madd
fictional

THE MIDNIGHT EDITION

Tag: #flashfiction

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: Trickery Misery Clock

    Micro-Fiction Corner: Trickery Misery Clock

    The clock traveled with the circus in its own velvet-lined case, carried by the mystic like something more fragile than clockwork had any right to be, and its face bore no numbers at all, only a single hand that swept slowly around a ring of small painted scenes, a wedding, a funeral, a fire, a harvest, a door standing open onto darkness. For a coin and a whispered question, the mystic would wind it, and the hand would drift to a stop somewhere on the ring, and whatever scene it landed nearest was declared the questioner’s future, delivered in a tone that left no room for negotiation.

    The clock’s reputation grew on the strength of being right often enough to matter. A man who was shown the wedding scene did marry within the year. A woman who was shown the fire lost her barn to lightning that same summer. Skeptics came expecting a trick and left quieter than they’d arrived, unable to explain how a painted circle of images kept landing so close to the truth of their lives, and the mystic never explained it either, only rewound the mechanism and waited for the next coin.

    What nobody outside the show understood, and what the mystic never said aloud even to the other performers, was that the clock’s accuracy had less to do with prophecy than with attention, the hand’s landing spot studied and remembered afterward, adjusted by hand between showings so the story it told matched whatever the mystic had quietly noticed about the person asking, a worn wedding band, a farmer’s calloused hands, the particular exhaustion of someone who’d been grieving for a while already. The future it predicted was, in that sense, only ever the present read closely enough to seem inevitable.

    Whether that made the predictions false was a question the mystic had stopped asking years ago, since the wedding still happened, the barn still burned, and the open door at the edge of the ring still waited its turn for everyone eventually, deserved or not, painted on or predicted.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: Hey Twiddle Riddle

    Micro-Fiction Corner: Hey Twiddle Riddle

    The cat had been coming to the pub longer than any of the current regulars could account for, sitting on the same stool at the end of the bar like it had been carved into the wood specifically for that purpose, and it asked its first riddle to anyone who made the mistake of buying it a saucer of cream. The riddles were always simple-sounding at first, the kind of thing you’d hear from a child, what has a face but never smiles, what runs but never walks, and the trick of it was that the obvious answer was always wrong, and the cat would tilt its head at a wrong answer with an expression that managed to look almost sympathetic.

    Getting a riddle wrong cost you nothing, officially. The cat never demanded payment, never threatened anything, only asked the next riddle, patient as anything, willing to sit there all night if that was what it took. The trouble started with the third or fourth wrong answer, when people began noticing that the riddles had started referencing details they hadn’t told anyone, a childhood dog’s name, a fear they’d never said aloud, small private things stitched into the wording so casually that you almost missed it until the answer clicked into place and left you cold.

    By the fifth riddle, most people stopped answering at all, which the cat seemed to consider an answer in itself, nodding slowly and moving on to a new question anyway, one that somehow required a response even from silence. The ones who stayed the whole night, who kept answering out of stubbornness or pride or the simple human inability to leave a puzzle unfinished, tended to leave a little different than they’d arrived, quieter, prone to answering questions with questions of their own, laughing at pauses in conversation as though they’d heard a joke nobody else had told.

    The pub kept the cat around because it was good for business, in its way, and because nobody had figured out how to ask it to leave without risking one more riddle on the way out. Regulars learned early to buy their round, listen politely, and never, under any circumstances, be the one who answered correctly, since nobody who’d ever gotten a riddle right had stayed to explain what happened next.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: Incy Wincy Cider

    Micro-Fiction Corner: Incy Wincy Cider

    The first barrel began singing three days after it was tapped, a faint melody bubbling up through the spigot at closing time, something between a harvest song and a marching chant, and by the weekend half the regulars were humming it without realizing they’d learned the tune at all. The cider picked up verses the way a child picks up words, first a line about apples, then a line about autumn, then a whole cheerful chorus about the wisdom of ordering another round, and the chorus was catchy enough that strangers who’d never spoken before found themselves linking arms across tables to sing it properly.

    Business became extraordinary almost overnight, and nobody thought much about the pale threads growing beneath the foam, or thought about them just long enough to find a comfortable word for them. The brewer called it sediment. The health inspector, on his one visit, called it fungal contamination and made a note to follow up that never got followed up on. The cider itself, by the fifth verse, had started calling it family, and by then enough of the pub was singing along that the word passed without anyone really hearing it.

    The fungus was cordyceps, more or less, though no strain any laboratory would have recognized, content in alcohol instead of insects, communicating through fermentation instead of spores, and it had developed, as far as anyone could tell, strong and specific opinions about sobriety. People who drank enough of it grew sociable and thirsty and strangely unwilling to leave before the final chorus. When the bartender finally tried pouring the barrel down the drain, the whole room objected at once, cheerfully rather than angrily, lifting their glasses into a new verse while thin white filaments crept out from under their collars and the singing got louder to cover the sound of it.

    By midnight there was dancing on the tables. By dawn the barrel had been rolled into the street and was being pushed, gently and communally, toward the next pub down the road, and nobody present could have said whose idea that had been. Recordings of the song turned up online weeks later with no clear source, and people who listened to them too many times in a row reported an odd craving for apples and company. The original pub is closed now. On quiet nights, something is still said to slosh beneath the floorboards, and if the street outside is quiet enough, the chorus can be heard asking, gently, whether you fancy one more.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: Nah Nah Black Death

    Micro-Fiction Corner: Nah Nah Black Death

    The tune had started, as far as anyone could trace it, in a village that lost most of its people in a single terrible season, back when death moved through households like weather and nobody had the luxury of grieving one loss before the next arrived. The survivors needed something to do with their hands and their fear, and what they landed on was a song, sung low around the fires at night, half plea and half performance, the kind of thing that could pass for a joke if anyone asked what it meant.

    Nah nah, black death,
    Give us one more night to breathe,
    Nah nah, black death,
    We're not quite ready yet to leave.

    It wasn’t a hymn, exactly. It didn’t ask for mercy in any grand sense, didn’t promise faith or virtue in exchange. It just asked for time, a little more of it, phrased casually enough that singing it didn’t feel like admitting how frightened everyone actually was.

    The song outlived the outbreak that produced it, passed down the way songs do, sung at bedsides during ordinary illnesses long after the original terror had faded into distant history, sung half-jokingly by people who no longer remembered why the words were phrased quite so strangely. Families would sing it to a grandparent running a bad fever, to a child recovering slowly from something the doctor called nothing serious, always with the same rhythm, the same small, stubborn refusal dressed up as a lullaby.

    Nobody could say whether it had ever worked, whether the extra nights it had once been sung for had actually been granted or would have happened regardless, and by now that question mattered less than the singing itself, a habit worn smooth by centuries of use, still murmured at bedsides in language soft enough to sound like comfort rather than the small, old fear it had first been built from.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: Crow, Crow, Crow, You Quote

    Micro-Fiction Corner: Crow, Crow, Crow, You Quote

    The children in the valley grew up learning the song before they learned much else, taught by parents who’d learned it from their own parents, a simple call-and-response meant to be sung to the crows that gathered every morning on the fence line at the edge of the orchards.

    Crow, crow, crow, you quote,
    Tell us what the old ones wrote,
    Sing it plain and sing it true,
    We'll believe whatever comes from you.

    It was meant as a game, mostly, a way to keep small children entertained during the long chore of orchard work, watching the birds tilt their heads at the sound of small voices and pretending the tilts were answers.

    Except the crows in that valley had always seemed a little too responsive for comfort, arriving at exactly the moment the song started, leaving at exactly the moment it ended, and every so often, rarely enough that it never quite became undeniable, one of the older birds would let out a series of calls that didn’t sound like ordinary crow noise at all, clipped and rhythmic in a way that made the children go quiet and the adults find some sudden reason to be elsewhere.

    Nobody in the valley would say outright that the crows understood the song, or that the strange rhythmic calls meant anything, because saying it outright would mean deciding what to do about it, and it was easier to let the tradition continue exactly as it always had, a children’s game that everyone privately treated as something closer to a agreement. The orchards did unusually well, year after year, better than the soil or the weather should have allowed, and nobody wanted to be the one who stopped singing and found out whether that had anything to do with it.

    The children grew up and taught their own children the same song, the same tilt of the head expected from the birds, and if any of them privately wondered what exactly the old ones had written, and how the crows had come to know it, they kept that wondering to themselves the way their parents had.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: Dock-a-Bay Baby

    Micro-Fiction Corner: Dock-a-Bay Baby

    The fishermen who worked the early hours told the story so often that it had stopped sounding like a story and started sounding like weather, something you mentioned in passing without expecting anyone to doubt it. Somewhere between three and four in the morning, the hour when the water goes flattest and quietest and even the gulls seem to know better than to call out, a basket would appear at the end of one of the docks, and in the basket, a baby, calm and dry despite the damp, never crying, only watching the sky with an attention that unsettled anyone who looked too long.

    Nobody had ever caught the moment it arrived. Boats came and went all through that hour, lines checked, engines idling, and still no one had seen a boat pull up to leave it, no one had seen footsteps on the dock boards, no one had heard so much as a splash. By the time someone noticed the basket, the baby was simply there, wrapped in cloth that smelled faintly of salt and something sweeter underneath, like driftwood left too long in the sun.

    The old song the dockworkers sang to it while they waited for someone official to come had been passed down so many times nobody remembered writing it, soft and rocking, rock-a-bye, dock-a-bay, out where the deep tide rolls, when the boat comes in, we’ll bring you home, back where the water knows. The baby never cried during the singing, only blinked slowly at whoever held it, patient in a way that infants weren’t supposed to be.

    By sunrise, every single time, the basket and the baby were both gone, no trace left on the dock boards, no cloth, no smell of salt and sweetness, just the ordinary business of boats coming in with their catch. The workers stopped trying to explain it to newcomers after a while and simply taught them the song instead, the way you teach someone the words to something they’ll need to know eventually, whether they believe in it yet or not.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: Blinkle, Blinkle, Brown Dwarf Star

    Micro-Fiction Corner: Blinkle, Blinkle, Brown Dwarf Star

    The station had been broadcasting the same lullaby to the colony ships for three generations, a soft, warbling recording meant to soothe children through the long dark stretches between waypoints, and somewhere along the way the words had drifted from the original, worn smooth by distance and repetition until they became something the crew’s own. Blinkle, blinkle, brown dwarf star, how we wonder where you are, the recording went, sung by a voice nobody could remember recording, and the children who grew up listening to it never questioned why the lyric didn’t match the songs their ancestors had once sung about a small yellow sun back on a world most of them would never see.

    The star at the center of their system had been dimming for longer than anyone alive had been keeping track of it, a slow reddening that the older engineers still called a temporary phase out of habit, though the instruments told a plainer story every cycle. The colony had built its whole rhythm of living around that fading light, harvesting what warmth it could before the long cold stretches, teaching children to layer their sleeping mats and keep their voices low during the dimmest hours, as if quiet itself could be conserved along with the heat.

    At night, when the recording played through the station’s speakers, the children would ask their parents why the star sounded worried in the song, and the parents, most of whom had grown up asking the same question, would say only that all stars grow tired eventually, and that tired didn’t mean gone, not yet, maybe not for a long while.

    The lullaby always ended the same way, soft and unresolved, the star never quite located, never quite named as safe or finished, just held there in the last line like a held breath: blinkle, blinkle, through the black, someday, love, we’ll send you back. Nobody knew what that meant either, only that the smallest children always fell asleep before the final note.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: The Wheels on the Hearse

    Micro-Fiction Corner: The Wheels on the Hearse

    The playgroup met on Tuesday mornings in the basement of the funeral home, a dozen small children sitting cross-legged on a rug patterned with clouds while their parents finished paperwork upstairs or caught a rare hour of sleep in the break room. It had started as a joke, a way to keep the kids occupied between viewings, but the joke had calcified into tradition the way jokes do in families that spend too much time around the same strange work, and now there was an actual song, passed down and refined over several years, sung to the tune everyone already knew from somewhere else.

    The wheels on the hearse go round and round, the children sang, hands circling in front of them the way they’d been taught, round and round, all through the town. The next verse involved the doors going open and shut, palms clapping together on shut with real enthusiasm. There was a verse about the flowers going droop, droop, droop, which always got a laugh because of how seriously the smallest kids took the wilting motion, folding themselves slowly toward the rug like something deflating.

    The parents upstairs had mixed feelings about it, mostly resolved into a shrug, because you couldn’t really raise children in this trade and expect them to flinch at the shape of the family business, and better they learn early to find it ordinary than grow up flinching at every hearse that passed on the street. The song had a final verse nobody had officially added but that had shown up anyway, sung a little quieter than the rest: the people in the ground go still, still, still, all through the town. The children sang it the same way they sang everything, with the same open, unbothered faces, hands folding into their laps at still, and the parents who overheard it from the stairwell never quite decided whether that verse was the darkest part of the tradition or the most honest one.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: Old Zack Conal Did Some Harm

    Micro-Fiction Corner: Old Zack Conal Did Some Harm

    Everyone in town had a story about him, and none of the stories agreed on the details, which was maybe the truest thing about him, that he’d become less a person over the years and more a shape people poured their fears into. Some said he’d once burned down a barn out of spite. Some said he’d broken a man’s hand in a dispute over a fence line and never showed a flicker of regret. He lived alone at the edge of the county on land nobody else wanted, farmed a little, kept to himself mostly, and let the stories do whatever they wanted without correcting a single one of them.

    The truth, when it finally came out after he’d been gone a few years and someone started going through the old county records for a historical society project, was smaller and stranger than any of the stories. He had, in fact, done harm, real and specific, decades back, the kind that had quietly ruined one particular family’s chance at owning their own land, a paperwork trick during a hard winter when nobody was paying close enough attention. It wasn’t dramatic. There was no barn fire, no broken hand. Just a signature and a debt called in at exactly the wrong moment, calculated instead of cruel, which somehow felt worse once people understood it.

    The family it had happened to had already left the county by the time anyone connected the pieces, scattered to other states, other lives, and there was no one left nearby to tell that the wild stories had been protecting the real one all along, papering over something quiet and deliberate with something loud and forgivable. The historical society published a short article about it that almost nobody read, and the barn-fire story kept circulating at the tavern anyway, because it was more fun to tell, and because by then it hardly mattered which version was true.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: When She Came Round the Mountain

    Micro-Fiction Corner: When She Came Round the Mountain

    The trail had been closed for repairs, technically, but the tape across the trailhead was old and sun-bleached and half torn down already, and she figured a warning that faded was a warning that didn’t count anymore. She’d hiked this range a dozen times. She knew the switchbacks, the place where the water ran clear enough to drink without treating it, the ridge where the wind always picked up around three in the afternoon like clockwork.

    This time the switchbacks didn’t feel right. She counted six turns where there should have been five, and told herself she’d miscounted, that counting switchbacks while climbing was never as reliable as people liked to think. The water at the usual spot ran cloudy, a faint grit in it like ground stone, and she passed it by without drinking, telling herself she’d catch the next stream instead. The wind came early, an hour off schedule, cold in a way that felt less like weather and more like being looked at.

    By the time she reached the ridge the light was wrong for the hour, thin and gray when it should have been gold, and the peak ahead looked farther away than the map said it should be, as if the whole mountain had taken a slow step back the moment she’d started climbing in earnest. She kept going anyway, because turning around felt like admitting something she didn’t have words for yet, and the ground under her boots had started to feel less like rock and more like something merely shaped like rock, patient and paying close attention.

    She never told anyone the details of getting back down, only that she had, eventually, and that she’d taken a different trailhead than the one she’d started from despite never leaving the main path. She hasn’t gone back to that range since. When people ask why, she says she prefers flatter country now, and leaves it there, and they let her.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys