Tag: #flashfiction

The electrician found the third bundle behind a kitchen panel: red thread, gray feathers, copper wire, and a small bone warm enough to discolor the plaster. By the ninth house, he knew exactly where to look. Every bundle occupied the north wall of a kitchen, and every homeowner had lived on the street longer than the streetlights.

The old woman at number six watched him seal hers inside an evidence bag. She explained that the neighborhood’s original electrician had been cheaper than the power company because he knew how to persuade lightning to stay. The electrician assumed this was a joke until she added that the wires were never meant to carry electricity. They were meant to tell it where it was allowed to go.

That night, all nine bags began vibrating in his truck.

Streetlights pulsed in sequence toward the substation. Refrigerators opened themselves. Television screens filled with branching white veins. At the end of the block, transformers exploded without cutting power. Instead, every house grew brighter.

He drove back and replaced the bundles.

Each disappeared into the wall like something being swallowed. With every restoration, another section of the street calmed until only number six remained flickering.

The old woman met him in the kitchen. “You carried all of them together?”

He admitted he had.

Her expression changed.

The refrigerator began humming a tune. His fillings answered.

She explained that the bundles were not charms. They were grounding points. The thing beneath the neighborhood moved constantly through copper, looking for somewhere warm enough to inhabit, and carrying the knots together had taught it a shorter route.

He felt the muscles in his hand twitch.

Across the kitchen, the light brightened with each beat of his heart.

The old woman reached for another length of red thread.

“You’ll want to stand still,” she said. “It hates being rewired.”

By morning, the utility company reported that voltage on the street had stabilized.

The electrician never returned to work.

Nobody removed the new bundle behind number six.

It contained red thread, copper wire, three gray feathers, and a human tooth with a silver filling.

©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

The dating app had been updated so many times that nobody remembered what it originally promised, but the newest version came with a feature nobody had asked for and everybody eventually used, a small icon beside each profile that let you preview a person’s entire romantic future with them, generated instantly, three paragraphs long, formatted like the back cover of a paperback. It read like marketing copy for a life. A whirlwind romance complicated by family secrets. A slow-burn love story tested by distance and ambition. Most profiles produced something serviceable, competent, the kind of description that made you swipe right out of mild curiosity rather than any real conviction.

She’d been swiping for months by the time she noticed what was actually happening to her, that she’d stopped being able to enjoy a synopsis that read as merely fine. A nice enough paragraph about companionship and shared hobbies left her cold in a way it wouldn’t have a year earlier. She wanted twists. She wanted a synopsis with weight to it, tragedy and redemption and a sentence near the end that made her chest tighten, and the app, learning her preferences the way these things always learned, began serving her exactly that, more elaborate summaries with every swipe, each one promising a love story too dense and complicated to be lived casually.

What she didn’t notice, not for a long while, was that the actual dates had gotten stranger to match, men and women showing up with the specific gravity of characters rather than people, delivering lines that felt written rather than said, entire evenings structured like chapters building toward something. She told herself this was simply what compatibility felt like now, finally, after years of forgettable small talk. She didn’t ask why the fourth date always seemed to end on a cliffhanger, or why breaking things off with anyone had started to feel less like a decision and more like closing a book that wasn’t finished with her yet.

©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

The salon opened without any fanfare, tucked between a shuttered bookstore and a nail place that had been there for decades, and within a month it had a waitlist longer than anywhere else in town despite nobody being entirely sure what made the results so different. The stylist never advertised anything unusual, just cuts and color like anywhere else, but clients left looking not just improved but somehow correct in a way that was hard to describe to anyone who hadn’t experienced it, symmetry adjusted by fractions nobody could consciously identify, a warmth to the skin that lingered for weeks.

The cost, when clients finally noticed it, came due slowly enough that most of them mistook it for something else entirely. A returning customer might mention feeling a little flat lately, a little quiet inside, the kind of thing easily blamed on weather or work or the ordinary erosion of being an adult with responsibilities. Nobody connected it to the appointments at first, because the appointments felt like the good part of their week, the one hour where they left feeling more like themselves than they had in months, more like the versions of themselves they’d always meant to become.

What the stylist took, gently and without ever naming it, was something harder to miss once you knew to look, an ambition here, a stubborn opinion there, the specific restlessness that made a person want anything beyond the mirror. Clients grew calmer. They grew prettier. They stopped applying for the promotions they used to want, stopped arguing with partners over things that used to matter, smiled more easily at everyone including people who didn’t deserve it.

The waitlist kept growing anyway, because word of mouth is a powerful thing and the results were, undeniably, beautiful. The stylist never turned anyone away, never explained the trade to a single client, only smiled that same warm, professional smile and asked, every time, the same gentle question: and what are we hoping to let go of today?

©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

He had built an entire career on the second half of the old saying long before hearing it phrased so neatly: If you can’t blind them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit. Confidence read as competence to almost everyone, and he had enough confidence to supply a small nation. Job interviews, sales pitches, municipal hearings, contract negotiations—whenever knowledge failed him, vocabulary stepped in wearing a hard hat.

He discovered the trick accidentally during a zoning hearing. Cornered about a drainage problem he did not understand, he invented the phrase retrospective hydrological displacement. Everyone around the table nodded. By morning, the floodwater behind the development had vanished. So had three months of complaints, two photographs, and the memory of a councilman who distinctly recalled standing ankle-deep in it.

After that, he experimented.

Deferred material fatigue made cracks disappear from a parking garage. Nonlinear occupancy compression transformed an illegally overcrowded building into one that records insisted had always contained twelve additional apartments. Whenever expertise failed, he supplied terminology complicated enough to embarrass anyone who questioned it. Reality seemed unwilling to contradict a phrase nobody wanted to admit they did not understand.

The bridge made him rich.

A junior engineer warned that the load calculations were dangerously wrong. He responded with six paragraphs about dynamic infrastructural harmonics and removed the engineer from the project. The bridge opened fourteen months later.

It collapsed during evening traffic, resulting in eleven deaths and multiple nonfatal casualties.

At the inquiry, he came prepared.

He described anomalous stress migration, cascading load redistribution, and post-event structural reinterpretation. Panel members nodded uneasily. Lawyers took notes. Reporters repeated the phrases.

Then the dead began changing.

Eleven became nine.

Nine became six.

Death certificates revised themselves. Families remembered funerals for relatives who were suddenly alive and relatives who had never existed. News footage showed cars falling into the river, but fewer vehicles appeared each time someone replayed it.

The former junior engineer arrived carrying the original calculations. “You’re erasing them.”

He smiled patiently. “I think you mean the casualty metrics are undergoing evidentiary reconciliation.”

That engineer disappeared before reaching the witness table.

Two years later, the governor appointed him chair of the National Infrastructure Integrity Commission.

At the announcement, a reporter asked what the bridge disaster had taught him.

He spoke for six uninterrupted minutes, and by the time he finished, there had never been a bridge collapse at all.

There had only been a highly successful emergency load-transition event.

And according to every available record, nobody had died.

©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

The lessons started before anyone bothered to call them lessons, folded into ordinary conversation the way other families folded in manners or grace before meals. Keep your word, no matter the cost of it. Never leave a debt hanging, whether it was money or a favor or a grudge. Know which roads the deputies used on which nights, and know the difference between ordinary silence and the kind that meant somebody outside was listening a little too carefully. By thirteen, there were skills that felt like nothing more than family tradition, the same way other kids learned to bait a hook or bake bread, and school called that behavior suspicious while home called it simply being raised right.

There were rules, though, spoken about with more conviction than most people reserved for scripture. No stealing from anyone poorer than yourself. No frightening children, ever, for any reason. Nobody touched money collected for a funeral or a hospital bill or a church roof, and the family broke plenty of other laws without a flicker of guilt while defending those particular lines like they were the only ones that mattered. That contradiction made perfect sense at the time and only became strange once there was enough distance to look back on it clearly.

Distance came eventually, the way it does. A legitimate job, taxes taken out automatically, neighbors who borrowed tools and actually returned them, a mailbox that never held anything requiring urgent destruction. The old instincts went dormant, embarrassing in the way inherited habits get embarrassing once you’ve built a different kind of life, useful only for fixing a stubborn engine or catching somebody in a lie they hadn’t bothered to make convincing.

Then the phone rang after midnight, a younger relative in trouble serious enough to matter and foolish enough to sound painfully familiar. The old training came back without being asked for. Find out what had actually been seen. Find out who had already talked. Get a lawyer in the room before anyone tried to be brave for its own sake. Bring cash. Bring food. Promise nothing that couldn’t be delivered.

On the drive home afterward, the younger one asked whether the old stories about how they’d all been raised were true, and got a careful answer back: some of them. Asked whether it had been a hard way to grow up, and got a longer silence before the reply came. It was home. That answer sat in the car the rest of the drive, heavier than either of them wanted to say out loud.

©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

She lived alone at the edge of the county in a house too big for one person, and the neighbors had long since stopped wondering why she’d never remarried after her husband passed, assuming it was grief or stubbornness or simple contentment with her own company. What they didn’t know was that she’d been working on a solution for years, methodical about it in the way she was methodical about everything, canning vegetables and mending fences and, in the evenings after the chores were done, copying old recipes out of a book that had come to her through her mother’s side of the family, recipes that had nothing to do with food.

The conjuring took the better part of a decade to get right, not because the working itself was difficult but because she was particular about the result, unwilling to settle for anything less than exactly what she wanted after forty years of marriage to someone who hadn’t listened well enough. She used flour and salt and rainwater collected in a specific basin, thread pulled from her late husband’s good coat, and words that felt less like a spell and more like a very long, very specific order placed with someone patient enough to fill it correctly.

What arrived on the porch one October morning was a man of reasonable height and pleasant disposition, capable of good conversation and better silences, who liked her cooking and remembered her birthday without being told and never once suggested she was too particular about how the towels got folded. The neighbors assumed he was a cousin visiting from out of state, then a boarder, then eventually just accepted him the way small towns accept anything given enough time and no better explanation offered.

She never told him what he was, and for many years he never asked. Then one spring morning, while she was folding towels, he told her he preferred them done another way. She nearly dropped the stack.

After that came other things. He wanted tomatoes planted along the south fence instead of beans. He stopped pretending to like one of her stews. He took long walks without explaining where he had been. None of it was cruel. None of it was even unreasonable. That made it worse.

One evening he found the recipe book.

She watched him turn the pages until he reached the one written in her hand.

“Did you make me?”

She could have lied. Forty years of marriage had taught her what happened when people failed to listen, and ten years of conjuring had taught her the danger of imprecise instructions.

What she had never learned was what to do when the thing she made began asking for a life of its own.

The book contained another recipe beneath his.

For correction.

©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys