madd
fictional

THE MIDNIGHT EDITION

Tag: #flashfiction

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: Wanna Join My Cult?

    Micro-Fiction Corner: Wanna Join My Cult?

    “Wanna join my cult?”

    The invitation was so casual it sounded like a joke, which was why people kept saying yes.

    There were no robes, no chanting, no secluded compound in the desert. Meetings took place in the back room of a laundromat on Thursdays because the owner offered a discount after six. The refreshments were supermarket cookies and coffee strong enough to dissolve resentment. The founder insisted there was no leader, although everyone turned toward the same chair whenever a decision needed making.

    The doctrine was simple: stop pretending your life is fine.

    Members confessed things they had spent years disguising as personality. One hated being a parent. Another had stayed married out of inertia. Someone else had built an entire career around avoiding a conversation with a dying father. Nobody offered advice. Advice was considered recruitment behavior.

    That rule lasted three weeks.

    Soon there were pamphlets.

    Then membership tiers.

    The basic level included weekly meetings and access to the group chat. Premium members received emergency listening sessions, branded notebooks, and priority seating during “Radical Honesty Evenings.” A merchandise table appeared beside the dryers.

    The founder became uneasy. “This is getting cultish.”

    Everyone laughed.

    Then came the retreat.

    It was held at a budget conference hotel near the airport, but somebody brought candles, and somebody else printed matching shirts. By Saturday night, the group had developed a hand gesture, three forbidden phrases, and a suspicious attitude toward anyone who left before dessert.

    The founder stood on a banquet chair and announced the cult was dissolved.

    Nobody moved.

    “You can’t just end it,” someone said.

    “I started it.”

    “That sounds authoritarian.”

    The room murmured agreement.

    The founder looked around at the notebooks, shirts, candles, slogans, and forty-three people waiting to be told they were free thinkers.

    Then someone near the back raised a hand. “Can we vote on whether you’re still in charge?”

    The founder closed both eyes.

    The cult had finally become successful enough to survive its creator.

    ©2012 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: Trauma Dump Baby Bump

    Micro-Fiction Corner: Trauma Dump Baby Bump

    The pregnancy announcement began with a sonogram and ended with a confession about childhood neglect.

    Nobody remembered exactly how it happened. One moment the expectant parent was holding up a grainy black-and-white image; the next, everyone at brunch knew about the locked bedroom door, the Christmas spent alone, the parent who drank, the teacher who noticed and did nothing, and the first therapist who said something unforgivable in a room that smelled of peppermint tea.

    At first, the table responded with the tender seriousness people reserve for revelations that arrive beside pastries.

    Then another guest touched the small curve of the belly and began crying.

    The tears came with a story.

    That story triggered another.

    Soon the entire restaurant was confessing.

    A waiter admitted he had not spoken to his brother in eleven years. A woman at the next table described the exact moment she stopped loving her husband. Someone near the window announced that every birthday since age nine had made her physically ill. The chef emerged from the kitchen carrying a tray of eggs and disclosed a fear of abandonment so detailed that three customers quietly canceled their weddings.

    Nobody could stop.

    The baby bump seemed to pull secrets from people like gravity.

    By the third trimester, strangers approached on sidewalks just to unload decades of pain. Grocery stores became impossible. Elevators became group therapy. The obstetrician began every appointment by apologizing for something unrelated.

    Then labor started.

    In the delivery room, every nurse began confessing at once. The parent screamed for them to shut up, and for the first time in months, everyone did.

    The baby arrived furious, healthy, and completely silent. No crying, wailing, or complaint.

    The room leaned closer.

    The newborn opened its eyes.

    And every adult present suddenly felt an overwhelming urge to keep something to themselves.

    ©2012 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: Dipping Dumplings You’ve Never Heard Of

    Micro-Fiction Corner: Dipping Dumplings You’ve Never Heard Of

    “I’m dipping dumplings you’ve never heard of.”

    The sentence appeared online beneath a photograph of six pale crescents arranged around a ceramic bowl of black sauce. Within an hour, strangers were demanding the restaurant’s name. By dinner, food accounts were calling the dish “the next thing.” By morning, people were arguing about whether they had eaten the dumplings before they became popular.

    Nobody could identify them, and that only made them more desirable.

    A critic described their filling as “ancestral, elusive, almost accusatory.” Another detected fermented pear, smoked eel, and “the mineral memory of rain.” A television chef claimed the folding technique came from a mountain village inaccessible during winter, although nobody could locate the mountain.

    Restaurants responded quickly. Menus acquired untranslated names. Servers began explaining that the dumplings were traditionally eaten in silence, with the left hand, after thinking briefly about one’s grandmother.

    Reservations became impossible to obtain.

    The original poster watched all of this with increasing alarm.

    The dumplings had come from a supermarket freezer bag. The black sauce was soy sauce mixed with too much molasses because the bottle had slipped.

    Eventually, a magazine requested an interview about cultural authenticity.

    There was still time to confess.

    Instead, the poster said the recipe could not be shared because it belonged to “a nearly vanished culinary lineage.”

    That was the moment everything became expensive.

    A cookbook followed. Then a streaming series. Then a line of artisanal dipping bowls. The supermarket quietly discontinued the frozen dumplings, unaware that its least popular product had become an international obsession under another name.

    Years later, at a private dinner attended by critics, collectors, and people who used the word mouthfeel without embarrassment, the creator finally tasted the celebrated version.

    It was exquisite.

    “What do you think?” someone whispered.

    The inventor chewed thoughtfully, dipped another dumpling into the sauce, and smiled.

    “I preferred them before everyone knew about them.”

    ©2012 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: If I Get Pushed Into The Pool One More Time

    Micro-Fiction Corner: If I Get Pushed Into The Pool One More Time

    “If I get pushed into a pool one more time, somebody is going to die.”

    Everyone laughed because everyone always laughed.

    It began at the first summer party, when someone thought it hilarious to shove the fully dressed guest into the shallow end. The next time happened at a wedding reception. Then a birthday. Then an office retreat. Somehow the joke followed from one social circle to another, acquiring the strange immortality of a story people preferred repeating to understanding.

    There were objections, of course. Quiet ones at first, then angry ones. None mattered. The moment someone stood near water, another person would grin, glance around for an audience, and begin creeping forward with both hands raised.

    So precautions were taken. Phones stayed in waterproof cases. Watches came off near pools. Shoes were chosen for drainage. Invitations mentioning boats, fountains, hot tubs, lakes, or decorative ponds were declined.

    For three years, there were no incidents.

    Then came the rooftop party.

    There was music, champagne, a swimming pool glowing blue beneath strings of lights, and exactly one person stupid enough to remember the old joke.

    Hands struck between the shoulder blades. The victim disappeared over the edge. The screaming began before anyone reached the railing.

    The rooftop pool had been removed during renovations six months earlier.

    What remained below was an empty concrete basin, twelve feet deep.

    The ambulance arrived quickly. So did the police. Witnesses repeated the same sentence: it was only supposed to be a joke.

    In the hospital, wrapped in plaster and stitched nearly everywhere stitching was possible, the survivor listened as an officer carefully explained that charges would likely follow.

    “Good,” came the whisper.

    Months later, the rooftop pool reopened.

    At the first party of summer, everyone promised not to push anyone. And even though nobody even stood too close…

    …a set of hands rushed out of nowhere and gave a rough shove.

    ©2012 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: Business Idea Problems

    Micro-Fiction Corner: Business Idea Problems

    “I have a lot of business ideas. The problem is the police.”

    That was how the pitch began.

    The investor across the café table lowered his coffee and considered leaving, but curiosity won over. The entrepreneur opened a folder labeled OPPORTUNITIES and slid over several neatly typed proposals. None of them were illegal exactly. They simply became illegal whenever described in enough detail.

    The first involved unused parking spaces, temporary ownership, and license plates that changed more often than weather. The second required a refrigerated truck, three abandoned warehouses, and an extremely flexible definition of seafood. The third was described only as “subscription-based burglary,” which the entrepreneur insisted had excellent recurring-revenue potential.

    “You understand,” the investor said, “that most businesses try to solve problems.”

    “These do.”

    “For customers.”

    “These do that too.”

    The entrepreneur explained that law enforcement lacked imagination. Every time a promising market appeared, somebody eventually called it fraud, theft, smuggling, extortion, or operating a zoo without appropriate permits. Innovation, apparently, was always being punished by vocabulary.

    The investor should have walked away. Instead, he asked about the final page.

    The entrepreneur smiled.

    That proposal was completely legal. No contraband, forged documents, stolen goods, or suspicious livestock. It merely offered consulting services to people with unusual business concepts.

    “What kind of consulting?”

    “Compliance.”

    The investor stared.

    The entrepreneur leaned forward and explained the model. Clients paid generously to discover which laws their ideas violated before the police did. Premium subscribers received introductions to accountants, attorneys, permit offices, insurance brokers, and, where necessary, therapists.

    Within six months, the firm occupied two floors downtown.

    Within a year, it employed forty people.

    Three years later, the founder gave a keynote speech at a business conference about ethical entrepreneurship.

    During questions, someone asked where the idea had come from.

    The founder smiled at the packed ballroom. “I used to have a lot of business ideas,” he said. “The problem was the police.”

    ©2012 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: You Are My Pencil and I Am Your Paper

    Micro-Fiction Corner: You Are My Pencil and I Am Your Paper

    The note appeared on the kitchen table in handwriting neither of them recognized.

    You are my pencil and I am your paper.

    They blamed each other at first. One accused the other of trying to be romantic after an argument; the other denied it with enough irritation to make romance unlikely. They crumpled the note, threw it away, and found it flattened neatly beneath the saltshaker the next morning.

    A second sentence had been added.

    You make the marks. I keep them.

    That evening, one of them wrote a grocery list and left it beside the sink. By breakfast, the words had appeared faintly across the other’s forearm: milk, coffee, soap, lemons. They scrubbed until the skin reddened, but the ink remained until every item had been purchased.

    After that, they experimented. A question written on paper appeared as an itch beneath the other’s skin. A confession surfaced as bruised lettering along the ribs. A lie arrived darker than the truth and took days to fade.

    Soon, they stopped speaking and everything important was written.

    I hate when you leave without saying goodbye.

    I still think about the person I was before you.

    Sometimes I stay because leaving would mean admitting how long I wanted to.

    The house filled with notebooks. Their bodies filled with answers.

    Then, one morning, the paper was blank. No notes on the table. No words beneath the skin.

    One of them searched every room before finding the other seated at the desk with a sharpened pencil and a single sheet of paper.

    Nothing had been written yet.

    “What are you doing?”

    The pencil hovered.

    “For once,” came the answer, “I’m waiting to see what remains if I don’t write you first.”

    The point touched the page, and nothing appeared on the other person’s skin.

    And for the first time in years, that silence felt honest.

    ©2012 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: The Cheap Trick of Expensive Love

    Micro-Fiction Corner: The Cheap Trick of Expensive Love

    The first gift was a watch that cost more than the rent. It arrived after an argument about missed dinners, unanswered messages, and the strange way one person could make another feel abandoned while technically remaining in the relationship. The box was lined with velvet, the face set with tiny diamonds, and the card said, For all the time I owe you.

    That should have been funny. Instead, it worked.

    After that, every disappointment came beautifully wrapped. Forgotten birthdays became weekend trips. Cruel remarks became jewelry. Infidelity became a car with heated seats and a ribbon stretched across the hood. Each apology had weight, polish, a receipt, and the reassuring smell of something newly purchased.

    Eventually, the betrayed partner began measuring pain in retail value. A lie worth flowers barely counted. A serious betrayal required something custom-made. When the arguments grew worse, so did the quality of the gifts, until heartbreak acquired excellent craftsmanship.

    Friends called the relationship toxic. The answer was always the same: nobody understood how generous love could be.

    As the years passed, the apartment filled with objects too valuable to discard and too painful to enjoy. Watches slept in drawers. Designer clothes hung unworn. Crystal gathered dust beside framed photographs of vacations taken immediately after disasters.

    Then came the diagnosis.

    It was not fatal, but it was frightening enough to expose the machinery. There were appointments, sleepless nights, prescriptions, and long afternoons when companionship would have been useful.

    Instead, a courier arrived carrying a small black box. Inside was a necklace. No note.

    The patient held it for a long time before laughing.

    When the giver finally came home, the necklace was waiting on the kitchen table beside every expensive apology collected over twenty years.

    Nothing had been taken, nor had they been broken, or even been returned.

    The expensive lesson was that the cheap trick had never worked.

    ©2012 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: By Words Defined

    Micro-Fiction Corner: By Words Defined

    The demon arrived without smoke, sulfur, or ceremony. It just appeared in the corner of the room as a sentence.

    At first it was only three words long.

    You are tired.

    The reader laughed, because this was true. The sentence darkened.

    You are alone.

    Which was also true.

    The letters thickened against the wall, and the reader tried not to look at them, but new words appeared wherever the eyes went.

    Ignored.

    The demon gained shoulders.

    Unwanted.

    It grew hands.

    Failure.

    Its face began to form.

    The reader understood then. Every word gave it substance. Every accepted description made it more complete. So the reader tried better words.

    Kind.

    One of the demon’s fingers vanished.

    Necessary.

    Its jaw cracked.

    Loved.

    The thing screamed, although no sound entered the room.

    For a while, that seemed to be the answer. The reader spoke only generous words, careful words, words polished smooth by hope.

    The demon shrank. Then it smiled. On the wall appeared:

    Coward.

    The reader flinched.

    The demon’s spine returned.

    Liar.

    Its ribs unfolded.

    Cruel.

    Its eyes opened.

    The reader shouted that none of those words were true.

    The demon stepped closer, and that was when the reader understood the trap.

    Truth did not matter. Belief did.

    The demon became whatever language the reader accepted, whether whispered by enemies, remembered from childhood, or supplied by the reader alone.

    It leaned close enough for its breath to move the hair on the reader’s arms.

    One final word appeared between them.

    Demon.

    The reader stared at it for a long time, then smiled.

    “No.”

    The word vanished.

    So did the horns. Then the claws. Then the teeth. What remained was small, frightened, and almost human.

    The reader considered it carefully. “You’re a thought,” they said.

    The thing became smaller.

    “A habit.”

    Smaller still.

    “A word.”

    And at last, it disappeared.

    ©2012 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: Ya Gotta Die Before You Live

    Micro-Fiction Corner: Ya Gotta Die Before You Live

    Kenny read about it on a forum that specialized in things nobody should read about on forums: a loophole, allegedly, where a man could be declared legally dead, collect on a insurance policy he’d take out on himself under a shell company, wait the requisite period, resurface under a slightly different name, and live — as the forum kept putting it, in all caps, like volume was a substitute for accuracy — TAX FREE FOREVER.

    His uncle Ray had always said it. Ya gotta die before you live, kid. Ray meant it about failure, about heartbreak, about the used Camaro he’d sunk a summer into before it taught him something about patience. Kenny had never once considered that Ray meant it as advice about actual, medically certifiable death, and to be fair to Ray, he hadn’t.

    Kenny considered this a technicality.

    The plan required, first, a boat. Specifically, a boat that could be found empty and adrift with Kenny’s phone, wallet, and a single deeply insincere note inside it. It required, second, a period of quiet living somewhere with a beach and no extradition treaty, which Kenny located, optimistically, using the same forum. It required, third, a new identity, which he built out of a library card, a gym membership, and enormous confidence.

    It did not require, though Kenny discovered this too late, an actual understanding of maritime law, life insurance underwriting timelines, or the fact that his mother would report him missing within four hours and would, upon hearing the words “empty boat,” immediately and correctly assume the worst about her son’s judgment rather than his safety.

    The insurance company sent an investigator before they sent a check. The investigator found Kenny in nine days, tan, badly sunburned, going by “Darren,” working a beach bar for cash and telling anyone who’d listen that he was between things.

    At the hearing — because there was, in fact, a hearing, a whole undignified proceeding with a name plaque that said FRAUD, PARTIAL and a judge who looked at Kenny the way you’d look at a raccoon that had gotten into the attic and then, somehow, further into the attic — Kenny’s lawyer asked if he had anything to say for himself.

    Kenny thought about Ray, about the Camaro, about the version of the plan that had made so much sense at two in the morning with a laptop and a forum full of strangers who’d never once been asked to defend it in daylight.

    “My uncle always said you gotta die before you live,” Kenny told the court.

    The judge considered this.

    “Mr. Travares,” she said, “I don’t think this is what he meant.”

    “No,” Kenny agreed. “I’m getting that now.”

    ©2012 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: The Intelligent and the Stupid

    Micro-Fiction Corner: The Intelligent and the Stupid

    They were seven and nine when the school tested them, and after that, everyone had a shorthand. Del was the smart one. Josie was the other one — not stupid, exactly, nobody said that word in front of their mother, but the shape of it sat in every sentence that didn’t include her when the school called about the gifted program.

    For a while it didn’t cost anything. Del got the extra worksheets; Josie got left alone with more time to build things out of whatever was in the garage, which she preferred anyway, or told herself she preferred.

    It cost something at fifteen, when Del corrected her at dinner — gently, the way you’d correct a child, though they were the same distance from being children — and Josie stopped bringing things up at dinner at all, not out of hurt exactly, more like a room she’d quietly stopped entering because the last time she had, someone had rearranged the furniture without asking and called it help.

    It cost more at twenty-six, when their mother got sick, and everyone assumed Del would manage the doctors and the paperwork, and Del did, competently, exhaustedly, alone, because nobody thought to ask Josie, and Josie didn’t offer, because by then “helping” felt like walking into a test she’d already been told the results of.

    They didn’t stop loving each other. That was the strange, stubborn part. They just built two entirely separate systems for being loved — Del’s built on being needed, competent, correct; Josie’s built on being easy, undemanding, no trouble — and the systems worked, mostly, as long as nobody asked either of them to be something else.

    It was Josie, in the end, who fixed the roof.

    Not metaphorically — the actual roof, on the actual house, the summer their mother died and left it to both of them and Del was three states away being needed by someone else’s problem. Josie climbed up with a book she’d bought years ago and never mentioned to anyone, because mentioning things she’d taught herself had started to feel like an argument she didn’t want to have, and she fixed it, alone, and stood on the ladder afterward not knowing who to tell.

    She called Del anyway.

    “I fixed the roof,” she said, and there was a silence on the line that had thirty years in it — every worksheet, every dinner, every quiet withdrawal from every room — and then Del said, “I didn’t know you could do that,” and Josie said, “Neither did I,” which wasn’t quite true, and neither of them corrected it.

    That was as close as they got, that year, to starting over. It was enough. It had to be. They were fifty-one and forty-nine, and there wasn’t a version of them left that had time to be anything but careful with what remained.

    ©2012 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys