madd
fictional

THE MIDNIGHT EDITION

Tag: #flashfiction

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: Do As Eternity

    Micro-Fiction Corner: Do As Eternity

    The phrase was stitched into a sampler that had hung in the hallway of every house my family owned for as far back as anyone bothered tracing. The linen had yellowed, the thread had gone brown, and the words formed a careful oval around an empty center. There were no flowers or houses or little moral scenes of domestic virtue, only the sentence circling itself. My mother called it an old blessing about living well enough that eternity would have no complaint with you, which satisfied me until the sampler became mine.

    After her death I hung it in my hallway and noticed that the words possessed no obvious beginning. There was no capital letter, no punctuation, nothing that established where the instruction should start or finish. Following the stitching eventually returned the eye to the same word, and reading from there produced another complete circuit. I stood before it far longer than I intended, tracing the sentence until the shape of it seemed to continue somewhere behind my thoughts.

    Repetition entered my days gradually. I would walk into the kitchen, forget why, return to the living room, and perform the same sequence again with identical movements. Pages of books repeated themselves although the page numbers advanced. Twice I received the same telephone call several days apart, complete with the same cough from the caller and a truck passing outside at precisely the same moment.

    My daughter noticed before I admitted anything was wrong. She asked why I sometimes greeted her twice in the morning and why, on certain evenings, I seemed surprised to find dinner already eaten. I began marking events on a calendar. Soon several dates contained two sets of notes in my handwriting, describing the same day with tiny variations.

    I considered destroying the sampler until I found photographs of older family homes. In every hallway it hangs in the same position. In one picture my grandmother stands beside it as a young woman. Another, supposedly taken thirty years later, shows her in different clothing but with exactly the same expression, one hand raised toward the same stitch.

    The sampler remains on my wall. Taking it down now feels strangely premature, because I am beginning to remember mornings that have yet to occur. Eternity, I think, may be less concerned with endless duration than with perfect recurrence, and my family has spent generations practicing one small domestic version of it until the pattern learned how to continue us.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: Hwalas ðec herigað

    Micro-Fiction Corner: Hwalas ðec herigað

    The chapel had been abandoned for nearly seventy years before the historical society restored it. Salt had softened the carvings, storms had taken most of the roof twice, and the parish records survived only in fragments. Above the altar remained a single inscription translated on the visitor placard as the whales praise you, though the smaller text admitted uncertainty about who, exactly, the original builders believed deserved the praise.

    Old accounts described whales approaching the shore each winter during the chapel’s first century. They came in groups far larger than normal migration patterns could explain and stranded themselves on the rocks beneath the seaward window. The congregation apparently considered the events auspicious. Surviving journals mention bells, hymns, processions, and quantities of oil rendered afterward, though none describe attempts to return the animals to the water.

    The beachings stopped around the same time regular services ended.

    I joined the final tour of the autumn season. Halfway through the guide’s talk, her radio crackled with a message from a sightseeing boat several miles offshore. A pod had broken from its usual route and was moving toward the chapel in a remarkably straight line. Another report followed. Then another. Different species were converging from opposite directions.

    The guide became visibly unsettled. She asked us to leave while staff closed the building, though before I stepped outside I heard something beneath the waves that sounded less like whale song than a sustained note answered from inside the chapel walls.

    The society reopened the building privately two nights later.

    Nobody would say who authorized the service. Residents reported hearing the old bell despite its rope having been removed decades ago. Several dozen whales gathered offshore but did not beach. They remained beyond the breakers throughout the night, aligned toward the chapel while voices inside sang hymns reconstructed from surviving fragments.

    Since then, the guide has been studying the old language and searching parish archives in neighboring towns. She believes the inscription has been translated too simply. The verb, she says, may imply praise, proclamation, or acknowledgment, depending on context.

    What concerns her is a newly recovered page from an eighteenth-century register. It lists every winter when the whales failed to come and records, beside each absence, some disaster suffered by the village before spring. The chapel may never have been built to summon them. Its congregation appears to have gathered each year to determine whether the sea had answered.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: Swa breþel seo, swa þystel

    Micro-Fiction Corner: Swa breþel seo, swa þystel

    The phrase appeared in my great-aunt’s notebook between a recipe for seed cake and instructions for removing rust from garden tools. Beside it she had written a rough translation about worthless things growing wherever they were allowed to root. A thistle filled the margin, traced repeatedly in black ink until the paper had worn almost transparent along the stem.

    The spring after she died, thistles emerged along the old property line. They came up weeks before anything else and followed the boundary with surveyor’s precision, turning at corners long since obscured by hedges and crossing beneath a gravel drive without breaking formation. When I checked the original deed, I discovered the line matched a strip of land she had sold forty years earlier after a dispute with the neighboring family.

    The plants behaved unlike ordinary weeds. Cutting them produced two stalks by morning. Herbicide darkened the leaves for several hours before they returned greener than before. Digging out the roots revealed pale runners descending deeper than I could follow, all angled toward the neighboring property.

    Her notebook contained additional entries once I knew what to search for. She had recorded arguments, encroachments, missing fence posts, and livestock allowed to wander across the boundary. Over the years the tone changed from anger to maintenance. She noted when the thistles first appeared, where they weakened, and which sections required reseeding. The final pages treated the border with the practical attention other people give gutters or furnaces.

    I stopped pulling the plants after finding the last entry. She had written that boundaries neglected too long eventually forget what they are protecting and remember only that they must hold.

    Since then I have walked the line every evening. The thistles remain thick and orderly, though their flowers now turn toward me as I pass. Last week several stalks appeared ten feet inside my property, forming a second boundary that encloses the house itself.

    I checked the notebook again. Beneath the old thistle drawing, faint enough to miss before, she had sketched two concentric lines around a small square marked HOME. I still do not know whether the outer growth was meant to keep something from crossing onto our land or whether the inner one is preparing for the possibility that it already has.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: Soð bið swicolost

    Micro-Fiction Corner: Soð bið swicolost

    My grandmother used the phrase whenever someone became too pleased about exposing a lie. Soð bið swicolost, she would say, then translate it loosely as truth is the most treacherous thing. To us it sounded like another of her inherited cautions, alongside advice about weather, strangers, and never trusting a door that opened too easily. Only during her final week did the words acquire a different weight.

    After the funeral, three relatives gave me accounts of her death. Each spoke with the calm certainty of someone describing events personally witnessed. One remembered her lucid until the end, sitting upright and asking after everyone by name. Another described a difficult final night in which she recognized nobody and repeatedly tried to leave the bed. A third recalled a long private conversation that, according to the others, occurred several hours after she had stopped speaking.

    No one appeared confused. Dates matched. Nurses remembered all three relatives being present. Hospital records supported details from each version while quietly contradicting the others.

    I began testing smaller truths afterward. I asked two people about dinners we had attended together, then compared their recollections with mine. Rooms changed shape. Conversations migrated between evenings. People remembered wearing clothes still hanging unused in their closets. Photographs occasionally supported whichever version I examined first, then seemed subtly different when I returned to them later.

    The effect eventually reached my own days. I told a coworker I had spent Sunday at home, and while describing it I remembered the entire afternoon clearly. Later I told my sister I had gone hiking and possessed an equally complete memory of mud on my shoes, cold wind, and a sandwich eaten beside a stream. My phone contained photographs from both days, timestamped within minutes of one another.

    I have stopped trying to determine which account is original. That question assumes truth begins somewhere stable and becomes distorted afterward. My grandmother seems to have understood something less comforting: perhaps truth accommodates the person receiving it, growing a shape each mind can carry without ceasing to be true.

    Her final expression returns to me differently depending on when I remember it. Sometimes she looked frightened. Sometimes amused. Increasingly, I remember recognition in her face, as though she had been waiting for the moment when I could finally inherit more than the phrase.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: þa cwom semninga sunnan beorhtra Lacende

    Micro-Fiction Corner: þa cwom semninga sunnan beorhtra Lacende

    The line was carved into the standing stone at the edge of the pasture, shallow enough that rain had nearly erased it. The farmer who owned the land dismissed it as decoration whenever visitors asked, something commissioned by an ancestor with more money than judgment. He had repeated that explanation for so many years that he delivered it without hesitation, despite the cattle refusing to graze within thirty feet of the stone and the pale circle of scorched grass around its base returning every spring with exactly the same circumference.

    I was staying nearby during the summer the light came. Everyone who witnessed it later described something different: a falling star, sheet lightning, a flame descending from a clear sky. I remember brightness arriving just after dusk with impossible speed, stopping directly above the stone and spreading across the pasture until every fence post, blade of grass, and frozen animal possessed edges sharper than daylight could produce. For several seconds I could see through my own hands well enough to make out the bones.

    The farmer found me afterward and seemed less surprised than tired. His family kept records, he admitted, though never where outsiders could find them. The light returned once every generation or two and always appeared while a woman from the household or its immediate circle stood nearby. Those who saw it clearly tended to live strangely afterward. Their bodies aged slowly, wounds closed too cleanly, and illnesses that should have taken months sometimes passed in days.

    The family had once treated this as a blessing. Eventually someone noticed the arithmetic.

    Each unusually long life corresponded with shortened ones elsewhere in the family. Children died in accidents. Healthy spouses developed sudden illnesses. People who had never seen the pasture seemed to lose years in ways nobody could predict. The records contained no proof, only enough repetition to make gratitude uncomfortable.

    Thirty-two years have passed since that evening. My face has changed little. Friends younger than I am have acquired white hair, grandchildren, artificial joints, and the careful movements of age while I continue receiving surprised looks from doctors comparing me with old photographs.

    I visit the stone occasionally at dusk. The scorched ring has widened by several inches since my last visit, and recently another woman from the neighboring farm has begun walking there in the evenings. I have considered warning her. What stops me is the growing suspicion that the light never chooses anyone at random, and that whatever accounting governs its visits may already have included the warning.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: Traitor Baiter

    Micro-Fiction Corner: Traitor Baiter

    Every unit has one, the old sergeant told me during my first posting. Nobody appoints him. Nobody lists the duty on paper. Eventually somebody becomes the person who notices when another soldier’s answers come half a second too late, when a joke lands strangely, or when a man starts giving away possessions without explaining why.

    Ours was a quiet older soldier who slept less than anyone I knew. The others called him the traitor baiter when he was out of earshot, although betrayal was only one of the things he seemed able to detect. He knew who was planning to desert, who was stealing, who had decided to hurt someone, and who was considering something even they had not yet admitted to themselves.

    He never accused anyone directly.

    Instead he appeared at inconvenient moments carrying coffee or cigarettes. He sat beside you and asked questions that sounded harmless until several minutes later, when you realized the conversation had somehow arrived at the one decision you were trying hardest to conceal. People who spoke with him usually changed course. Those who did not sometimes disappeared from the roster, transferred suddenly or were escorted away without explanation.

    I avoided being alone with him for nearly two years.

    He finally found me packing during the week I had decided to leave. I could no longer stomach the assignment waiting for us, and disappearing seemed preferable to carrying it out. He sat on the end of my bunk and told me he had no intention of stopping me. He only wanted to know whether I had imagined the entire road beyond the gate or merely the relief of taking the first step.

    We talked for almost an hour. I stayed.

    He retired several months later. During his farewell, he pressed a packet of cigarettes into my hand despite knowing I did not smoke. I thought it was a joke until I noticed that the package felt unusually heavy. Inside were twenty cigarettes and a tiny brass disk with no markings.

    Years have passed, and I still carry it.

    Sometimes the disk warms in my pocket around certain people. I have learned that resisting the sensation only makes it hotter. Eventually I find myself sitting beside whoever triggered it, offering one of those cigarettes and asking a question whose wording arrives before I decide what to say.

    The packet never empties.

    What unsettles me most is how rarely the person I approach is actually contemplating treason. Some are planning to run. Some intend violence. Others are preparing to betray promises nobody in the service would consider important. The thing passed down to me appears to recognize betrayal in a much broader sense than any military regulation does.

    Recently the disk has started warming when I am alone.

    I have spent several nights examining my choices, searching for the intention it has detected. So far I have found nothing certain, though I now understand why the old soldier rarely slept. Whatever this duty identifies, it seems capable of noticing a betrayal before the person committing it has decided which loyalty will be broken.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: The Scion In Splinter

    Micro-Fiction Corner: The Scion In Splinter

    The orchard had been grafted for so many generations that nobody could say which branch belonged to the original trees. Apples grew beside pears on trunks older than the farmhouse. Plums emerged from limbs that had once produced nothing but hard cider fruit. Every spring brought another round of cuts, bindings, and patient waiting.

    My grandfather called the practice the scion in splinter. He used the phrase for the small living piece inserted into another tree’s wound and treated the work with a solemnity I associated with funerals and church. He taught me how deep to cut, how tightly to wrap, and how to recognize the moment two different tissues had begun behaving as one.

    He said grafting was an introduction that continued long after the people involved were gone.

    The year after his death, the untended orchard produced fruit nobody recognized. It grew from one of the oldest trunks, pale-skinned and fragrant, with flesh that tasted first like pear, then apple, then something resinous and unfamiliar. Agricultural extension workers could not identify it. DNA samples returned inconsistent results, as though several cultivars occupied the same tissue without fully agreeing on which one dominated.

    An elderly orchardist listened to the story and asked how many generations had worked the trees. When I told her, she became unusually quiet. She explained that old grafts sometimes carried more history than anyone intended. Viruses, mutations, chemical signals, and cellular material passed from scion to rootstock. Enough exchanges over enough time could turn lineage into something less like a family tree and more like a conversation.

    That spring I began grafting cuttings from the pale-fruited branch.

    The dreams started soon afterward. I saw orchards laid out on hillsides I had never visited, hands binding branches with cloth instead of tape, people speaking words I understood only while asleep. Sometimes I experienced the sensation of cutting wood from the tree’s perspective, feeling the blade enter followed by the intimate pressure of foreign tissue pressed into the opening.

    The new grafts have taken unusually well. Several trees now produce the pale fruit, and when I work among them I sometimes know where a diseased branch is before seeing it. I know which limbs will survive winter and which should be removed. These certainties arrive with the unmistakable patience of my grandfather’s instruction.

    Lately, however, older knowledge has begun arriving with his. I recognize techniques he never taught me and remember planting trees that were mature before he was born. Whatever accumulated in the orchard has carried forward through far more hands than his, and each fresh cut gives that inheritance another living place to continue.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: A Quantum of Molluscs

    Micro-Fiction Corner: A Quantum of Molluscs

    The marine biology department kept the tank in the basement long after the grant supporting it expired. Its occupants were eleven pale snails collected years earlier from a vent field that subsequent expeditions failed to relocate. Nobody wanted responsibility for destroying them, relocating them, or explaining why organisms gathered at enormous expense had become an unlabeled aquarium beside the custodial sink.

    A graduate student discovered the counting problem while inventorying neglected specimens. Eleven snails appeared on Monday. Fourteen appeared Tuesday. Thursday there were nine. The shells bore identical markings in every count, which made identifying individuals impossible. Numbers changed only while the tank was unattended. The instant someone entered the room, the population settled.

    She installed a camera.

    The footage created worse problems. A recording that showed twelve snails during playback might show fifteen when reopened. Pausing on a single frame changed the count depending on how many times she examined it. Exported still images disagreed with their originals. When three researchers watched the same monitor simultaneously, each recorded a different number.

    Eventually she placed a chair before the tank and watched for six hours without leaving. The snails moved slowly across the glass while the room acquired a peculiar instability around them. Reflections appeared fractionally delayed. The timer light switched on twice without switching off between events. She became aware of several possible positions for her own hands resting in her lap and could not immediately decide which pair belonged to her.

    She began feeding the colony herself after that.

    Her thesis changed subjects without formal approval. She filled notebooks with observations about populations that seemed distributed across slightly different versions of the tank. She theorized that direct attention forced some temporary agreement among them. The snails themselves appeared increasingly reluctant to cooperate. Their numbers took longer to stabilize when she entered. Once, she counted seventeen for almost ten seconds before the colony dropped abruptly to eleven.

    The department finally ordered the tank removed during renovations. When movers arrived, the basement contained no aquarium. Staff records showed conflicting room numbers, conflicting collection dates, and three different versions of the original grant.

    The graduate student still comes in every morning carrying food. She disappears downstairs for twenty minutes and returns with wet hands, though the basement has been converted into offices.

    She says the colony is doing well. She has also stopped giving exact numbers, explaining that counting them too confidently seems to make certain possibilities feel excluded, and lately the snails have become surprisingly sensitive about being told how many of them are allowed to exist.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: To Thrill A Shockingbird

    Micro-Fiction Corner: To Thrill A Shockingbird

    The birds began nesting inside the transformer housing behind the substation during the same summer the outages started. They were small gray things with translucent eyelids and feathers that seemed darker whenever the current surged. Nobody could identify the species. The utility crews called them shockingbirds as a joke, and the name survived because removing the nests would require shutting down half the district.

    The outages were brief enough to be blamed on heat, aging equipment, or overloaded lines. Months passed before anyone noticed the timing. Every evening near dusk, the birds gathered along the busbars and began a rising metallic chatter. Streetlights dimmed in response. Televisions blinked. Elevators paused between floors. Then the birds would settle, and the grid returned to normal.

    One veteran lineman became fascinated by the pattern. She spent lunch breaks beside the housing with an insulated meter, recording surges that made no electrical sense. The birds appeared to absorb charge through their feet and release it in coordinated bursts. When one bird called, current shifted through three transformers at once. When the flock answered, power flickered across several neighborhoods in patterns resembling repetition.

    She started leaving the gate unlatched.

    One evening she entered the yard after everyone else had gone. The birds were already calling. Static lifted the hair on her arms and pulled loose strands from beneath her cap. Then the chatter changed, falling into pauses long enough to feel deliberate. Lights across the district began blinking in sequences. Apartment towers darkened floor by floor and returned in reverse order. Traffic signals flashed red, green, red, green, then held yellow for almost a minute.

    She stood there until the flock went quiet.

    Afterward she claimed the outages were conversations. The birds had learned the grid the way songbirds learn an environment, discovering that electricity could carry feeling farther than air. The first interruptions had been instinctive. Later ones had become structured. She refused to explain what she thought they were saying.

    She retired that winter but still drives to the fence several evenings a week. The crew leaves the gate unlocked for her. Lately, residents have begun reporting unusual dreams after outages: fields seen from impossible heights, the taste of copper, the conviction that something enormous is listening through household wiring.

    The birds have multiplied every year. Last week the utility company approved construction of a new substation across town. Before the first transformer was installed, three gray birds were already waiting on the empty frame, chirping softly toward wires that had yet to carry current.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: Swa swa sceap betweonen wulfum

    Micro-Fiction Corner: Swa swa sceap betweonen wulfum

    We found the collar half buried along the property line after a storm. The leather had decayed into something resembling black lace, though the brass tag remained intact. A neighbor who collected old books cleaned it with vinegar and read the inscription aloud: Swa swa sceap betweonen wulfum. He translated it loosely as like sheep among wolves and suggested it had belonged to a livestock guardian or perhaps been fashioned as a charm.

    We hung it beside the back door.

    The first sheep appeared three mornings later.

    It stood beneath the collar without grazing, drinking, or attempting to wander. No nearby farm claimed it. Two more arrived the following week, then another five. They came clean and calm, without brands or ear tags, gathering beside the porch every evening as if awaiting instructions. Animal control removed them twice. By sunrise, the same number had returned.

    Then shapes began appearing along the tree line.

    They moved on four legs but were too tall through the shoulders for coyotes and too deliberate for feral dogs. They watched the sheep from beyond the fence and never crossed into the yard. On moonlit nights we could sometimes count six or seven pairs of eyes. The sheep seemed aware of them yet showed no fear as long as the porch light remained on.

    Our scholarly neighbor became less enthusiastic about the collar after studying the inscription more carefully. He suggested the wording might describe a relationship rather than offer protection. Old boundaries, he explained, were sometimes maintained by obligations whose logic mattered more than anyone’s understanding of them. The collar may have marked a designated place where something vulnerable was permitted to remain unharmed because something else agreed to wait beyond it.

    We considered moving the collar back to the property line. That evening every sheep rose at once and crowded against the back door until we changed our minds.

    There are nineteen of them now. The shapes in the woods have multiplied as well. They remain beyond the fence, patient and remarkably disciplined, while the animals sleep beneath our windows.

    Last week I noticed another phrase scratched into the reverse of the brass tag, too faint for us to see before. Our neighbor has refused to translate it. He returned the collar without coming through the gate and advised us, with unusual urgency, to keep feeding the sheep.

    Since then we have begun wondering which part of the old arrangement required them to be sheep, and whether the distinction depends entirely on which side of the fence one happens to occupy.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys