Author: Madd Fictional

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

The trouble began when the old woman at the repair stall refused cash for fixing the radio.

She wanted a favor instead: carry a copper charm home, keep it near an outlet, and never plug anything expensive into the same socket after midnight. The charm looked ridiculous—wire, beads, a bent coin, and something that might once have been a chicken bone—so it was tossed beside the toaster and forgotten.

The next morning, every dead battery in the apartment was full.

The phone charged without a cable. The television turned on when someone thought about the news. A broken lamp lit whenever anybody lied beneath it.

Word spread.

Soon neighbors arrived carrying dead watches, cracked tablets, burned-out appliances, and medical devices with exhausted batteries. Everything revived when placed near the charm. Nobody understood how. Everyone understood usefulness.

Then the charm began choosing.

A cheating husband’s car refused to start. A landlord’s security camera melted. A child’s night-light glowed through a three-day blackout. An elderly tenant’s oxygen machine ran without electricity while the rest of the building went dark.

The utility company investigated. Electricians found nothing. Engineers measured impossible voltage and left with scorched instruments.

By then, people had started leaving offerings beside the outlet: fruit, coins, flowers, tiny handwritten requests.

The apartment smelled faintly of rain and hot metal.

One evening, the television switched itself on. Every screen in the room followed. A sentence appeared:

PAY YOUR DEBTS.

The owner of the apartment remembered the repair stall.

The old woman was gone.

In her place stood a shuttered kiosk with a handwritten sign taped across the metal grate.

NO REFUNDS.

That night, every appliance in the apartment came alive at once. Not loudly. Purposefully.

Fans turned toward the door. Lamps flickered in sequence. The microwave displayed an address instead of the time.

The copper charm lifted from the counter and hung suspended in the air. Then the front door unlocked itself.

Whatever favor had been promised was ready to collect.

©2012 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

The correction began as a joke in the grocery store.

A cashier glanced at the couple, looked at the wedding rings, and said, “Your girlfriend left her card.”

“Wife,” came the reply.

The cashier apologized, but the correction stuck around longer than expected. Soon it became a household refrain. Girlfriend? Wife. Partner? Wife. Significant other? Wife. One evening, while filling out a form that offered six relationship categories and none that seemed quite right, someone wrote in the margin: Her pronouns are wife and wifey.

The phrase spread through their friends.

It appeared on birthday cards, coffee mugs, a cheap apron, and eventually a T-shirt worn so often the lettering cracked. The joke was affectionate, but underneath it lived something stubborn.

Years earlier, neither of them had believed marriage would happen. Too much family resistance, too much legal uncertainty, too many arguments about whether a ceremony could change anything important. They had already built a life together out of rent payments, hospital visits, bad vacations, shared passwords, and one elderly cat with expensive kidneys.

Then one winter, after a medical emergency, a receptionist had asked, “Are you family?”

The pause before the answer lasted less than a second.

It was still too long.

They married three months later.

Years passed. The T-shirt faded. The cat died. One career ended, another started, and the apartment accumulated furniture neither remembered buying. The phrase remained.

At a crowded anniversary dinner, someone new to the group made the mistake of asking how they preferred to be introduced.

The answer came immediately.

“Wife.”

Across the table, an eyebrow lifted.

“And on weekends?”

“Wifey.”

Everyone laughed.

Later, walking home with fingers linked, one of them admitted the joke had probably gone too far.

The other squeezed her hand.

“Maybe.”

“You tired of it?”

“Never.”

That answer needed no correction.

Nobody meant for the prank to become a legal category.

It started with a harmless office swap: two framed certificates exchanged between neighboring cubicles, just enough to confuse both owners before lunch. The culprit enjoyed the reaction, so the next day brought a second stunt. Someone’s ergonomic chair was replaced with a throne rented from a costume shop. By Friday, every computer mouse on the floor had been wrapped individually in aluminum foil.

Management called a meeting.

That was a mistake.

The culprit discovered that rules made mischief more interesting. A memo banning “unauthorized humorous interference” inspired a fake compliance department. A warning about impersonating executives produced an entire fabricated board meeting, complete with agendas, nameplates, and a consultant who turned out to be somebody’s cousin.

Each stunt demanded something larger.

Soon the office elevator announced fictional floors. The vending machines dispensed fortune cookies containing performance reviews. A visiting vice president spent twenty minutes following signs to a Wellness Annex that did not exist.

Human Resources stopped using the word prank.

They chose “shenanigan.”

The culprit loved it.

Then the building’s sprinkler system released biodegradable confetti during a quarterly earnings call.

That brought lawyers.

The final notice was very clear: one additional shenanigan would result in immediate termination, civil action, and possible criminal referral.

The culprit behaved impeccably for eleven days.

On the twelfth, every employee arrived to find the office exactly as they had left it.

No altered signs. No hidden speakers. No fake memos. Nothing strange at all.

By noon, productivity had collapsed.

People kept checking beneath desks. Executives opened cabinets cautiously. Security reviewed footage searching for an event that had not happened.

At 3:17, the CEO received a single envelope.

Inside was a blank sheet of paper.

Beneath it, handwritten in tiny letters, was one sentence:

Made you look.

The company’s attorneys argued for termination.

The CEO overruled them.

Some talent, he decided, was too dangerous to let the competition hire.

©2012 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

The restaurant kept one table empty every night, tucked into the darkest corner beneath a cracked painting of Venice. No one knew why. New servers were simply told not to seat anyone there and, if a plate of spaghetti appeared after closing, to leave it alone.

Naturally, someone eventually ate it.

The sauce was excellent. Rich, garlicky, slightly metallic. The server finished half the plate before noticing the noodles moving independently of the fork.

By then, the kitchen lights had begun flickering, and something pale unfolded from beneath the table.

It was tall, thin, and draped in a black coat far too formal for a neighborhood Italian place. Its fingers were long enough to reach the bread basket without leaning. Its eyes fixed not on the frightened server, but on the half-eaten spaghetti.

“That,” the creature said with immense sadness, “was mine.”

Apologies followed. Then bargaining. Then a frantic offer to make another plate.

The vampire considered this.

The cook, awakened by shouting, produced spaghetti within twelve minutes. The vampire tasted it, grimaced, and pushed the plate away.

“Too much basil.”

Another attempt failed for insufficient salt. The third lacked acidity. The fourth was dismissed because the pasta had “no despair.”

By dawn, everyone was exhausted.

The server finally snapped and dumped a ladle of sauce over cold leftover noodles.

The vampire tasted it.

Silence.

Then came a small, approving nod.

“What did you do?”

“Nothing.”

“That is impossible.”

The vampire ate every strand.

After that, the arrangement became permanent. Each night, one plate was left beneath the cracked painting. No substitutions. No garnish. No questions.

Business improved dramatically.

Customers claimed the restaurant had developed an atmosphere impossible to imitate. Critics praised the sauce for its dark complexity.

The staff never corrected them.

They simply made sure the garlic stayed in the bread.

©2012 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

The clinic advertised peace of mind as if it were dental whitening.

The procedure was painless, outpatient, and increasingly popular among people exhausted by indecision. A narrow pulse targeted the frontal lobe, softening what the brochure called “excessive executive noise”: second-guessing, inhibition, anticipatory regret, moral rehearsal, and the endless internal committee meeting that made simple choices feel like war.

Patients emerged radiant.

They quit jobs without drafting resignation letters. They kissed strangers. They bought motorcycles. They told their parents exactly what they thought. One woman returned a dress after wearing it to a wedding and slept beautifully afterward.

Demand exploded.

The city became livelier, then stranger.

Traffic moved faster because fewer drivers hesitated at yellow lights. Restaurants stopped taking reservations because nobody planned ahead. Marriages formed in laundromats and ended before the dryers finished. People laughed louder, spent savings, confessed affairs, punched supervisors, climbed monuments, and abandoned diets in the same week.

The clinic called it liberation. Hospitals called it a surge. Courts called it complicated.

Then a patient committed murder.

The defense argued there had been no intent in the usual sense. Intent required reflection, consequence, inhibition. The prosecution countered that the accused had chosen every action voluntarily.

Nobody could agree on what responsibility meant after responsibility had been medically reduced.

The clinic closed quietly three months later.

Years passed.

A former patient sat across from a neurologist and asked whether the procedure could be reversed.

“Possibly,” the doctor said. “Why now?”

The patient considered the question. Consideration itself had become difficult.

Outside the window, someone screamed at a bus driver. Two strangers kissed beside a police barricade. A delivery cyclist rode against traffic while filming himself.

“I think,” the patient said slowly, “I miss the part of me that used to argue.”

The neurologist nodded.

Somewhere behind the patient’s forehead, nothing objected.

©2012 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys