Tag: #microfiction

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

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

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

Marla said “good morning” to the bread vendor for eleven years, and on the twelfth, she made herself say something else.

“Cold one today,” she said instead, and the vendor blinked at her like she’d spoken a language he almost remembered, and handed over the loaf, and neither of them noticed the sidewalk hold its breath and let it go again.

This was how you survived. You varied. You never said the same sentence twice in one week if you could help it. You took different streets home even when the different street was longer, colder, worse. You changed the order you buttoned your coat.

The people who didn’t understand this were the ones who called it superstition, or nerves, or — the word she hated most — quirky. They said it gently, the way you’d talk about someone’s fear of birds. They never watched what happened to Dorwin.

Dorwin liked routines. He said routines were comforting, said the world was chaotic enough without borrowing more of it, and every morning for six weeks he ran the same three miles, past the same maple, past the same cracked mailbox shaped like a barn.

On the forty-third day, the street noticed him.

It didn’t come as a monster. That was the thing nobody believed until they’d seen it — there was no shape to point to, no teeth. The air just got thick near the maple, thick like it was concentrating, like it had finally located the thread of him running through it for the forty-third time and started, gently, to pull. He didn’t scream. He didn’t have time to. He was just there and then he was a shape the street remembered better than it remembered him, and the next morning the maple was gone too, replaced by a maple-shaped absence that the neighborhood adjusted to within a week, the way you adjust to any story you tell yourself enough times that it stops sounding like a story.

Marla told this to no one twice.

She’d learned that part hardest of all — that even warnings were repetition, that the story of Dorwin was itself a thread, and if she told it the same way to the same person more than once, she risked teaching the air his name.

So she varied that too. Some days she said he moved away. Some days she said she never knew a Dorwin at all.

Only once, to a stranger on a train who’d never hear it again, did she tell it straight through — every detail, the maple, the mailbox, the way the air had learned to want him — because some things deserved, once, to be said exactly true.

Then she got off at the next stop, and took the long way home, and did not look back at the tracks to see if anything had noticed her sitting in that same seat, telling that same story, twice now, if you counted the first time she’d told herself.

©2012 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys