Tag: #flashfiction

The market stall offered relief from anything that hurt. The sign promised PANGS WANGLED at fair rates, and the proprietor worked with bare fingers, removing pain as easily as pulling lint from cloth. A toothache came out as a bright white bead. A humiliation emerged as a damp knot of thread. Heartbreak required a larger jar.

The widow returned several times.

Eventually she brought the grief of her husband’s empty chair.

The proprietor chose a glass demijohn and drew the sorrow from her chest in a long black ribbon that carried the faint sounds of keys in a lock, boots by the door, and a man clearing his throat before speaking. She paid with her wedding ring and walked home wonderfully light.

The chair became furniture, which should have frightened her, but instead, she slept beautifully.

A month later, parcels began arriving.

The toothache had gone to a man who enjoyed pain and paid well for clean specimens. Her embarrassment had been purchased by an actor who needed authentic shame for a role. The smaller pangs had all found customers.

The demijohn had not because grief that old was difficult to place.

Then someone bought it.

The next morning, a stranger stood outside her house wearing her husband’s coat.

He knew where the spare key had been hidden. He knew which stair creaked. He knew the joke told during their honeymoon and the exact way her husband had ruined eggs on Sundays. The proprietor had sold the grief intact, and whoever carried it now possessed everything embedded inside it.

She demanded her sorrow back, but the stranger refused.

He had paid dearly for thirty-eight years of love and said it was the closest he had ever come to being loved himself.

At the market, the proprietor listened sympathetically and explained the difficulty. Pain was not waste. It was compressed attachment, memory, expectation, and identity. Removing it did not destroy those things. It separated ownership.

She asked what it would cost to recover hers.

The proprietor studied the empty place inside her and named the price.

She returned home without her wedding ring, her happiest memory, or the ability to recognize her own reflection.

The stranger was waiting in the kitchen.

This time, when he smiled, she understood why it hurt.

©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

The county map came framed above the study desk, printed on linen and missing one corner in a neat scalloped bite. The estate agent called it old damage and repeated something the previous owner’s mother used to say: that the marsh parish had been chewed up catawamptiously. Nobody had ever asked what the word meant.

Curiosity sent the new owner driving toward the missing section. The road ended exactly where the bite began. Beyond the ragged tarmac lay a flat gray expanse with the texture of paper pulp, faint fibers running through it and a smell of glue after rain. A signpost pointed toward a village that appeared on no modern map.

Back at the house, the bite had grown.

It had taken the reservoir and part of the railway.

She removed the frame and discovered a nest hollowed into the plaster behind it, lined with paper scraps, coat buttons, hair, and tiny fragments of things that belonged to her. Whatever lived there was not eating the map at random. It was collecting samples.

The next morning the reservoir no longer existed.

Nobody remembered it.

Maps, websites, road signs, photographs, and childhood recollections had adjusted overnight. Only she retained the memory because she owned the bitten map. Whatever the creature consumed ceased to have been part of the county at all.

She began protecting important places with pins. The hospital. The school. Her mother’s grave.

Each pin stopped the bite temporarily.

Then she noticed the pattern.

The creature was eating toward the house because the house itself did not belong.

Old maps showed an orchard on the property. Older ones showed open field. The earliest survey contained only a small black symbol labeled EXCISION SITE.

The wall behind her began ticking.

She turned the map over and found writing on the linen backing in brown ink: REMOVE STRUCTURE BEFORE IT REMEMBERS WHY IT WAS BUILT.

The bite reached her street.

Outside, the houses opposite vanished without sound, leaving uninterrupted pasture where families had lived moments earlier. She seized a pin and drove it through her own roof on the map.

Something behind the plaster shrieked.

For several seconds, the whole county shook.

Then the creature bit around the pin.

©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

The three collies on the hill farm started quarrelling every night at ten past three. The shepherd had lived among dogs long enough to distinguish boredom, warning, pursuit, and spite, and this was professional disagreement. He eventually pulled on his coat and followed the racket to the top field, where all three dogs were working something hidden inside a bank of fog.

The old bitch crawled left. The young dog circled wide on the right. The middle one kept snapping corrections at both while the grass beyond the gate bent under dozens of invisible feet. By morning the flock contained one extra ewe, pale-faced and perfectly dry despite the rain. Another appeared the next day, then another, and none carried an ear tag or reacted properly when handled. The collies spent daylight hours exhausted, watching the newcomers with the flat suspicion of workers who knew management had misunderstood the job.

The shepherd marked the strange sheep with red paint.

By dawn, the marks had moved.

One appeared on a ewe he had owned for seven years. Another turned up on the barn cat. The third was on the shepherd’s own wrist.

That was when he understood the dogs were not bringing sheep through the fog. They were sorting things.

Every night, the mist blurred the boundary between neighboring versions of the farm, and the collies drove whatever crossed back toward the reality where it belonged. His interference had confused the flock. Each extra animal displaced something native, and the red marks showed which lives had been assigned incorrectly.

On the ninth night, he went to the gate without a torch. The three dogs waited in silence while fog rolled over the hill from both directions. Inside it he saw farms layered over one another: different fences, different barns, different versions of himself standing at different gates.

The old bitch crept around to his left.

He did not move.

The young dog closed from the right.

Only then did he notice that all the other shepherds in the fog were watching him with the same alarm.

The middle collie gave one sharp bark.

The dogs had finished deciding which one belonged here.

©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

The melancholy always arrived with November, and she had developed reliable defenses against it: thick socks, soup, lamps switched on before dusk, and the radio talking in another room so the house never became too aware of itself. What changed that year was the timing. Sad thoughts began reaching her a fraction before she thought them.

The sensation was difficult to describe. A page would rustle somewhere above the ceiling, and then she would remember her mother’s hands. Another page, and an old embarrassment would surface complete with details she had ignored for years. The thoughts did not feel implanted. They felt narrated.

She followed the sound to the loft.

Inside, narrow shelves filled every space between the rafters. Thousands of tiny books stood spine-out, each no larger than a matchbox and labeled in her handwriting. Dates covered decades. Some corresponded to terrible days she remembered vividly. Others marked ordinary Tuesdays that had somehow ended in inexplicable sadness.

She opened one.

The pages contained her thoughts from that day, but written in future tense.

At 8:14 she would think about the school corridor where nobody sat beside her.

At 9:03 she would remember an argument with her sister differently than it had happened.

At 11:20 she would decide she had disappointed everyone who had ever loved her.

She checked the clock.

It was 7:52.

Something moved deeper in the loft.

She found the author seated behind a miniature desk, too small to be human and too familiar to be anything else. Its face resembled hers after several sleepless nights. It wrote steadily in a blank volume while consulting older books, selecting griefs that connected neatly to one another.

The creature explained that it had always managed the seasonal material. Sadness required continuity. Left unattended, people might wake miserable without a reason, and that was unbearable. A coherent story made suffering easier to inhabit.

She asked what would happen if it stopped writing.

The creature seemed genuinely puzzled by the question.

So she took away the pen.

November became strange after that. Grief still came, but unpredictably. She cried over toast and laughed while remembering funerals. Pain arrived without explanations, then left before she could build identities around it. Some mornings were heavy for no discernible reason, while others contained inexplicable joy.

By December, the little books in the loft had begun losing their titles.

She still visited occasionally with tea.

The creature no longer wrote.

Sometimes they simply sat together while outside the weather changed its mind.

©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

People came down from the moor with things in their heads.

The farmhouse woman never asked what they had seen. She simply sat them beside the range, ladled broth from the black pot, and told them to drink before the memory settled too deeply. Owl floated in the liquid: a hooked foot, pale meat, an occasional feather turning slowly on the surface.

The drunken traveler accepted the cup because he was cold and because the thing at the crossroads had followed him halfway down the hill without taking a single step.

The first swallow blurred its shape. The second loosened the memory of its face. By the third, he could remember being frightened but not what fear had belonged to.

Above him, the rafters creaked. He raised his head and found dozens of owls perched in darkness.

Every bird stared at him.

The woman explained that the broth did not erase anything. Memory could not be destroyed merely because a person found it inconvenient. The owl took it instead.

One bird opened its beak. From somewhere inside it came his own voice describing the crossroads.

Another owl whispered in a child’s voice about lights moving beneath the peat. A third spoke like an old woman describing something enormous walking through fog on legs too thin to carry it. The rafters were full of everything the parish had chosen not to know.

The traveler pushed the cup away.

The woman told him that leaving half-finished was unwise. Partial transfer meant the memory would remain divided between man and bird, and divided things tended to seek one another.

He drank.

By dawn, he remembered only that he had walked across the moor and become unwell.

Years passed.

Then the farmhouse burned.

The owls escaped.

They scattered across the countryside carrying generations of buried knowledge, and wherever they nested, people began dreaming memories that did not belong to them. Children woke speaking of the thing beneath the reservoir. Farmers refused to cross certain fields. Entire villages remembered crimes committed before anyone living had been born.

One autumn evening, an owl settled on the traveler’s windowsill.

He was an old man by then.

The bird tapped the glass.

When he opened the window, it climbed onto his wrist and regarded him with pale round eyes. Then it spoke in his younger voice and calmly reminded him what had been standing at the crossroads.

This time, there was no farmhouse left to make him forget.

©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

The pastry shop advertised that everything was made slowly, and the baker meant this with unsettling precision. He offered her a plum tartlet beneath a glass dome and warned that the price remained reasonable provided she had nowhere urgent to be. The first bite took nearly an hour to finish. Flavor unfolded gradually: butter, almond, warm fruit, then a faint impression of rain against a window she had never seen.

She stayed.

Other customers chose quicker pastries and left within minutes. Those ordering the slow varieties remained at their tables, chewing with distant expressions while daylight moved across the floor. Some seemed younger whenever she glanced away. Others had accumulated clothing from decades that had not yet passed.

The tartlet grew stranger with each bite. She tasted the hands that had kneaded the dough, then the hands that taught those hands. Kitchens opened briefly behind her eyes: wartime kitchens, palace kitchens, basement bakeries, rooms where ovens were heated with wood because electricity had not reached the street. The pastry was not merely made from ingredients. It contained every moment required to produce it.

By the third bite, she noticed her own childhood kitchen among them.

That should have been impossible.

She tasted her mother rolling dough. She tasted herself stealing sugar from the counter at six years old. She tasted tomorrow afternoon, when according to the tartlet she would return to the shop wearing an apron.

She stopped chewing.

The baker explained that slow pastry worked by extending provenance forward as well as backward. Anyone who completed one became part of its production history. The recipe incorporated the eater wherever the timeline needed another pair of hands.

She tried to spit the bite out.

Nothing came.

Outside, the street had changed. Cars were gone. Gas lamps burned behind fogged glass, and the shop sign carried a family name she did not recognize. Behind the counter stood a much younger version of the baker, struggling with a bowl of dough.

He called toward the back room for help.

She knew, with the same certainty as remembering her own birthday, that he meant her.

The tartlet softened on her tongue as the shop folded her gently into the recipe, and somewhere far ahead in time, beneath a glass dome, another one began cooling.

©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

The regional tower closed at ten, but the night controller usually remained on frequency while finishing paperwork. Shortly after midnight, a calm voice requested landing clearance under a callsign that made him reach for a pencil: Sierra November Golf. Radar showed nothing. The transponder returned nothing. The pilot reported inbound over the reservoir, where the original airfield had disappeared beneath water when the valley was flooded seventy years earlier.

The controller cleared the aircraft because procedure arrived before disbelief. Runway lights illuminated in sequence, and an engine note rolled across the dark, low and mechanical, unmistakably from an aircraft built before he was born. No wheels touched pavement. Instead, the voice thanked him and requested taxi instructions to Hangar Four, which had belonged to the drowned field.

He found Sierra November Golf in an old logbook, then another. Entries appeared in several hands across decades. Every account ended similarly: aircraft landed, nobody observed disembarking, no aircraft present at sunrise. One entry contained an additional note in red pencil: DO NOT TAXI PAST THE OLD APRON.

He gave the route from a yellowed chart.

Outside, lights appeared beneath the reservoir.

Not reflections. Taxiway lamps.

They advanced across the black water, marking roads and buildings that should have been sixty feet below the surface. As he watched, the reservoir began lowering without draining. Roofs emerged. A windsock rose dripping into the night. Beyond it stood the old terminal, windows illuminated and figures waiting behind the glass.

The pilot requested parking.

The controller hesitated.

The voice changed slightly. Still courteous, but older now, layered with other voices speaking beneath it. Sierra November Golf had not been landing repeatedly over the decades. It had been checking whether someone still remembered how to guide it home.

The old airfield continued rising.

So did the town buried with it.

At dawn, emergency crews found the reservoir nearly empty and a complete runway where water had been the night before. The modern airport remained intact, except that every departure board now listed an additional destination with no scheduled time.

The controller recognized the name.

It was the town that had been drowned to build the dam.

©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

The office went to hot desking in the spring, and the memo explained that no employee would own a surface anymore. She arrived early on Monday, claimed the desk beside the window, wiped it down, and placed a succulent beside her laptop. By ten the plant was gone. By lunch, a steaming mug of tea had appeared beside the keyboard along with a sticky note in unfamiliar handwriting asking that she leave everything as she found it.

She assumed another employee had forgotten to log out of the booking system, but the desk showed as available every day. Its previous occupants left traces anyway: a chewed pen, a cardigan smelling faintly of woodsmoke, a photograph turned face down, handwritten notes about meetings nobody remembered attending. Whenever she moved something, it returned the following morning. Whenever she added something of her own, it disappeared.

She began staying late to catch whoever was using it. At seven, after the floor emptied and the lights dimmed, the monitor woke by itself. Her inbox opened. Draft replies appeared to messages she had not answered, written in her voice but better: warmer where she was impatient, firmer where she usually apologized. Her calendar rearranged itself into a schedule that eliminated pointless meetings and added blocks labeled TRANSITION.

Facilities had no record of the desk’s manufacture. Human Resources had something stranger: a list of employees assigned there over twelve years, every one of whom had left the company without resignation paperwork. Their personnel files remained active. Their salaries continued to be processed. Performance reviews appeared annually, all excellent.

On Friday, the desk returned her succulent. It had doubled in size.

The following Monday, the booking system assigned her permanently to the window seat. Her security badge stopped opening any other floor. Colleagues began addressing emails to a slightly different version of her name, and nobody reacted when she corrected them.

By Wednesday, her locker had been emptied.

By Thursday, a new employee sat at the desk across from hers and asked whether anyone had been using the window seat.

She tried to answer.

The desk answered first, sending an email from her account that welcomed the newcomer to the team and explained that nobody owned a surface anymore.

©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys