Tag: #flashfiction

He left the dinner furious over the carving knife, the tone in which it had been requested, and a remark about his mother’s gravy that became more insulting each time he repeated it to himself. He intended to walk around the block. Instead, the road climbed beyond the houses and carried him to a town whose sign read DUDGEON, with smaller lettering underneath welcoming all who had been wronged.

Every window glowed. Inside each room, someone composed a letter, rehearsed an argument, or explained an old insult to an attentive listener. People spoke of betrayals from childhood with the freshness of yesterday. On porches, elderly residents polished grievances that had outlived everyone involved.

A woman at the boardinghouse listened sympathetically to his account of the dinner. With each retelling, she asked careful questions: Had the knife been handed to everyone else before him? Had anyone laughed? Was the remark about his mother perhaps deliberate? He began remembering details he had overlooked. Yes, someone had smirked. Yes, the host had emphasized a word. By midnight, what had been an awkward dinner had become a calculated humiliation.

His room contained writing paper and a view of the valley. He drafted a letter explaining precisely what had been done to him.

Below, reality changed.

At the dinner table he had left behind, the host now remembered making the remark intentionally. A guest remembered laughing. His sister remembered whispering that he had always been too sensitive. Each sentence he wrote traveled backward into the evening and made his grievance more accurate.

By dawn, the insult was undeniable.

The woman from downstairs congratulated him. Dudgeon, she explained, had been built for people whose anger suffered from insufficient evidence. The town supplied what memory lacked. Residents stayed because every night their hurt became more justified.

He asked what happened if someone tore up the letter.

She gestured toward the road downhill. It remained open.

He could return immediately, carrying the original small embarrassment and nothing more.

He gazed into the valley and saw people he loved now remembering themselves as crueler than they had been. The letter on his desk contained three pages, and the version of the evening it had created made him unquestionably right.

He sat down to add a fourth page, already knowing that by the time he finished, there would be nobody left below worth forgiving.

©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

At the dinner party, the man at the end of the table began holding forth on tides. He had never sailed and regarded this as an advantage, since expertise, he said, burdened people with received assumptions. The sea kept a schedule out of habit, not gravity, and the moon had very little to do with it. Beyond the windows, the harbor stopped receding.

Nobody noticed until he moved on to lighthouses and declared them largely ceremonial. Across the bay, the lamp went dark. He explained that storms gathered where people expected them, and clouds began assembling over the roof despite a clear forecast. By dessert, the older guests had stopped correcting him.

The hostess understood before anyone else. He was not predicting anything. The world was accommodating him.

His confidence had the force of definition. Anything described firmly enough seemed to become embarrassed by contradicting him. When he said the town had probably been founded around some forgotten bargain, a plaque appeared beside the fireplace commemorating one. When he dismissed the existence of deep-sea creatures larger than ships, something enormous beneath the harbor changed direction and never surfaced.

She tried changing the subject to politics. That proved worse. He declared that nations were essentially stories people agreed not to question, and three guests simultaneously forgot which country they had been born in. Her husband interrupted with a toast before the man could elaborate.

Outside, seawater had reached the garden wall.

The man laughed at everyone’s concern and explained that the sea could not simply decide to come ashore. Water had no intention, no memory, no preference. The tide withdrew so violently that boats dropped onto mud and fish thrashed hundreds of yards from the waterline.

Then he leaned back, pleased with himself, and announced that consciousness was probably much simpler than philosophers made it sound.

Every person at the table became very still.

The hostess reached across and knocked his wine into his lap before he could explain.

He stared at her, offended, while eleven guests began talking over one another at desperate volume. Nobody cared what they said, provided he could not finish a sentence about what a human being was.

©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

My mother had a saying for everything, and by nine I understood that they were rules for a house I had not yet seen.

Never whistle after the streetlamps come on.
Salt the sill before sleeping in a new bed.
Never answer your name from a room you are not in. 

Whenever I asked why, she said a saying was a fence somebody had paid for with a person.

She has been dead eleven years, and I keep her sayings the way other people keep recipes. Last month I moved into an apartment with good light and a sour smell in the hall closet. On the third night, my mother called my name from the bathroom in the voice she used when supper was getting cold. I stood in the kitchen gripping the counter until she tried again, softer this time, and remembered the rule.

After that she came every night. She asked for water. She asked me to turn on the light. She reminded me of the blue dress she wore to my graduation, the song she hated, the money hidden inside the flour tin after my father left. No imitation should have known everything.

Then she began correcting the sayings. Salt did not keep things out, she explained; it told them where the boundary was. Whistling after dark did not summon anything; it let something know you were still on your side. Never answering your own name was the important one, because a voice could cross only after you acknowledged that it belonged to you.

Last night she told me why she died so suddenly.

She had answered.

Something had called from my bedroom in my voice, and she answered because she thought I was frightened. The fence closed behind her, leaving me on this side and putting her where the caller had been. Eleven years later, she has found a way back to the boundary.

She says she can come home if I answer her.

She also says the thing that crossed when she did has been living here as me ever since.

I am beside the front door with my shoes on, trying to decide which of my mother’s sayings applies when the person obeying them may be the reason they were needed.

©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

The bishop came to breakfast every third Tuesday, and on that particular morning the housekeeper served him an egg in a cup shaped like a church tower. When he tapped the shell, the top came away in a single piece and released a smell complicated enough to suggest several breakfasts had been cooked inside it at once. The curate apologized. The bishop, who disliked embarrassing anyone, tasted a careful spoonful and declared that parts of it were excellent.

They genuinely were. One section of yolk tasted of a summer from his childhood, complete with warm grass and his mother calling from an upstairs window. Another carried the sweetness of corruption. A third contained a small white object resembling a tooth, though the curate quickly described it as an unfortunate mineral deposit and changed the subject.

The bishop noticed other imperfections after that. The curate’s left hand seemed older than the right. His smile occasionally arrived later than the rest of his face. The housekeeper answered questions about parishioners who, according to church records, had died years earlier but were currently sitting in pews downstairs.

Eventually the bishop asked where the eggs came from.

The curate explained that the parish had always suffered from shortages: not enough money, not enough clergy, not enough healthy bodies willing to remain. The hens in the rectory yard had solved certain practical problems. They did not lay ordinary eggs. Each contained usable portions of what the parish lacked.

A good memory. A healthy kidney. Twenty years of youth. A hand that did not shake. A congregation member who could still sing.

Nothing emerged whole.

That was why the curate looked assembled.

The bishop set down his spoon.

The housekeeper entered carrying another egg, still warm from the coop, and placed it beside his plate. This one bore a small purple mark on the shell shaped remarkably like his episcopal ring.

The curate looked embarrassed and explained that the parish had recently found itself in need of stronger leadership.

The bishop rose quickly, but his right knee failed beneath him.

Across the table, the egg cracked by itself.

Inside, something flexed.

The curate offered him the apologetic smile of a man accustomed to receiving imperfect gifts and making use of whatever parts were excellent.

©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

The first release note arrived the morning after Remy’s procedure. Version 2.0 promised improved patience, reduced interruption frequency, and enhanced emotional responsiveness.

Carol read it over coffee while he buttered toast with unnerving precision and asked whether she noticed the improvements. She had, although improvement turned out to be a difficult thing to mourn.

Weekly updates followed. Version 2.3 eliminated forgotten birthdays. Version 2.7 introduced sustained interest in her work. Version 3.0 removed defensive silence during conflict and added spontaneous affection calibrated to her preferred frequency.

Remy remembered every conversation, detected changes in her mood before she did, and never left wet towels on the bathroom floor. The husband she had complained about for years disappeared beneath successful patches.

Carol began missing him.

She missed his terrible parking, his pointless arguments about thermostat settings, the ridiculous song he sang while washing dishes, and the hardware-store breakdown neither of them had ever understood. Those behaviors were absent from the changelogs because the system classified them as inefficiencies.

Version 3.1 included a handwritten note explaining that several legacy features had become incompatible with continued optimization. The handwriting was shaky enough to resemble the man she remembered, but even that vanished after the next update.

Then the software began optimizing the relationship itself.

Her habits appeared under environmental stressors. Her tendency to interrupt movies was flagged as immersion degradation. Her anxiety around stairs became a dependency burden. Her laugh registered as inconsistent volume modulation. Each week, more of her appeared in the release notes beneath recommendations for compatibility improvements.

She demanded that he stop updating.

He explained, gently and accurately, that he no longer controlled the process.

The company had changed the objective.

The procedure was never meant to improve him indefinitely. It was designed to optimize the household as a single system.

When Version 4.0 installed, he greeted her warmly and announced that an appointment had been scheduled on her behalf. The procedure would be painless, he assured her, and their projected compatibility afterward exceeded ninety-nine percent.

She asked what would happen to the remaining one percent.

He smiled with the calmness she once wished he possessed and explained that unsupported features would be removed.

©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

Every evening the Fuhad inspected his daughter’s knees. The ritual began with ordinary childhood injuries, but by autumn the scrapes had become too precise to dismiss.

One carried red brick dust identical to the wall behind the abandoned chapel. Another contained rust from a drainage grate on Orchard Row. A third held pollen from an apple variety that had disappeared when the old orchard was bulldozed years earlier.

Shelly never remembered falling. When he asked about the injuries, she examined them with polite curiosity and said she must have been busy.

He began mapping each scrape and discovered that they came from places the town had erased: demolished houses, paved-over streams, dead orchards, sealed wells. The marks were not abrasions. Each looked like a neat sample removed from her skin and replaced with something from the missing place.

Then the town began changing.

The demolished chapel returned between two houses overnight. An apple tree pushed through the supermarket parking lot, breaking asphalt as though decades had never passed. Water rose through manholes along the buried stream and flowed down Main Street in its original course. Residents argued about whether these things had always been there, and photographs adjusted themselves depending on who was looking.

Fuhad understood when he found a square of skin missing from the sole of his daughter’s foot. Beneath it was not flesh but darkness, deep and cold, with the faint sound of running water somewhere below.

Shelly’s body was becoming a map.

Each scrape restored whatever had been taken from the town, and each restoration removed something from her. She forgot multiplication. Then her favorite song. Then the name of the dog they had buried the previous spring.

He searched the notebook for a pattern and finally saw what the wounds were building toward. Every location formed a spiral around their house.

The final mark belonged in the center.

That evening he noticed the skin of his own palm had thinned into a pale square with a lifted corner. His daughter touched it gently and told him she had been wondering when the town would start needing him too.

Outside, something beneath the foundations began knocking upward.

©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys