madd
fictional

THE MIDNIGHT EDITION

Tag: short story

Micro-Fiction Corner: Coo-coo Crazy, Reality Is Hazy

The cuckoo clock came with the house, screwed above the hallway radiator, and it never kept the correct hour. The bird emerged at meaningless intervals and called a number that corresponded to nothing on the dial.

Amandala stopped correcting it until one Tuesday afternoon, after four sharp calls, she discovered that the spoon rest beside the stove had turned blue. She was almost certain it had been green, although certainty became harder to hold once she began checking.

Other discrepancies followed. Her mother’s photograph shifted several inches across the mantel and acquired a broader smile. The dictionary changed publishers. A scar disappeared from her wrist, although she remembered exactly how she had received it.

She began keeping a list on the refrigerator, recording every alteration after each appearance of the bird, but the list itself gradually changed. Entries vanished. Others appeared in rounder handwriting, describing objects she did not remember owning and a sister she could no longer picture.

She eventually realized the number of calls did not count changes. It counted corrections.

The clock was rebuilding the house according to another version of her life.

By Sunday, the hallway contained family photographs from vacations she had never taken. Her wedding ring returned after twenty-two years in a drawer, already warm on her finger. Someone had placed men’s shoes beside the front door. When the cuckoo called thirteen times, she remembered a husband who had never existed and missed him with enough force to make her knees weaken.

She opened the little wooden door beneath the clock face and found no gears. Inside was a nest of newspaper strips, each carrying fragments of obituaries bearing her name at different ages. At the center rested a warm brown egg and the green spoon rest she remembered.

From the kitchen came a man’s voice asking whether she wanted tea.

She knew the voice. She loved the voice. And that frightened her more than anything else.

The egg began ticking in her hand, and she understood that the clock was not replacing her world randomly. It was searching through every life she might have lived, correcting toward one in which she had never bought the house alone.

She did not know what would happen when it finally decided which woman belonged there.

©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

May 24, 2013
Micro-Fiction Corner: One Glistening Eye In The Dark

The closet door never latched properly, and each night the father pushed it shut after the bedtime story. One evening it drifted open farther than usual, revealing a single enormous eye at the height of his waist. Its iris had the color of a pond beneath winter ice.

He should have taken his daughter and run. Instead, he noticed the eye was watching her.

Over the following weeks, he began leaving the closet open. The creature never emerged. It simply watched while she slept. During thunderstorms, fevers, and nights when he dozed downstairs beside the baby monitor, that glistening eye remained at its post.

Then small things changed.

His daughter hated peas on Tuesday and asked for seconds on Wednesday. A scar beneath her chin vanished. She remembered a beach vacation they had never taken. Photographs altered subtly: a different swimsuit, a missing tooth returned, curls where her hair had been straight.

He blamed exhaustion until he found a picture from the previous Christmas. His daughter was not in it. A different little girl stood beside the tree wearing the same pajamas.

That night, he confronted the eye. The closet widened behind it.

For an instant, he saw hundreds of bedrooms stretching away into darkness. In each one, a child slept beneath the same blanket. Some were older. Some younger. Some carried scars his daughter did not have. Several beds were empty.

The eye moved from room to room, comparing.

He understood its purpose. It had not been protecting his daughter from danger. Whenever something happened to her, it selected another version and continued.

The fever in March. The power failure. The night she wandered downstairs and he never heard her.

He backed away from the closet.

His daughter stirred behind him and asked why he was awake. Her voice sounded almost right.

The eye shifted toward him. Beyond it, hundreds of bedrooms changed.

Now every room contained a father. Some younger. Some heavier. Some sleeping.

Several were dead.

A second eye opened beside the first.

The creature had begun comparing again.

©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

May 23, 2013
Micro-Fiction Corner: Sorry For The Theatrics

I apologize for the fog, the cold hallway, and the way the lights bend toward whichever room I occupy. I understand these things are upsetting. Unfortunately, they are not theatrics in the way you assume.

They are boundaries.

A haunting must remain recognizable as a haunting. Cold tells your body that I am not alive. Flickering lights mark the distance between where you are and where I remain. Doors opening by themselves remind both of us that I enter differently. I learned this only after your youngest began leaving a place for me at the table.

The first evening, I sat. The chair accepted my weight. I cannot adequately explain what that felt like.

The following morning, your child could not lift a spoon.

I stood in the hallway that night and watched strength return to those small hands while mine became transparent again. The exchange was slight enough that none of you noticed. I did.

After that came other experiments I regret. When you spoke to me directly, my voice strengthened and yours became hoarse. When someone hung a stocking for me last winter, I became warm enough to fog a window while your eldest shivered beneath three blankets.

Ordinary kindness is making me alive. It is doing so by borrowing life from you.

This is why I have resumed the fog. This is why the doors slam. This is why I whisper from vents instead of joining conversations. I need you to be frightened enough to remember what I am.

Your youngest has set my place again tonight. Please remove it.

If the child cries, allow the crying. If the chair moves, break it. If I ask to come in, understand that I may sincerely mean it and refuse anyway.

I have spent decades wanting someone to treat me as though I belonged in a home.

I know now what it costs.

Please forgive the theatrics.

They are the only thing keeping me dead.

©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

May 22, 2013
Micro-Fiction Corner: Mom And Pop Music Shop

The music shop priced its records by date. Yesterday cost almost nothing. Next month required cash. Anything beyond a year sat behind glass.

The customer came for guitar strings and left with a plain white record marked three Thursdays from now. The wife behind the counter advised playing it only once. Her husband added that stopping halfway caused complications.

At home, the record produced no music. It played his apartment instead: the radiator clicking, a kettle cooling, his own footsteps crossing the floor. Near the end came three knocks at the front door, followed by his voice asking who was there. Something answered too softly to understand. Then came a crash, several seconds of dragging, and silence.

Three Thursdays later, he unplugged the doorbell, removed the knocker, and spent the evening sitting motionless in the bedroom.

At 9:14, three knocks sounded anyway, but he did not answer.

The knocks repeated. When he remained silent, the apartment changed around him. The kettle appeared on the stove although he had never filled it. The radiator began clicking in the exact rhythm from the record. His legs carried him toward the hallway despite every effort to resist.

That was when he understood that the record had never predicted anything. It had arranged it.

He returned to the shop the next morning, shaken and furious. The couple listened without surprise. The wife explained that recordings from future dates were not recordings at all. They were masters. Once played, the world pressed itself from them.

He demanded that they destroy his.

The husband reached beneath the counter and produced another sleeve. On it was written today’s date.

The customer tore it in half.

That was when the bell above the door rang, and he suddenly found himself standing outside the shop.

Confused, he entered, and the husband sold him guitar strings and mentioned records in the back room.

The customer began screaming, and the couple exchanged a tired glance.

Somewhere behind them, a needle dropped.

©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

May 21, 2013
Micro-Fiction Corner: Electric Juju

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

May 20, 2013
Micro-Fiction Corner: All Righty, Aphrodite

He assumed Aphrodite was an ambitious screen name until she walked into the café and every conversation around him faltered. A barista poured steamed milk onto the counter. Two strangers waiting for separate orders exchanged numbers before she reached his table. Someone near the window began crying over a person they had stopped loving twenty years earlier.

She seemed embarrassed by all of it.

Their date went well enough to make him suspicious, but she kept accepting his invitations. By the third date, he had compiled a private inventory of impossibilities: flowers that opened when she entered a room, quarreling couples who reconciled within her hearing range, rain that arrived suddenly because he mentioned liking thunderstorms.

He eventually asked whether Aphrodite was really her name.

She admitted it was closer to a job title.

After that, the stranger things became easier to notice. Desire accumulated around her. Marriages began in supermarket aisles. Former lovers called one another at three in the morning. People abandoned sensible lives because she happened to pass their buildings.

Yet something else was happening.

The longer she stayed with him, the weaker those effects became.

Flowers wilted normally. Arguments continued. A waiter served her without trembling. One evening they walked through a crowded restaurant and nobody turned to watch.

She understood before he did.

Gods survived through recognition. Worship did not require temples; wanting was enough. For thousands of years, humanity had looked at her and desired what she represented.

He had ruined that by asking whether she slept badly, whether her mother annoyed her, whether she wanted the last dumpling.

By loving her specifically, he was making her mortal.

The change spread beyond her. Dating apps emptied. Affairs ended from simple lack of interest. Love songs disappeared from radio playlists because listeners found them inexplicably tedious. Around the world, desire was cooling.

She could leave him and recover everything.

Instead, she asked whether he was frightened.

He considered the quiet city outside. “A little.”

She took his hand.

Somewhere, millions of people suddenly forgot why they had been lonely.

©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

May 19, 2013
Micro-Fiction Corner: To Sow, Perchance To Reap
The seed catalog arrived unsolicited, wedged into the mailbox between bills and coupon flyers, no return address, no company name printed anywhere on its glossy cover, just a single line of script promising a harvest beyond anything conventional soil could produce.

Most people would have tossed it straight into the recycling bin, and most people, in fact, did exactly that, but every town seems to have at least one gardener desperate enough for something to finally take, and this town had hers, a woman who’d lost three seasons in a row to blight and drought and a rabbit infestation that ate through every fence she built.

The seeds inside were labeled in that same unfamiliar script, names that sounded almost like vegetables and almost like something else, and the instructions asked for things no seed packet had ever asked for before.
```
Plant at the hour between dusk and true dark.
Water only with something that had once been warm.
Speak to the rows nightly, and mean what you say to them. 
```
She followed the instructions with the specific devotion of someone who had run out of other options, and within two weeks the rows were thick with growth unlike anything she’d planted before, dark green and glossy, heavy with fruit that smelled faintly of copper.

The harvest, when it came, fed her better than any season had in years, and she told the neighbors who asked that she’d finally found the right fertilizer, laughing it off the way you laugh off good luck you don’t fully trust.

What she didn’t mention, because she’d only half admitted it to herself, was the sense that the garden was listening back now, that the rows seemed to lean toward her before she’d finished speaking, that the vegetables on her table had started to taste like things she remembered rather than things she’d grown.

She kept planting anyway, every season after, because the harvest never failed again, and because by then she’d stopped being entirely sure the choice was still hers to make.

©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys
May 18, 2013
Micro-Fiction Corner: I Date Synopses

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

May 17, 2013
Micro-Fiction Corner: I Don’t Wanna Be Free, I Wanna Be Pretty

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

May 16, 2013
Micro-Fiction Corner: If You Can’t Blind Them With Brilliance…

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

May 16, 2013