Tag: #flashfiction

The field had been in the family for three generations, and every year the same song got sung at harvest, half-joking, half-ritual, the kind of thing nobody really believed but everybody did anyway because your grandfather did it and his grandfather before him. This year the harvest was late, the corn heavy and strange on the stalk, ears grown long and knuckled like something reaching rather than something rooted, and when the youngest hand went out at dusk to check the rows, he sang the old song under his breath without thinking about it, the way you hum something you’ve heard too many times to notice.

The corn cracked back.

It wasn’t loud. It was more like a held breath let go, a hundred small snaps rippling down the row in the wrong order, against the wind instead of with it. He stood there in the dark with the husking knife still in his hand and told himself it was just the temperature dropping, stalks contracting, nothing that hadn’t happened before. Then it happened again, closer, three rows over, and this time something in the sound had shape to it, almost a rhythm, almost an answer.

He didn’t finish checking the field that night. He told the family it was too dark to see straight and left the rest for morning, and nobody argued, because everyone had grown up hearing stories about this particular field and had always assumed the stories were just a way of explaining why the yield was better on this land than anywhere else nearby.

In the morning the corn looked ordinary again, dry and gold and patient, and the harvest went ahead as scheduled. But nobody sang that year, and nobody has since, and the field still produces more than it should for soil that tired, and everyone who works it has learned, without being told directly, to walk the rows in silence.

©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

The vending machine showed up in the break room over a long weekend, wedged between the water cooler and the recycling bin like it had always been there. Nobody remembered ordering it, and the maintenance guy swore he’d never seen the model before, some off-brand unit painted the color of dried blood with a hand-lettered label taped over the usual soda logos: Zero Sugar Katey Krueger, ninety-nine cents, exact change only.

The first person to buy one was an intern who wanted to seem fearless in front of the accounting department. She popped the tab, took a long pull, and said it tasted like cherry cola with something metallic underneath, like a penny dissolving on the tongue. That night she dreamed about her childhood bedroom, except the window was in the wrong wall and something was scratching to get in through the closet instead. She woke up sweating and told everyone at lunch, laughing about it, and by Thursday half the office had bought a can just to see what they’d dream.

The dreams got more specific as the week went on. A man from shipping dreamed about a birthday party he’d forgotten he’d been to. A woman from HR dreamed about her sister’s wedding, except her sister’s face kept sliding off like wet paint. Everyone described the same metallic aftertaste, the same sense of a door left open somewhere just out of view.

By Friday the machine was empty and nobody had seen it get restocked, and by the following Monday it wasn’t in the break room anymore, just a rectangle of clean floor where it had been sitting, and a faint smell of artificial cherry that took two days to fade. The maintenance guy checked the delivery logs and found nothing. Everyone stopped talking about their dreams around the same time, like they’d agreed to without discussing it, and the break room went back to smelling like burnt coffee and old carpet.

©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

Nobody expected the woman from apartment 1F to save the building because nobody expected much from her at all. She missed tenant meetings, borrowed tools she forgot to return, and once set off the smoke alarm making toast. When the elevator trapped six people between floors during a blackout, she was downstairs arguing with the vending machine over a bag of chips.

Then the emergency lights failed.

The superintendent panicked. Someone inside the elevator started hyperventilating. A child began crying. Cell service was gone, the backup generator refused to start, and the maintenance company estimated help would arrive in two hours.

She disappeared into her apartment.

Ten minutes later, she returned carrying a motorcycle battery, jumper cables, a camping lantern, and a plastic storage bin labeled RANDOM ELECTRIC STUFF. Nobody asked why she owned any of it. There was no time.

She powered the control panel long enough to reset the emergency release, then crawled halfway into the service access with a flashlight between her teeth. The superintendent protested until she reminded him that he had spent the last fifteen minutes pressing the same button.

The elevator shifted.

Everyone froze.

“Keep talking to them,” she said. “If they hear people, they won’t panic.”

Twenty minutes later, the doors opened six inches below the lobby floor.

The trapped tenants climbed out one by one.

The child hugged her. The superintendent stared at the improvised wiring.

“Where did you learn how to do that?”

She shrugged. “Bad boyfriends. Worse cars.”

By morning, everyone in the building knew the story.

At the next tenant meeting, someone proposed making her emergency coordinator.

She declined immediately. “Absolutely not. I have my boundaries.”

Then she reached into her bag, pulled out a laminated evacuation plan, and slid copies across the table.

Nobody commented.

Sometimes the least reliable person in the room is simply waiting for the emergency to become interesting.

©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

Nobody agreed on what Slappy Joe actually was. The oldest version made him a cafeteria cook fired for serving meat of uncertain origin. Another claimed he was a student who ate one-too-many sloppy joes on a dare and vanished on the way to the toilet. By the time the story reached the current class, he had become some kind of saucy meat creature that lived inside the industrial freezer and came out whenever somebody wasted any sort of beef or beef byproducts.

The rules on encountering Slappy Joe changed depending on who told them, but one remained consistent: never leave a sloppy joe unfinished on a Friday.

And the world being full of nitwits and daredevils, naturally, someone did just that.

Half of a sloppy joe sandwich went into the trash at 12:37. By 12:45, the cafeteria lights flickered. At 12:52, the ketchup dispenser began leaking without being touched. At 1:03, a wet handprint appeared on the freezer door.

Nobody laughed after that.

The janitor smartly refused to enter the kitchen. The lunch staff claimed not to know anything, though one quietly began setting aside an extra bun each Friday. Teachers dismissed the whole thing as nonsense until a tray slid across an empty counter during afternoon detention.

Then came the smell.

Tomato sauce, onions, grease, and something scorched drifted through the halls long after the kitchen closed. Lockers rattled. Shoes stuck briefly to clean floors. Somewhere behind the walls came a rhythmic, meaty slapping sound.

The next morning, every trash can in the building was empty.

In the center of the cafeteria sat a single sandwich. Perfect bun. Perfect filling. Steam rising. Beside it was a handwritten sign:

FINISH WHAT YOU TAKE.

After that, food waste dropped by eighty percent.

The administration credited a successful sustainability initiative, but students knew better.

Every Friday, one untouched sloppy joe still appeared on the back counter.

Nobody ate it.

Nobody threw it away.

And nobody asked why the plate was always clean by Monday.

©2012 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

Nobody suspected the quiet tenant on the third floor because nothing ever happened loudly around them. Packages arrived on time. Rent was paid early. The hallway plant got watered without anyone asking. Even the recycling was sorted correctly.

The trouble was in the details.

A neighbor would spend twenty minutes searching for keys that had somehow migrated from the bowl by the door to the freezer. Someone’s alarm clock would be set nine minutes late on the morning of an important interview. A shared laundry machine would stop with exactly seven minutes left, forcing whoever used it to pay for another cycle.

None of it was serious enough to report. That was the beauty of it.

The tenant kept a small notebook labeled COMMUNITY IMPROVEMENTS. Inside were entries such as switch decaf labels, move thermostat two degrees, replace good pen with identical dying pen, and subscribe upstairs neighbor to twelve mildly embarrassing catalogs.

There were principles. No broken bones. No dead pets. No ruined marriages unless they were already unstable. The work had to remain deniable, irritating, and beneath the threshold where anyone could justify becoming dramatic.

Then the building installed security cameras.

For two weeks, the tenant behaved perfectly. Everyone relaxed.

That was when the residents’ group chat began sending messages nobody remembered writing. Petty complaints appeared under the wrong names. Private grudges became public. Someone accused the superintendent of stealing packages. Someone else confessed to using another tenant’s streaming password.

Chaos spread floor by floor, but the cameras showed nothing unusual.

Eventually, management hired a cybersecurity consultant, who discovered the culprit had never hacked the system at all.

The tenant had simply changed the Wi-Fi passwords on three communal devices and waited for everyone to blame technology.

When confronted, the tenant seemed offended. “That sounds incredibly immature.”

The building manager apologized for the accusation.

That evening, every elevator stopped one inch below the floor.

Not enough to hurt anyone.

Just enough to make everybody stumble.

©2012 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

Hell smelled different on Sundays. The usual sulfur, scorched iron, and damp stone gave way to butter, vanilla, and something sweet browning somewhere beyond the furnace halls. After several weeks, one of the newer arrivals followed the scent through a service corridor and found a kitchen large enough to feed a cathedral.

Satan stood at the center island wearing a black apron and working six waffle irons at once. He measured batter precisely, flipped each iron with care, and arranged finished waffles on warming trays beside bowls of strawberries, syrup, whipped cream, and several toppings that glowed faintly.

The newcomer remained in the doorway. “Is this some kind of punishment?”

Satan glanced over. “If I were punishing you, you would know.”

“Then what’s the catch?”

“There isn’t one. Take a plate before they get cold.”

News spread quickly. By the following Sunday, a line stretched down the corridor. The damned arrived suspiciously, convinced the syrup concealed contracts or the strawberries represented some obscure temptation, but Satan asked for nothing. He simply cooked.

Soon Sunday breakfast became routine. Murderers sat beside liars. Tyrants passed butter to thieves. People who had spent centuries blaming everyone else for their misery argued over whether pecans belonged in batter. For nearly an hour, the screaming elsewhere in Hell became background noise.

Eventually someone worked up the nerve to ask why the Prince of Darkness spent one morning each week making waffles.

Satan kept pouring batter. “Eternity is very long, and damnation involves a great deal of repetition. I discovered I needed a hobby.”

Nobody believed him.

He shrugged. “Also, I happen to make excellent waffles.”

That part was difficult to dispute.

Nothing about Hell improved afterward. No sentence was shortened. No soul was redeemed. The furnaces stayed hot, the punishments continued, and Satan remained Satan.

But every Sunday morning, the corridors filled with the smell of butter and vanilla, and the damned lined up carrying plates.

Even eternal torment, apparently, benefited from breakfast.

©2012 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys