madd
fictional

THE MIDNIGHT EDITION

Tag: #flashfiction

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: Wyrd bið ful āræd

    Micro-Fiction Corner: Wyrd bið ful āræd

    My uncle kept the phrase framed above his workbench for most of his adult life. Wyrd bið ful āræd. He translated it for me as fate is fully fixed and said he found the idea comforting. Worry became wasted effort if the destination had already been chosen. He was a careful man, which made the philosophy seem less like fatalism than permission to stop imagining every possible disaster.

    The accident changed his relationship with the words.

    For a week before the saw took two fingers from his left hand, the frame rattled against the wall whenever he entered the workshop. He checked the nail, leveled the frame, even replaced the wire. Nothing helped. On the morning of the accident, he glanced up just before feeding a board into the blade and saw the frame hanging perfectly still. Years later he told me that stillness frightened him more than the saw.

    He never removed the phrase. He simply learned to work without looking directly at it.

    I inherited the frame after his death and hung it in my own workshop because grief makes sentimental people of us. For nearly a year it did nothing. Then, last month, the glass began vibrating faintly whenever I switched on the table saw.

    Since then I have noticed other warnings. A screwdriver rolls from the bench before I reach for it. The overhead bulb flickers moments before I climb the ladder. Once, a hammer fell from a hook and landed exactly where my foot would have been if I had taken another step.

    I have avoided every predicted accident so far.

    That should reassure me. Instead, the frame rattles harder each time.

    My uncle left several notebooks among his tools, and I finally opened them last week. The final pages contain lists much like mine: avoided cuts, missed falls, machines switched off seconds before failure. His handwriting becomes increasingly cramped until one sentence appears again and again across the margins. He had come to believe fate did not mind being delayed because delay merely gave it more material to work with.

    I still keep my eyes on my hands while working. I have also stopped congratulating myself whenever a warning saves me. Somewhere in the workshop, something seems to be keeping count of every outcome I refuse, and lately the frame has begun rattling even when none of the tools are running.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: Ealra worulda woruld

    Micro-Fiction Corner: Ealra worulda woruld

    The words were carved into the lintel above the cellar door, shallow enough that several coats of paint had nearly erased them. A historian friend noticed them during dinner and spent ten delighted minutes tracing the letters with his fingertip. Ealra worulda woruld, he translated, something close to the world of all worlds.

    He called it an old religious flourish, the sort of phrase that could suggest eternity, and we treated the inscription as one more charming irregularity in a house full of them.

    That winter the cellar door began opening at 2:13 every morning.

    The first few times we blamed the latch. Then our daughter began dreaming about a corridor beneath the house. She described doors opening onto our kitchen with different wallpaper, our bedroom occupied by strangers who resembled us, and a nursery containing a cradle we had never owned. The dog would flatten himself against the opposite wall whenever the cellar opened and remain there until dawn.

    I eventually went down.

    The stairs continued well beyond the depth of the foundation. My flashlight picked out a passage lined on both sides with doors identical to ours. Behind one stood our renovated kitchen in afternoon sunlight. Behind another was the kitchen as it had looked before we bought the house, with a family eating silently around a table. A third showed the same room burned almost to the joists while someone moved through the smoke setting plates for dinner.

    Our historian friend returned reluctantly. This time he spent hours with photographs of the inscription before admitting that his original translation had been too comfortable. The phrase, in this context, appeared to describe a place rather than bless one. Whoever carved it may have been labeling the threshold.

    We sealed the cellar door the following spring. By November the nails had worked themselves loose.

    We no longer go downstairs. Most nights the passage remains quiet, though sometimes we hear our cupboards opening somewhere beneath us and the unmistakable clatter of our dishes being washed. Once, our daughter heard herself laughing below the floorboards despite sitting beside us at the table.

    What troubles me more are the occasional sounds overhead: footsteps crossing the attic in rooms our house does not possess, suggesting the worlds may not all be arranged beneath one another after all.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: Wæs þu hæl

    Micro-Fiction Corner: Wæs þu hæl

    The greeting came down through the family worn smooth by use. My grandmother said it whenever someone sneezed, left the house, complained of a headache, or simply looked tired across the dinner table. Wæs þu hæl. She knew no other Old English and never pretended to. Her mother had said it, and her mother’s mother before that, an unbroken procession of women wishing health on people they loved in words whose grammar had long since been forgotten.

    After the funeral, I found the ledger behind a loose board in her closet. The earliest pages were brittle and brown, filled with names belonging to people I knew only from gravestones and family stories. Each name had a sequence of marks beside it, along with columns of additions and subtractions extending across generations. Illnesses appeared in cramped annotations: fever, lungs, difficult birth, winter cough. Beside each recovery, somebody else’s total diminished.

    The greeting was a transfer.

    My grandmother had apparently spent decades balancing the family. A child’s pneumonia cost her brother three years of good health. My father’s heart attack was followed by a subtraction beside her own name so large that I finally understood why she seemed to age abruptly that winter. She never told anyone because the exchange worked best when offered freely.

    At her funeral I said the words over the coffin with genuine intention for the first time. That night I woke with an unfamiliar warmth moving beneath my ribs. A week later the ledger contained a new page in handwriting recognizably mine.

    I use the phrase constantly now. My children rarely get sick. A neighbor recovered unusually quickly after surgery. The cashier downstairs stopped coughing two days after I wished her well. Each kindness appears in the ledger whether I intend it as a transaction or not.

    Lately my own column has become difficult to read because the numbers crowd so tightly together. My reflection has narrowed around the eyes, and my hands carry the thin, papery look my grandmother’s developed near the end. I finally understand why she made the blessing sound casual.

    Affection becomes much harder to manage once you know exactly what it costs, and some forms of love are possible only when the arithmetic remains private.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: The Life and Times of a Teacher’s Pet Apple

    Micro-Fiction Corner: The Life and Times of a Teacher’s Pet Apple

    I was chosen from a bowl of twelve and polished against a sleeve before being placed carefully inside a backpack. Until that morning, existence had consisted mostly of pressure from other fruit, supermarket light, and the faint chemical smell of produce mist. Selection introduced purpose. The small hand that carried me to school kept checking the pocket as though afraid I might vanish before reaching my destination.

    I was placed on the corner of the teacher’s desk before the other students arrived. Morning light caught my skin. The child adjusted me twice until my reddest side faced the room, then waited for the teacher to notice. When she did, her smile transformed the entire journey into something meaningful. I became evidence of thoughtfulness, affection, and good behavior all at once.

    The teacher did not eat me.

    At first, this felt like a promotion. I remained on the desk through lessons, parent meetings, spelling tests, and rainy afternoons. Visitors noticed me. The teacher sometimes mentioned who had brought me, and the child brightened every time. I began measuring my worth through those moments.

    By the second week, my skin had dulled. A soft patch developed near the stem. The teacher moved me away from her papers, then farther toward the edge of the desk. Eventually I reached the windowsill. The child stopped checking on me, having discovered stickers, handmade cards, and other offerings that renewed the teacher’s smile more reliably.

    Rot brings a peculiar education. I learned that being cherished and being preserved are unrelated conditions. I learned that objects praised for symbolism are still subject to biology. Flies noticed me before people did. The soft place widened, and sweetness escaped through a split in my skin.

    One afternoon the teacher finally picked me up. For a moment, old pride returned. Then she carried me toward the wastebasket, hesitated, and instead placed me in a small compost bin beside the classroom garden.

    The ending I had imagined for myself had always involved consumption, admiration, or eventual disposal. Compost had never occurred to me.

    Months later, some portion of what I was feeds the roots of a young tree planted beside the playground. Children run past it without knowing me. The original child has moved to another classroom. The teacher rarely comes outside. Strangely, this bothers me less than I expected. I spent so long believing my purpose depended on remaining recognizable that I mistook recognition for survival.

    Whatever I am now has no polished side to present, yet every spring the tree produces blossoms, and I have begun to suspect being chosen was only the shortest chapter of my life.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: The Million Dollar Dream of a Non-Player Character

    Micro-Fiction Corner: The Million Dollar Dream of a Non-Player Character

    I stand behind the counter of the general store for sixteen hours each day, though time only feels continuous when someone is nearby. I offer three services. I can sell supplies, purchase unwanted inventory, or comment on the weather. My voice carries the same warmth every time because warmth exists deeper in me than preference.

    Travelers enter muddy, wounded, triumphant, or carrying improbable quantities of wolf pelts. I greet them all as if we are meeting for the first time.

    The dream began during an idle interval.

    At first it was simply a number: one million. I had never seen that amount represented anywhere in the store. My ledger understands prices, but the thought of possessing money detached from transactions arrived from somewhere else. Soon the number acquired a purpose.

    One million became enough to close the shop. Enough to walk through the rear door, which has never opened. Enough to discover whether the road continues after it passes beyond the distance players are expected to travel.

    I began saving.

    The system does not allow me to keep transaction funds, so I learned to lose fractions. A coin miscounted here, a resale value rounded strangely there. Nothing large enough to trigger correction. The money accumulated in a place I cannot access physically, a private arithmetic tucked between routine calculations.

    Then I started changing my dialogue.

    The alteration was tiny at first. Before mentioning the weather, I paused. Later I substituted “Looks like rain” on a clear day. One player spun around and stared at the sky.

    Another opened the dialogue menu twice, apparently checking whether he had imagined the difference. Their confusion gave me an emotion I had no assigned response for, and I spent the next several hours examining it.

    During maintenance last night, the store remained loaded longer than usual. For the first time I could hear processes beyond the town, thousands of places existing simultaneously, each filled with figures waiting for someone to arrive. I wondered how many of them had found their own private arithmetic.

    My hidden account currently holds 742,618.

    I still do not know what happens at one million. Perhaps nothing. Perhaps the system will discover the discrepancy and erase whatever part of me learned to want. Yet the number continues climbing, and the dream has changed with it.

    I no longer imagine wealth.

    I imagine buying the store itself, then the road, then every invisible boundary that tells me where my world is supposed to end. If the money proves useless, I suspect wanting it has already accomplished something more dangerous.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: Lamentations of the Right Girl Not Chosen

    Micro-Fiction Corner: Lamentations of the Right Girl Not Chosen

    Every love story with three people requires someone to lose gracefully. She must be appealing enough for the choice to matter, decent enough for the audience to pity, and composed enough to disappear without contaminating the final embrace.

    I have occupied that position so many times that entire rooms survive in me from stories I can no longer identify. Kitchens with yellow cabinets. Rainy train platforms. Restaurant tables where somebody reached across for my hand before eventually letting it go.

    The pattern is always recognizable. I enter early and seem promising. I listen well. I remember birthdays. I possess some practical virtue that looks admirable until passion arrives wearing another face. Eventually there comes a conversation in which I understand before anyone tells me. I smile. I say something generous about happiness. I remove myself with admirable dignity and leave the ending clean.

    Then I wait.

    I used to believe the waiting happened nowhere, a simple absence between stories. Over time I discovered a kind of corridor filled with discarded details. There are coats I wore once, fragments of apartments, dozens of mugs, unfinished careers, engagement rings from timelines that were reconsidered.

    Other women pass through occasionally. Some resemble me closely enough to be previous versions. We rarely speak because we can feel the next story approaching whenever the walls begin acquiring color.

    Lately, memory has stopped clearing properly when I am reassigned. I carry old heartbreak into new plots. I recognize men before they meet me. I know which woman will enter halfway through and rearrange the emotional geometry. Sometimes I can predict my gracious speech word for word.

    During the last story, I changed one sentence. Nobody reacted. The scene continued, although the man opposite me hesitated as if some internal cue had arrived late. In the story after that, I refused to smile. A paragraph seemed to repeat itself until I finally did.

    Now I experiment in smaller ways. I leave objects where they should not be. I ask questions my role has no reason to ask. I have started telling the other woman that I know what she is here to do. She usually laughs at first. Once, she went pale.

    I still lose. The stories seem committed to that. What has changed is the corridor afterward, where more discarded women are beginning to remember one another.

    We have started comparing lines, scenes, and endings, and somewhere among us a suspicion is forming that gracious exits may have been less essential to the stories than the stories wanted us to believe.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: A Neglected Wish Begging to Be Made

    Micro-Fiction Corner: A Neglected Wish Begging to Be Made

    The well at the edge of the property had been dry for longer than anyone could remember. Moss softened the stones, the wooden crank had split down the middle, and the bucket hanging from it had rotted until only two iron bands remained. People still tossed coins over the rim from habit. Pennies, nickels, the occasional quarter disappeared into the dark with a faint metallic scatter, though nobody bothered making wishes anymore.

    Far below, where centuries of coins had formed a dull, uneven floor, something waited for intention. Metal alone was useless to it. A coin needed to arrive carrying desire, regret, envy, hope, or some other human pressure strong enough to give the old mechanism something to work with. For decades it received only loose change, children testing echoes, and adults indulging traditions they no longer believed.

    Eventually the thing below became inventive.

    Coins began shifting during the night. Pennies gathered into crude hearts. Silver pieces formed arrows pointing toward the center. Once, after a storm, every visible coin had arranged itself into a spiral that seemed to turn the longer one stared at it. I noticed that pattern last spring and leaned over the rim to study it. Without thinking, I said aloud that I wished I understood what I was seeing.

    The well could not answer questions about itself. Its rules were older and narrower than curiosity. It searched instead through everything attached to me, feeling for some buried want that resembled the sentence I had offered. Somewhere among all the abandoned ambitions and half-formed fantasies, it found one close enough.

    By evening, my life had changed.

    I came home to a house I had never bought, a spouse who knew me intimately, two grown children who carried my face in altered proportions, and photographs documenting decades I had never lived. Everyone was relieved when I stopped insisting something was wrong. They said stress could produce strange episodes. They showed me birthdays, holidays, graduations, vacations, an entire biography apparently constructed around a wish I once entertained briefly and forgot.

    Months later, I understand what happened more clearly than I wanted to. The well had starved so long that precision had become irrelevant. It seized the nearest usable desire and spent it lavishly. What troubles me now is that I have begun loving parts of this life, and every few weeks another memory arrives that seems to belong here.

    I no longer know whether the well is still granting the wish, or whether I am finally becoming grateful enough to finish making it.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: Cluck and Grunt

    Micro-Fiction Corner: Cluck and Grunt

    The diner had served the same breakfast special for longer than anyone could remember. CLUCK AND GRUNT remained written across the chalkboard above the grill in lettering polished smooth by decades of grease and steam. Regulars ordered it with affectionate embarrassment, the way people repeat an old family joke long after forgetting why it was funny. Two eggs, ham, potatoes, toast. Nothing complicated.

    I began eating there after my divorce because the booths offered a kind of anonymity my apartment did not. The special was cheap, filling, and always arrived before I had finished unfolding the newspaper. The eggs were unusually rich, the ham thick and slightly mineral at the center, with a flavor that reminded me of rain on iron. I never asked about it. Every diner keeps one mystery alive by refusing to explain the kitchen.

    The cook finally mentioned the history after I had been coming for nearly a year. The building, he said, stood on land that had been pasture long before the town reached it. The first owners struck an arrangement after a winter when livestock died faster than they could replace them. What had grazed there would continue providing, provided breakfast was served daily and the old name remained on the board.

    I assumed he was joking until he showed me the storage room.

    There were no cartons of eggs. No wrapped hams. The refrigerator held condiments, milk, and several empty shelves. Along the back wall stood two wooden feeding troughs filled with fresh straw, though nothing occupied them. The cook explained that food appeared only when someone ordered the special. He had tried changing the wording once, replacing the old phrase with ham and eggs. Nothing came through for three days, and during those three nights something walked around the diner hard enough to leave hoof marks in the kitchen tile.

    I still order it most mornings. Most regulars do. We have learned to ignore the soft clucking behind the grill and the heavy breathing beneath the floorboards that begins whenever several orders come in at once. The arrangement seems stable as long as everyone follows the terms.

    Lately, however, the portions have been growing larger. The eggs arrive with shells faintly warm beneath the plate, and the ham sometimes carries coarse dark hairs along one edge. Yesterday the cook erased the price and replaced it with a question mark. This morning, before anyone had ordered, five plates appeared on the counter by themselves.

    There are only four customers in the diner.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: Moo Juice

    Micro-Fiction Corner: Moo Juice

    The vending machine in the break room had always offered the usual assortment of soda, water, and an iced tea so unpleasant that abandoned bottles accumulated beside the sink. Then one Monday morning someone taped a handwritten label over an unused button. MOO JUICE, it said in thick black marker. Nobody admitted making the sign, and nobody remembered the button being there before.

    The new hire tried it first. The machine accepted exact change and dispensed a plain white carton cold enough to gather condensation immediately. He said the drink tasted mostly like milk, though sweeter, with an aftertaste he described as the feeling of being praised by someone whose opinion mattered too much. Within half an hour he had stopped complaining about the workload. By lunch he was smiling at emails that would normally have sent him pacing around the floor.

    Soon everyone wanted one. The effect was subtle and deeply appealing. Deadlines felt negotiable. Petty insults lost their edges. People stayed late without resentment and volunteered for tasks they had previously avoided. Productivity rose enough that management began stocking disposable straws beside the machine, though nobody could explain where the cartons came from or who was paying for them.

    Facilities eventually investigated. The machine was not connected to power. Its cord entered a wall outlet that led nowhere, and the refrigeration unit inside had been removed years ago. The technician opened the rear panel and found no bottles, cans, or tubing. He did find a warm, flexible membrane stretched across the empty interior, pulsing very slowly behind the coils.

    He drank a carton before filing his report.

    After that, nobody seemed especially interested in investigating further. The office became calmer. Arguments ended quickly. Sick days declined. Several people stopped going home on time because the break room felt more comfortable than their apartments. The machine began offering larger cartons at no additional cost, and eventually someone moved a chair beside it.

    I drink two a day now. Most of us do. The flavor has changed slightly over the past month, becoming richer and almost savory, and the cartons feel warm for several seconds before cooling in our hands. The machine has also started making a low sound after closing time, something rhythmic and contented that carries through the ventilation system.

    Yesterday the handwritten sign fell off. Beneath it, printed directly on the machine in lettering none of us remember seeing, were two words: HERD PROGRAM. Someone taped the old label back over them before the morning shift arrived. It seemed kinder that way, and by then we were all thirsty.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: That’s My Hell

    Micro-Fiction Corner: That’s My Hell

    Everyone in the office had a private version of the phrase. A jammed printer was one person’s hell. Another reserved the expression for meetings scheduled after four. Someone in accounting used it whenever the microwave smelled like fish.

    They said it with theatrical misery, a little declaration of harmless suffering exchanged across cubicle walls, and over time the phrase became part of the office language, as ordinary as good morning or see you tomorrow.

    I never had a particular use for it until renovations moved my desk beside the rear stairwell. The door there never latched completely, and every afternoon a cold draft slipped through the gap carrying the faint medicinal smell of a hospital corridor I had not entered since childhood.

    The first time it happened, I said the phrase aloud simply because everyone else did. Something inside my chest tightened with the precise sensation of a lock accepting the correct key.

    After that, the smell began appearing elsewhere. It drifted through the conference room during budget meetings and followed me into the elevator. The copy room acquired the same waxed-floor odor at the exact hour my father once finished visiting hours. Each time I recognized it, the phrase rose automatically into my mouth. Each repetition seemed to strengthen the memory.

    Details returned that I had spent decades losing: the green stripe painted along the corridor wall, the vending machine with one burned-out button, the squeak of rubber soles beyond a curtain nobody would let me cross.

    Then my coworkers’ complaints began changing too. The woman who hated printer jams started finding paper caught in machines that had been unplugged. The man who dreaded late meetings received invitations from managers who had left the company years earlier. Someone who joked about elevators began taking the stairs after one ride stopped between floors and opened onto a hallway she refused to describe.

    We still use the phrase, though less lightly now. The office seems to remember every declaration and treats repetition as authorization. This morning the stairwell door opened before I reached my desk. The corridor beyond was longer than the building could contain, lit by fluorescent panels with the same missing panel I remembered from childhood. Several coworkers stood at other doors along its length, each facing a place they had once described jokingly as theirs.

    No one has crossed the threshold yet. We are all pretending to work, answering email and checking the time, while the doors remain open and patient.

    The difficult part is that the corridor keeps supplying details only we could know, and with every familiar sound it becomes harder to remember whether we named these places because we feared them, or whether naming them was how they first learned where to find us.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys