O witches, O misery, O hatred—come!
 
 
The house stood there in the slow rot of summer, leaning in its infirmity like a drunk old man—the kind who always made it to the party, though no one quite remembered inviting him. Its beams sagged as if they too carried the burden of recollection. It was a place where memories clung like cobwebs, thick with the dust of neglect and the grease of indulgence.
 
A while back—how far, I couldn’t say, because time in such places tends to blur, spill, and congeal like cheap wine on a ruined tablecloth—my life was nothing but one long, unbroken party. All hearts open wide, all bottles uncorked, pouring themselves into the deep cavities we carved into ourselves, demanding to be filled and refilled until they overflowed, until they drowned the room in the garish laughter of fools. And in that murk of revelry, Beauty herself, soft and radiant and wholly unearned, sat on my lap one night. She laughed like a bell tolling for the dead, and her skin smelled like violets pressed between the pages of some forsaken book.
 
And yet, something galling twisted in her smile, some sharpness that bit into me. I cannot say if it was hers or mine, but I roughed her up—God help me, I roughed her up—as though by doing so I might bend her brilliance to match my own squalor. When the others found her crying, they turned their faces away, for who among them had not roughed up some piece of Beauty themselves? I armed myself then, not with apology but against the very notion of justice. What justice could there be in a world where Beauty laughs and we can’t stand the sound?
 
I ran, dragging the tatters of my pride through the muck. O witches, O misery, O hatred—come! I have no need of lesser gods. Let bad luck be my redeemer. Let plague and sand and blood choke me, baptize me, confirm me in my degradation. Let me make a kingdom of filth. And I did. I stretched myself out in the mud and dried off in the sharp, electric air of crime. I grinned while I called for executioners, grinned as I imagined biting down on the butts of their rifles, tasting the iron tang of my end like a holy sacrament.
 
But Spring came anyway, unwelcome, unrelenting, with its maddening laugh of the idiot. A laugh that crawled up the walls and settled in the rafters, that mocked the silence I had so painstakingly cultivated. It was then—only then, with the smell of thawed rot wafting through the house—that I thought to look again for the key. The key to that ancient party, the one where Beauty laughed without malice, where wine did not stain but cleanse, where I might find appetite again, might eat and drink without fear of choking.
 
Charity, the key is Charity. A simple word, like a name you’ve forgotten but that still shapes your tongue when you speak. But no sooner had I grasped it than the devil himself appeared, dressed in a crown of poppies. “You’ll always be a hyena, tearing at your own carcass,” he snarled. “Deserve death with all your appetites, your selfishness, your capital sins.”
 
I told him I’d been through too much for him to start grading me now. I begged him for mercy, though I knew better. “A less blazing eye, sweet Satan,” I said, though he only laughed. And while waiting for whatever cowardly gestures might come next, for the same parties to be thrown with the same spoiled wine, I tore out these pages from my notebook of the damned—a notebook too damp to burn, too stained to redeem.
 
If the house could speak, it might’ve laughed too, though not kindly. A slow, creaking laugh that spread from beam to beam, desolate and eternal. But it didn’t need to. Its silence did the talking for it.
 
And so I lingered, a guest overstaying a party that had long since ended, though the confetti still clung to the floorboards and the ghosts of revelers’ shadows flickered in the corners. I waited for something—a sign, a new wind to come blowing through the cracked windows. But no sign came. Instead, the days stretched and bent in their sameness, each one like a photograph bleached by too much sun, until even the colors of my despair began to fade.
 
Then one night—if it was night; the house had long since made a liar of time—I woke to the sound of footsteps in the hallway. Slow, deliberate, like the ticking of some infernal clock. They stopped just outside my door. And then, a knock. Three sharp raps, like nails being driven into wood.
 
“Come in,” I said, though my voice cracked on the words. The door creaked open, and there stood Beauty. Or what was left of her. Her face was a ruin of violets, her laughter a rusted bell. She stepped inside and closed the door behind her.
 
“You’ve called me,” she said, her voice bathed in something I couldn’t name.
 
“I’ve done nothing but run from you,” I replied, though the words felt like they’d been kicked loose from a grave even as I spoke them.
 
“And yet here I am,” she said. “Because you never truly wanted me gone. You only wanted me broken enough to hold.”
 
She crossed the room and sat on the edge of the bed, her weight causing the old mattress springs to groan. “You look tired,” she said.
 
“I am tired,” I replied. “Of this house, this life, this endless game of waiting for something that never comes.”
 
“Then leave,” she said simply. And for a moment, it seemed the simplest thing in the world. To walk out, to step into the night and never look back. But where would I go? The world outside was no less a ruin than the one I carried inside me.
 
“I can’t,” I said finally. “Not yet.”
 
Beauty smiled, and it was the saddest smile I had ever seen. “Then I’ll stay,” she said. And so we sat there, two ruins side by side, waiting for a morning that might never come.
 
And so, I stayed, though not by choice but by inertia. The house had taken me in, cradled me in its rotted embrace as if it, too, found some use for a man who could neither leave nor repent. The beams no longer creaked under my weight; they sighed as though resigned. Time passed—again, I could not tell you how much, for the days folded in on themselves, and the nights stretched long and empty like a road to nowhere.
 
I would wake in the mornings to the faint sound of footsteps in the hall, though I knew the house held no one but me. They were soft, deliberate, almost polite in their rhythm. I told myself it was the house settling, though I never quite believed it. Sometimes, I would follow the sound, stumbling barefoot over warped floorboards, only to find nothing but dust motes hanging heavy in the air. Other times, I stayed in bed, daring the footsteps to grow bolder, to announce themselves. They never did.
 
The devil, I think, was bored of me. He hadn’t returned since our last conversation, and I took his absence as both an insult and a reprieve. I could hear his laughter sometimes, faint and tinny, like it was being piped in through the walls. “You’ll always be a hyena,” it said. “Always tearing at your own carcass.” And I would laugh back—dry, desiccated, because what else could I do?
 
One night, I dreamed of the party again. Not the whole endless loop of bad wine and worse company, but the first one. The one where the air was light and music spilled from unseen corners, where Beauty sat on my lap and laughed with her whole heart. In the dream, I reached for her, but she pulled away, her laughter souring into a scream. “Charity,” she said, her voice breaking like glass. “The key is Charity.” And then she was gone, her seat taken by the devil himself, crowned in poppies and grinning wide enough to show every crooked tooth.
 
I woke with the word still on my lips. Charity. A name, a command, a curse—I didn’t know. The house seemed smaller now, its walls pressing in, its silence deafening. I thought of leaving, but where would I go? The party was out there, waiting, and I wasn’t ready to face its laughter again.
 
So I stayed. I sat in the same chair by the same window, watching the same dead garden wilt further under the mantle of Spring’s wet, open-mouthed glee. I wrote in my notebook, though the pages were too damp to hold the ink, the words bleeding together into dark smudges that seemed truer than anything I could say. I waited—for what, I didn’t know. Redemption? Punishment? It was all the same in the end.
 
And then, one morning, the footsteps came again, louder this time, their rhythm quick and uneven. I followed them, my heart pounding like it hadn’t in years. They led me to a door I didn’t recognize, one that had no right to exist in this house I knew too well. It was cracked open, just enough for me to see the light spilling through.
 
I hesitated, hand trembling on the doorknob. Charity, I thought. The key is Charity. I pushed the door open.
 
And on the other side, there was nothing. Just a vast, endless expanse of white, so bright it burned my eyes. I stood there, staring into nothing, waiting for it to laugh, to speak, to do anything. But it didn’t. 
 
 
 
 
Joseph Randolph is a multidisciplinary artist from the Midwest working in prose, poetry, oil painting, and experimental music. He is the author of 'Vacua Vita,' 'Vox Vana,' 'Sum: A Lyric Parody,' and two philosophical works, 'The End of Thinking' and 'Correlation & Recursion.' His music is streaming on major platforms, and his paintings appear regularly on Instagram @jtrndph. His debut novel, 'Genius & Irrelevance,' is currently being submitted for publication. He is also completing a conceptual poetry volume, 'The Book of Capacitors: A Directory of Unfinished Miracles.'