the ceremony. Her face changed almost immediately. She gathered several grains from the pavement before anyone could step on them and sealed them in a napkin.

    She has refused to tell me what pattern they made.

    Months later I found her new collection of jars. Mine sat on the top shelf with no symbol on the paper inside. Instead, the rice itself had arranged into a narrow ring against the glass, leaving the center completely empty.

    I asked her what it meant. She admitted she did not know because my grandmother had never recorded anything like it.

    Since then, my spouse and I have both started dreaming of the same room: a long table covered with white cloth, two empty chairs at the far end, and rice falling continuously from somewhere above. My mother has begun checking our jar every morning because the ring keeps tightening by a few grains at a time, though nobody has opened the lid.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: Hell, If This Ain’t Heaven

    Micro-Fiction Corner: Hell, If This Ain’t Heaven

    The retirement home sat beside a wide bend in the river, beautiful enough that families repeated the same phrase whenever they first toured the grounds. Hell, if this ain’t heaven, they would say, relieved by the gardens, the sunlight on the water, and the absence of everything they had feared a nursing facility might look like. Staff heard the remark so often that it eventually became background noise.

    Residents began saying it too.

    A newly hired nurse noticed the pattern because she worked nights and paid attention to strange repetitions. People nearing death often used the phrase within a day or two of passing. They said it while gazing toward the river, usually in late afternoon when sunlight reflected off the bend and filled the rooms with a pale gold haze. Some smiled. Others sounded surprised. One resident who had been mostly unresponsive for a week sat upright, spoke the sentence clearly, then asked whether someone had remembered to open the gate.

    There was no gate.

    The nurse began keeping records in a notebook hidden behind her locker. Room number, time of day, weather, exact wording, date of death. She discovered that the phenomenon followed the light rather than the residents. During summer, when the sunset angle shifted, the affected rooms changed accordingly. People housed away from the river rarely said anything unusual until they were moved temporarily into a room with the proper view.

    Then she heard herself say it.

    She was alone in the supply closet on an ordinary Tuesday, folding towels with no window nearby. The words came out softly in a voice she recognized only after hearing it. It belonged to a resident who had died the previous winter.

    After that, she started avoiding the riverside corridor during late afternoons. The avoidance lasted three days. On the fourth she found herself standing before the largest window on the floor with no memory of walking there.

    The river below looked unusually still. Reflected sunlight formed a bright path across the surface, ending exactly beneath the building. For several seconds she thought she could see figures standing along that path, shoulder to shoulder, facing upward.

    The facility has since installed blinds in every riverside room. Residents complain about them constantly and somehow manage to raise them shortly before sunset, even those who cannot leave their beds unaided.

    The nurse has stopped trying to prevent it. Her notebook now includes another column labeled VISITATION, because several residents who spoke the phrase did not die afterward. They simply became calmer, as though reassured by something they had seen.

    She finds that possibility more unsettling. Death would at least explain why the river seems to be calling. Whatever appears in the light may instead be convincing some of them that they already know the way back.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: Shook By A Graveyard Look

    Micro-Fiction Corner: Shook By A Graveyard Look

    The cemetery caretaker had a phrase for the expression certain visitors acquired after standing too long over a grave. He called it the graveyard look and claimed he could recognize it from half a field away. Ordinary mourners shifted their weight, wiped their eyes, checked the time, eventually remembered the living world waiting beyond the gates. Someone with the graveyard look became perfectly still, the face emptied of everything except attention.

    He taught me to spot it during my first week on the job. The dead, he said, grew accustomed to familiar company. Visit often enough and they learned your shape. Stand still long enough and they occasionally mistook you for something that belonged there permanently. His remedy was simple: approach noisily. Scuff gravel. Cough. Say something ordinary about rain or traffic. Give whoever was being watched a reason to remember they still occupied a body.

    I treated this as workplace folklore until the widow in section nine froze beside her husband’s stone one October afternoon. She had visited every Sunday for three years, always leaving chrysanthemums and talking quietly for twenty minutes before going home. That day she remained motionless for nearly an hour.

    Even from the maintenance shed, something about her posture felt wrong.

    I crossed the path dragging my boots through the gravel and called out that frost was expected overnight. She jerked hard enough to drop her handbag and drew several sharp breaths, as though surfacing from deep water. When I asked whether she was all right, she said she had been listening to her husband explain how lonely the cemetery became after closing.

    She stopped visiting regularly after that.

    Since then I have noticed other things. People wearing the graveyard look sometimes face the wrong headstone. Fresh flowers appear beside markers belonging to families who moved away decades ago. More than once I have heard my own name spoken from behind me while working alone.

    The caretaker retired last winter. On his final day he gave me his keys and advised me never to count how many people remained on the grounds after sunset. I understood the warning only recently.

    Some mornings, before leaving for work, I catch the graveyard look on my own face in the hallway mirror. The stillness arrives before I realize I have stopped moving, and my eyes seem focused on something several feet behind my reflection. I scuff my boots against the floorboards until the feeling breaks. Lately, though, the sound has been answered by another scrape from somewhere inside the mirror, slightly delayed and growing more confident each time.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: A Certain Style

    I noticed her the way you notice weather changing, gradually and then all at once. For nearly a year she appeared two rows ahead of me at every wedding I attended, always in the aisle seat and always turned slightly toward the couple exchanging vows. She possessed the particular composure of someone who had attended hundreds of such ceremonies. Her smile arrived at exactly the right moments, and whatever she wore seemed perfectly chosen for the season, the venue, even the flowers.

    For months I assumed we moved in overlapping circles. By the fourth wedding I started counting. By the sixth I began asking questions. None of the couples knew her. Her name appeared on no guest list. Photographers found her in their pictures, sometimes seated prominently enough that forgetting her seemed impossible, yet nobody remembered speaking to her at the reception. One bride studied a photograph for nearly a minute before saying the woman’s dress was exactly what she herself would have worn if she had been attending instead of marrying.

    At the seventh wedding, the woman caught me watching. Her usual ceremonial smile changed into something warmer, almost relieved. She inclined her head slightly, acknowledging that I had finally understood enough to be interesting.

    She attended my wedding the following spring.

    Her dress matched a shade I had privately considered for the flowers and never mentioned to anyone. During the vows she watched me more closely than she watched my intended. Once, our eyes met, and for several seconds I became acutely aware of how I was standing, where my hands rested, how wide I was smiling. I adjusted all three without deciding to.

    Afterward, photographs began troubling me. In every picture my posture resembled hers. Within months I caught myself using her restrained smile during arguments, funerals, even moments alone. My marriage changed too, though I cannot identify a single event that changed it. We simply began behaving like two people remembering how married people ought to behave.

    Then the invitations started arriving.

    Some were addressed to strangers. Others contained no names at all, only dates and locations. I attend anyway. Nobody questions me when I take an aisle seat two rows back. I always seem to own the appropriate clothes, though I no longer remember buying them.

    Recently I have noticed certain guests watching me with growing concentration. When one finally catches my eye, I find myself smiling more warmly than the occasion requires. There is satisfaction in that moment, accompanied by the strange certainty that whatever I inherited was never interested in weddings themselves. It requires only ceremonies where people promise to become something, because promises apparently leave enough room for another shape to enter.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: Bleak of Dawn

    Micro-Fiction Corner: Bleak of Dawn

    The phrase first appeared in the logbook of a fishing vessel that vanished for eleven days and returned with fuel tanks nearly full, nets empty, and its crew physically unharmed. Every sailor used the same expression when interviewed: bleak of dawn. None remembered learning it from the others. Each insisted it was simply what those mornings had been called.

    According to navigation instruments, the boat remained in familiar waters. There was no major storm, no recorded fog, and no mechanical failure sufficient to explain the disappearance. The crew remembered something different. For eleven days, the sun attempted to rise and never completed the task. The horizon brightened to a gray, exhausted half-light and remained there. Watches continued running. Meals were eaten. Night arrived eventually, yet morning never advanced beyond that colorless threshold.

    They also agreed that something was observing them through the light.

    Nobody saw a figure or object. The sensation came from the dawn itself, an awareness directed toward the deck whenever someone stepped outside. One crewman described it as waiting for an answer to a question he could feel but never hear. Another believed the light was measuring how long they could tolerate uncertainty before somebody declared that full daylight would never return.

    On the eleventh morning, one of them finally did.

    Accounts diverge sharply after that. Some remember him shouting. Others remember him whispering. One insists he merely thought the words. Within minutes the sun rose normally, the engines started without assistance, and the harbor appeared on the horizon several hours earlier than navigation should have allowed.

    Most of the crew never went to sea again.

    Years later, their memories have begun changing. Two now insist there were twelve mornings. Another remembers someone aboard whose name appears nowhere on the manifest. The man who supposedly broke the silence denies doing so and says the others have assigned him that role because every ordeal eventually demands a person to blame for ending it.

    The vessel still works the same waters under different ownership. Its current crew maintains a private dawn log, recording cloud cover, brightness, and the exact minute sunlight clears the horizon. Recently, several entries have been marked with the same phrase despite perfectly ordinary weather.

    The captain has ordered everyone to stop using it. He says language encourages patterns, especially at sea. Even so, each morning the crew gathers on deck a little earlier, waiting to see whether daylight will finish arriving before anyone feels compelled to say that it will not.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: Eschaton is Going to be a Fine Day

    Micro-Fiction Corner: Eschaton is Going to be a Fine Day

    The preacher on local access television had announced the end of the world every autumn for thirty years. He was small, cheerful, and relentlessly specific, standing beneath a hand-painted sign while naming a date in October and assuring viewers that whatever arrived would do so under pleasant conditions. People watched for entertainment. Restaurants ran specials. Someone once printed T-shirts reading SEE YOU AFTER ESCHATON when the predicted Tuesday passed uneventfully.

    A graduate student digitizing the broadcasts noticed something nobody else had. The dates changed each year, yet every one corresponded with the mildest clear afternoon recorded locally that autumn. Thirty predictions matched thirty unusually fine days: low humidity, little wind, comfortable temperatures, excellent visibility. The weather archive confirmed the pattern closely enough that the student’s advisor checked the calculations twice before asking where the preacher obtained his forecasts.

    By then he had retired from broadcasting.

    When contacted, he seemed amused by the question. He said people had misunderstood him from the beginning. Eschaton, he explained, concerned unveiling, completion, the removal of whatever prevented one thing from being seen as another. He had never promised explosions, trumpets, graves opening, or cities burning. Those embellishments belonged to viewers.

    Asked how weather entered into it, he replied that an unveiling was important enough to deserve decent conditions.

    This year’s date had already been chosen.

    Since the announcement, meteorologists have become increasingly uncomfortable. Forecast models that usually diverge beyond a week now agree with unusual precision. Next Tuesday will apparently be mild, cloudless, and almost windless across an area hundreds of miles wide. Competing models produce nearly identical temperatures.

    Other things have begun aligning as well. Sunrise and sunset times listed by separate services differ by less than a second. Migrating birds have altered course toward the region. Amateur astronomers report several stars appearing fractionally brighter each night, though observatories dismiss the measurements as calibration errors.

    The former preacher has reserved a folding chair on a hill outside town. He plans to bring sandwiches and has advised anyone joining him to wear comfortable shoes. When asked what exactly will be unveiled, he smiled and said that knowing beforehand would spoil the purpose.

    Tuesday’s forecast remains perfect. What troubles me is Wednesday. Every weather service I check now displays the same blank space where the forecast should be, and none of them appears able to explain why.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: Wouldst Me Marry Thee?

    Micro-Fiction Corner: Wouldst Me Marry Thee?

    The question appeared carved into the oak at the edge of the churchyard in lettering old enough to send the vicar searching through reference books. Wouldst me marry thee? was the closest translation anyone agreed upon. Nobody knew who had carved it. The bark had healed smoothly around the letters, and an arborist estimated from the growth that the words must have been cut while the tree was still young, despite parish records making no mention of them.

    For a while, the inscription became harmless local folklore. Couples posed beneath it. Ribbons appeared around the trunk. Teenagers dared one another to answer yes after dark. The amusement faded when a groom collapsed during a wedding in the adjoining field on the same afternoon every leaf on the oak turned brown and fell at once.

    His bride later admitted she had answered the carved question when she was sixteen.

    She remarried within a year. That marriage has lasted.

    The vicar began examining older parish records and discovered a pattern he preferred not to discuss publicly. Weddings conducted within sight of the tree often failed quickly, sometimes through infidelity or simple incompatibility, sometimes through accidents that left no marriage to preserve. Couples in which one partner had previously answered the oak aloud remained together with extraordinary consistency. Some were miserable. A few lived separately for decades. None divorced.

    The distinction troubled him enough that he started redirecting wedding photographs to the far side of the church.

    Last spring I stood beneath the oak alone and answered yes. I had no partner and no romantic prospects. It was curiosity, perhaps loneliness, perhaps the kind of foolish impulse that feels safest precisely because nobody is there to witness it.

    Three months later I met the person I am marrying this June.

    Everything about the relationship has unfolded with unnerving ease. Our preferences align where they should and differ where difference remains interesting. Our families get along. Even arguments resolve with suspicious efficiency. Sometimes my future spouse wakes from dreams about the churchyard despite never having visited it.

    Last week, while sorting through old photographs, I found one taken at a parish picnic decades before either of us was born. The oak stands in the background, smaller then, its inscription already visible. Beneath it are two blurred figures whose faces cannot be made out. One is wearing the ring currently on my hand.

    I have stopped wondering whether the tree predicts marriages. I am more interested now in when the proposal actually occurred, and how many generations we have spent making our way toward an answer already given.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys