madd
fictional

THE MIDNIGHT EDITION

Tag: weaving words

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: Rampire Princess Igloo

    Micro-Fiction Corner: Rampire Princess Igloo

    The children invented the game during a winter so cold the gutters froze solid. They built a snow fort at the dead end of the block, packed the walls nearly shoulder-high, and carved a throne into the center. Whoever occupied the throne longest became the Rampire Princess, a title assembled from words nobody could later trace. The game survived childhoods, moves, divorces, demolished houses, and every adult attempt to explain why no one used the name correctly.

    When I returned to the neighborhood decades later, the fort was still there.

    It had been rebuilt many times, yet the oldest section remained beneath an overgrown hedge. Even in July, when the pavement softened in the heat, a fist-sized core of ice persisted in the soil. Children still gathered around it every winter, adding fresh walls and choosing a new princess. None could explain the rules beyond the essentials: the princess sat, the others tried to remove her, and she was never supposed to leave the throne before dark.

    My mother remembered more.

    Years before I was born, a girl had refused to surrender the seat during a blizzard. By the time adults realized the children were still outside, visibility had collapsed. They found the fort intact and the other children huddled near the entrance. The girl was gone. No footprints led away.

    Afterward, parents demolished the fort. Children rebuilt it the following winter without discussing why. Every generation did the same.

    This year I watched from my mother’s window as the youngest child in the group climbed onto the snow throne. The others became unusually quiet. She sat very straight, hands folded in her lap, while frost thickened along the inside walls.

    I went outside before dusk and told them the game was over.

    None argued. That unsettled me more than resistance would have.

    The child on the throne opened her eyes and asked whether I had come to relieve her. I said yes before understanding the question. The other children immediately began dismantling the fort around us, laughing again as though released from some obligation.

    Since then, the patch beneath the hedge has finally started melting. My own hands, however, stay cold no matter how warm the room becomes, and every night I dream of sitting somewhere made of snow while generations of children wait patiently for me to decide who sits there next.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: The Scarlet Maw

    Micro-Fiction Corner: The Scarlet Maw

    The tavern had operated under that name for so long that nobody remembered whether it referred to the red door, the stained-glass windows, or some forgotten owner with theatrical taste. The current proprietor inherited the building along with its ledgers, liquor license, and several generations of unpaid repairs, and for years regarded the name as one more piece of branding nobody had bothered changing.

    During the handover, the previous owner mentioned a cellar door at the rear of the building and advised her never to open it after last call. He offered no explanation, and she assumed the warning concerned pipes, wiring, or some structural defect he hoped to avoid paying for.

    She ignored him once.

    It happened during a quiet winter night after the final customer had gone. Behind the door lay no storage room. A passage descended beyond the foundation, narrow and red, its walls ribbed with pale bands that tightened and released at long intervals. Warm air moved through it in a slow inward pull. When she leaned closer, the passage contracted slightly around the light from her phone.

    She closed the door and began noticing details she had previously dismissed. Glasses left overnight sometimes stood empty by morning even when nobody had cleared them. Regulars who spent decades drinking at the same tables seemed to age unevenly, remaining unchanged for years before suddenly appearing much older. The building itself shifted through the seasons, floorboards rising and settling with a rhythm that never matched humidity.

    She eventually tracked down the previous owner at a retirement home. He laughed when she asked about the cellar. The tavern, he explained, had always done better when crowded. It liked conversation, music, arguments, confessions, flirtations, and all the other things people released after enough drink. Owners who kept the place lively tended to prosper.

    She asked what happened to everything the building took in.

    He told her that was the wrong question to ask while still standing inside it.

    Since then she has kept longer hours. The tavern does excellent business. Customers often remark that the place feels unusually warm and intimate, especially late at night. Lately, though, the cellar door has started opening by itself just before closing, and the red passage beyond seems slightly shorter each time, as though whatever has been swallowing the noise for all these years has begun moving closer to the room where the noise is made.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: Spinner Tori’s Inner Story

    The carousel at the edge of the fairground had run on the same tinny calliope recording for more than forty years. Paint peeled from the horses, mirrors had clouded around their edges, and the brass poles wore dark where generations of children had gripped them. One horse stood apart from the others only because a small plaque at its base read TORI.

    Nobody knew who had named her.

    Children chose her whenever possible. Something in the tilt of her carved head made the expression seem different from every angle. Seen from the entrance, she appeared cheerful. From the operator’s booth, the same painted face looked frightened. Parents often remarked on how lifelike she seemed before laughing at themselves.

    The longtime operator told me that Tori had always moved slightly out of time with the carousel. Each rotation she lagged perhaps half a second behind the other horses. The mechanism should have made that impossible, yet maintenance crews never found a fault. Riders sometimes stepped off disoriented, insisting the ride had lasted much longer than the three minutes shown on the clock.

    Eventually the operator showed me a hidden panel beneath the saddle.

    Inside the hollow body lay a folded scrap of paper. Most of the writing had faded beyond recognition, though one line appeared to contain a woman’s name different from Tori and a date nearly twenty years before the fairground opened. The ink changed subtly whenever anyone tried to copy it. Letters shifted places. Numbers reversed. Once, the operator photographed the note and discovered that the image showed a completely different date.

    She stopped opening the panel after that.

    The carousel began slowing near the end of her final season. Motors tested normally. Bearings were replaced. The other horses kept perfect time while Tori drifted farther behind each night.

    Children riding her started telling similar stories. They described seeing another fairground during the turns, older and dimmer, where adults rode the carousel instead of children. Some said a woman stood beside the operator’s booth counting rotations. One child claimed the woman kept asking whether anyone remembered her real name.

    After closing, the calliope now continues faintly for several minutes after the power is cut. Only one set of hoof mechanisms moves during those extra rotations.

    The operator retired last week and left instructions for her replacement. Keep the panel closed. Never repaint the horse’s face. If Tori completes one full turn after the rest of the carousel has stopped, do not restart the ride until morning.

    She did not explain the final rule.

    Yesterday, the new operator called to tell her Tori had stopped lagging.

    For the first time in decades, the horse is moving slightly ahead of the others. The operator said it feels less like the mechanism has been repaired and more like whatever has been circling inside finally knows where it wants to arrive.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: The Wisdom of Rice

    Micro-Fiction Corner: The Wisdom of Rice

    My grandmother threw rice at every wedding she attended well into her nineties. Long after guests switched to bubbles, bells, flower petals, and biodegradable confetti, she arrived with a small cloth pouch and ignored anyone who warned her about birds. Rice remembers things bubbles cannot, she would say, as though the explanation were obvious.

    After she died, my mother found shelves of glass jars in the pantry. Each contained a handful of dried rice labeled with a wedding date and the names of the couple. Some went back more than seventy years. Folded inside every jar was a small square of paper bearing one of several marks: a circle, a slash, a pair of parallel lines, occasionally something resembling a knot.

    We assumed it was sentimental record keeping until my mother began comparing the jars with family history.

    The slashes belonged almost exclusively to marriages that ended early. Circles marked long unions. Parallel lines appeared beside couples who stayed married but lived largely separate lives. The knotted symbol was rare. Every marriage bearing it had survived circumstances that should have destroyed it: disappearances, affairs, prison sentences, decades of resentment, even one case where the couple divorced and remarried each other three times.

    My grandmother apparently knew which symbol to draw by watching the rice fall.

    My mother began testing the method at weddings. A wide scatter that bounced freely across the pavement usually meant the couple would grow apart without catastrophe. Rice that landed close around their feet suggested endurance. Grains that struck one person and avoided the other entirely corresponded disturbingly well with later illness or abandonment.

    Then came my wedding.

    My mother used rice from my grandmother’s old supply, throwing it as we left the ceremony. Her face changed almost immediately. She gathered several grains from the pavement before anyone could step on them and sealed them in a napkin.

    She has refused to tell me what pattern they made.

    Months later I found her new collection of jars. Mine sat on the top shelf with no symbol on the paper inside. Instead, the rice itself had arranged into a narrow ring against the glass, leaving the center completely empty.

    I asked her what it meant. She admitted she did not know because my grandmother had never recorded anything like it.

    Since then, my spouse and I have both started dreaming of the same room: a long table covered with white cloth, two empty chairs at the far end, and rice falling continuously from somewhere above. My mother has begun checking our jar every morning because the ring keeps tightening by a few grains at a time, though nobody has opened the lid.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: A Certain Style

    I noticed her the way you notice weather changing, gradually and then all at once. For nearly a year she appeared two rows ahead of me at every wedding I attended, always in the aisle seat and always turned slightly toward the couple exchanging vows. She possessed the particular composure of someone who had attended hundreds of such ceremonies. Her smile arrived at exactly the right moments, and whatever she wore seemed perfectly chosen for the season, the venue, even the flowers.

    For months I assumed we moved in overlapping circles. By the fourth wedding I started counting. By the sixth I began asking questions. None of the couples knew her. Her name appeared on no guest list. Photographers found her in their pictures, sometimes seated prominently enough that forgetting her seemed impossible, yet nobody remembered speaking to her at the reception. One bride studied a photograph for nearly a minute before saying the woman’s dress was exactly what she herself would have worn if she had been attending instead of marrying.

    At the seventh wedding, the woman caught me watching. Her usual ceremonial smile changed into something warmer, almost relieved. She inclined her head slightly, acknowledging that I had finally understood enough to be interesting.

    She attended my wedding the following spring.

    Her dress matched a shade I had privately considered for the flowers and never mentioned to anyone. During the vows she watched me more closely than she watched my intended. Once, our eyes met, and for several seconds I became acutely aware of how I was standing, where my hands rested, how wide I was smiling. I adjusted all three without deciding to.

    Afterward, photographs began troubling me. In every picture my posture resembled hers. Within months I caught myself using her restrained smile during arguments, funerals, even moments alone. My marriage changed too, though I cannot identify a single event that changed it. We simply began behaving like two people remembering how married people ought to behave.

    Then the invitations started arriving.

    Some were addressed to strangers. Others contained no names at all, only dates and locations. I attend anyway. Nobody questions me when I take an aisle seat two rows back. I always seem to own the appropriate clothes, though I no longer remember buying them.

    Recently I have noticed certain guests watching me with growing concentration. When one finally catches my eye, I find myself smiling more warmly than the occasion requires. There is satisfaction in that moment, accompanied by the strange certainty that whatever I inherited was never interested in weddings themselves. It requires only ceremonies where people promise to become something, because promises apparently leave enough room for another shape to enter.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: Bleak of Dawn

    Micro-Fiction Corner: Bleak of Dawn

    The phrase first appeared in the logbook of a fishing vessel that vanished for eleven days and returned with fuel tanks nearly full, nets empty, and its crew physically unharmed. Every sailor used the same expression when interviewed: bleak of dawn. None remembered learning it from the others. Each insisted it was simply what those mornings had been called.

    According to navigation instruments, the boat remained in familiar waters. There was no major storm, no recorded fog, and no mechanical failure sufficient to explain the disappearance. The crew remembered something different. For eleven days, the sun attempted to rise and never completed the task. The horizon brightened to a gray, exhausted half-light and remained there. Watches continued running. Meals were eaten. Night arrived eventually, yet morning never advanced beyond that colorless threshold.

    They also agreed that something was observing them through the light.

    Nobody saw a figure or object. The sensation came from the dawn itself, an awareness directed toward the deck whenever someone stepped outside. One crewman described it as waiting for an answer to a question he could feel but never hear. Another believed the light was measuring how long they could tolerate uncertainty before somebody declared that full daylight would never return.

    On the eleventh morning, one of them finally did.

    Accounts diverge sharply after that. Some remember him shouting. Others remember him whispering. One insists he merely thought the words. Within minutes the sun rose normally, the engines started without assistance, and the harbor appeared on the horizon several hours earlier than navigation should have allowed.

    Most of the crew never went to sea again.

    Years later, their memories have begun changing. Two now insist there were twelve mornings. Another remembers someone aboard whose name appears nowhere on the manifest. The man who supposedly broke the silence denies doing so and says the others have assigned him that role because every ordeal eventually demands a person to blame for ending it.

    The vessel still works the same waters under different ownership. Its current crew maintains a private dawn log, recording cloud cover, brightness, and the exact minute sunlight clears the horizon. Recently, several entries have been marked with the same phrase despite perfectly ordinary weather.

    The captain has ordered everyone to stop using it. He says language encourages patterns, especially at sea. Even so, each morning the crew gathers on deck a little earlier, waiting to see whether daylight will finish arriving before anyone feels compelled to say that it will not.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: Eschaton is Going to be a Fine Day

    Micro-Fiction Corner: Eschaton is Going to be a Fine Day

    The preacher on local access television had announced the end of the world every autumn for thirty years. He was small, cheerful, and relentlessly specific, standing beneath a hand-painted sign while naming a date in October and assuring viewers that whatever arrived would do so under pleasant conditions. People watched for entertainment. Restaurants ran specials. Someone once printed T-shirts reading SEE YOU AFTER ESCHATON when the predicted Tuesday passed uneventfully.

    A graduate student digitizing the broadcasts noticed something nobody else had. The dates changed each year, yet every one corresponded with the mildest clear afternoon recorded locally that autumn. Thirty predictions matched thirty unusually fine days: low humidity, little wind, comfortable temperatures, excellent visibility. The weather archive confirmed the pattern closely enough that the student’s advisor checked the calculations twice before asking where the preacher obtained his forecasts.

    By then he had retired from broadcasting.

    When contacted, he seemed amused by the question. He said people had misunderstood him from the beginning. Eschaton, he explained, concerned unveiling, completion, the removal of whatever prevented one thing from being seen as another. He had never promised explosions, trumpets, graves opening, or cities burning. Those embellishments belonged to viewers.

    Asked how weather entered into it, he replied that an unveiling was important enough to deserve decent conditions.

    This year’s date had already been chosen.

    Since the announcement, meteorologists have become increasingly uncomfortable. Forecast models that usually diverge beyond a week now agree with unusual precision. Next Tuesday will apparently be mild, cloudless, and almost windless across an area hundreds of miles wide. Competing models produce nearly identical temperatures.

    Other things have begun aligning as well. Sunrise and sunset times listed by separate services differ by less than a second. Migrating birds have altered course toward the region. Amateur astronomers report several stars appearing fractionally brighter each night, though observatories dismiss the measurements as calibration errors.

    The former preacher has reserved a folding chair on a hill outside town. He plans to bring sandwiches and has advised anyone joining him to wear comfortable shoes. When asked what exactly will be unveiled, he smiled and said that knowing beforehand would spoil the purpose.

    Tuesday’s forecast remains perfect. What troubles me is Wednesday. Every weather service I check now displays the same blank space where the forecast should be, and none of them appears able to explain why.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: Wouldst Me Marry Thee?

    Micro-Fiction Corner: Wouldst Me Marry Thee?

    The question appeared carved into the oak at the edge of the churchyard in lettering old enough to send the vicar searching through reference books. Wouldst me marry thee? was the closest translation anyone agreed upon. Nobody knew who had carved it. The bark had healed smoothly around the letters, and an arborist estimated from the growth that the words must have been cut while the tree was still young, despite parish records making no mention of them.

    For a while, the inscription became harmless local folklore. Couples posed beneath it. Ribbons appeared around the trunk. Teenagers dared one another to answer yes after dark. The amusement faded when a groom collapsed during a wedding in the adjoining field on the same afternoon every leaf on the oak turned brown and fell at once.

    His bride later admitted she had answered the carved question when she was sixteen.

    She remarried within a year. That marriage has lasted.

    The vicar began examining older parish records and discovered a pattern he preferred not to discuss publicly. Weddings conducted within sight of the tree often failed quickly, sometimes through infidelity or simple incompatibility, sometimes through accidents that left no marriage to preserve. Couples in which one partner had previously answered the oak aloud remained together with extraordinary consistency. Some were miserable. A few lived separately for decades. None divorced.

    The distinction troubled him enough that he started redirecting wedding photographs to the far side of the church.

    Last spring I stood beneath the oak alone and answered yes. I had no partner and no romantic prospects. It was curiosity, perhaps loneliness, perhaps the kind of foolish impulse that feels safest precisely because nobody is there to witness it.

    Three months later I met the person I am marrying this June.

    Everything about the relationship has unfolded with unnerving ease. Our preferences align where they should and differ where difference remains interesting. Our families get along. Even arguments resolve with suspicious efficiency. Sometimes my future spouse wakes from dreams about the churchyard despite never having visited it.

    Last week, while sorting through old photographs, I found one taken at a parish picnic decades before either of us was born. The oak stands in the background, smaller then, its inscription already visible. Beneath it are two blurred figures whose faces cannot be made out. One is wearing the ring currently on my hand.

    I have stopped wondering whether the tree predicts marriages. I am more interested now in when the proposal actually occurred, and how many generations we have spent making our way toward an answer already given.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: Hwalas ðec herigað

    Micro-Fiction Corner: Hwalas ðec herigað

    The chapel had been abandoned for nearly seventy years before the historical society restored it. Salt had softened the carvings, storms had taken most of the roof twice, and the parish records survived only in fragments. Above the altar remained a single inscription translated on the visitor placard as the whales praise you, though the smaller text admitted uncertainty about who, exactly, the original builders believed deserved the praise.

    Old accounts described whales approaching the shore each winter during the chapel’s first century. They came in groups far larger than normal migration patterns could explain and stranded themselves on the rocks beneath the seaward window. The congregation apparently considered the events auspicious. Surviving journals mention bells, hymns, processions, and quantities of oil rendered afterward, though none describe attempts to return the animals to the water.

    The beachings stopped around the same time regular services ended.

    I joined the final tour of the autumn season. Halfway through the guide’s talk, her radio crackled with a message from a sightseeing boat several miles offshore. A pod had broken from its usual route and was moving toward the chapel in a remarkably straight line. Another report followed. Then another. Different species were converging from opposite directions.

    The guide became visibly unsettled. She asked us to leave while staff closed the building, though before I stepped outside I heard something beneath the waves that sounded less like whale song than a sustained note answered from inside the chapel walls.

    The society reopened the building privately two nights later.

    Nobody would say who authorized the service. Residents reported hearing the old bell despite its rope having been removed decades ago. Several dozen whales gathered offshore but did not beach. They remained beyond the breakers throughout the night, aligned toward the chapel while voices inside sang hymns reconstructed from surviving fragments.

    Since then, the guide has been studying the old language and searching parish archives in neighboring towns. She believes the inscription has been translated too simply. The verb, she says, may imply praise, proclamation, or acknowledgment, depending on context.

    What concerns her is a newly recovered page from an eighteenth-century register. It lists every winter when the whales failed to come and records, beside each absence, some disaster suffered by the village before spring. The chapel may never have been built to summon them. Its congregation appears to have gathered each year to determine whether the sea had answered.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

  • Micro-Fiction Corner: Soð bið swicolost

    Micro-Fiction Corner: Soð bið swicolost

    My grandmother used the phrase whenever someone became too pleased about exposing a lie. Soð bið swicolost, she would say, then translate it loosely as truth is the most treacherous thing. To us it sounded like another of her inherited cautions, alongside advice about weather, strangers, and never trusting a door that opened too easily. Only during her final week did the words acquire a different weight.

    After the funeral, three relatives gave me accounts of her death. Each spoke with the calm certainty of someone describing events personally witnessed. One remembered her lucid until the end, sitting upright and asking after everyone by name. Another described a difficult final night in which she recognized nobody and repeatedly tried to leave the bed. A third recalled a long private conversation that, according to the others, occurred several hours after she had stopped speaking.

    No one appeared confused. Dates matched. Nurses remembered all three relatives being present. Hospital records supported details from each version while quietly contradicting the others.

    I began testing smaller truths afterward. I asked two people about dinners we had attended together, then compared their recollections with mine. Rooms changed shape. Conversations migrated between evenings. People remembered wearing clothes still hanging unused in their closets. Photographs occasionally supported whichever version I examined first, then seemed subtly different when I returned to them later.

    The effect eventually reached my own days. I told a coworker I had spent Sunday at home, and while describing it I remembered the entire afternoon clearly. Later I told my sister I had gone hiking and possessed an equally complete memory of mud on my shoes, cold wind, and a sandwich eaten beside a stream. My phone contained photographs from both days, timestamped within minutes of one another.

    I have stopped trying to determine which account is original. That question assumes truth begins somewhere stable and becomes distorted afterward. My grandmother seems to have understood something less comforting: perhaps truth accommodates the person receiving it, growing a shape each mind can carry without ceasing to be true.

    Her final expression returns to me differently depending on when I remember it. Sometimes she looked frightened. Sometimes amused. Increasingly, I remember recognition in her face, as though she had been waiting for the moment when I could finally inherit more than the phrase.

    ©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys