MY WINDOWS ARE ALL BROKEN and my doors hang off their hinges. The outside of me is peeling, my columns are all rotted and chewed through, and in places my walls are caving inward. Still, I stand. On warm evenings the neighborhood boys come to me, tossing about empty cans of cheap beer and climbing daringly up my stairwell’s teetering wooden banisters. People stare transfixed as they walk past, my ruined body evoking horror and fascination. Their gazes are morbid, but I still take pleasure in the attention they pay me. It’s reverential. I am a proud old thing—but not excessively so. During winter’s frost I offer my meager shelter to those with nowhere else to go; they sleep in bundles on my blackened hardwood floor, and inside of me I feel their shivering.

In the spring of 1993, I had a happy young couple. The man was handsome and ruddy. The woman was miniscule but sturdy and strong-looking, all steel except for her soft brown eyes. They moved in on a bright day, when the sun shone through my windows into my bare insides. They filled me with boxes, antique oak furniture with ornate limbs and scrolled feet, and with themselves. They moved about within me and settled. Ate dinner and watched television. She read novels by morning light in my dining room and he watched her silently from the couch. In short time the two had a child: an affectionate, dark-haired baby boy who grew quickly and began walking at nine months. They fawned over him. They picked up extra shifts at work. They lived their lives and became part of me.

Only I’m awake. I’m proprietary. I’m not what I was meant to be.

I rose to consciousness confused and empty, strewn with bones. I had nothing but a strong imprint left upon me. You are wrong, it said to me. You are wrong. It could have been anything. Cosmological event, metaphysical anomaly, spiritual interference, religious rite. The imprint could not be argued with. It was simple, and it was true. As I first appeared I was small and circular and made of cold, jagged stone. Barely a structure, and certainly not a house. Everything else was different as well—the land was harsh and dark and men were not yet men but animals still. At night, the wind howled silver tongues through sprawling forests where trees grew tall as mountains, and living things fell wisely silent. Spirits were real back then; the entire world was haunted.

Then, slowly, a new world was built around me, then another and another, and I changed with them. I’ve been a shack and I’ve been a mansion, bolstered and diminished and I’ve weathered floods and storms and fire—but through my own conscious will I have not yet ceased to be. There is a spark in me that keeps me going. Living, alive. All of the old spirits are dead now. There’s only me left.

And I confess.

Late December of 1994, the world was all slick with ice outside. My couple was packing for a last-minute trip to the woman’s family home in Ohio. All along the street, houses were lit with colorful string lights. It was almost Christmas.

Inside me, domestic chaos. The car was half-packed, the man was looming grimly over various identical button-up shirts, and the woman was hectic. She had wrapped a small gift the day before—a very tasteful pair of earrings that her mother would probably somehow still find a way to dislike—but now she couldn’t remember where she put them. If she were to show up empty-handed, she would never hear the end of it.

Then somebody left the front door open. Or perhaps they had meant to close it but missed the latch, and the wind blew it open. Across the street, red and purple lights twinkled, and snow was falling lightly.

I watched their boy slip out, quiet and easy. I watched him crawl down the front steps like the tiny animal he was. He stumbled a bit on the icy walk, but he made it to the curb alright. He wanted to touch the twinkling lights that swayed in the winter wind, dangling from the eaves of the house across the street. He had his little arms outstretched to them when the car cut him swiftly down. It wasn’t speeding. It never stopped.

For a few shameful minutes, nobody noticed him out there. Then somebody did. The woman couldn’t look, couldn’t speak as her man howled hunched over in the road. She could only stare through the front windshield of their parked sedan, where a tiny box wrapped in shiny blue paper sat neatly on the dashboard.

It ruined them completely. The lingering question of who had left the door open hung heavy within me and pressed down upon them until they couldn’t stand it. Arguments lasted for weeks straight. Each swore that the other was responsible. The woman began sleeping in her dead son’s bedroom. His bed, emblazoned with green dinosaurs, was far too small for her but she slept in it anyway. She took the back pain as righteous suffering. The man developed severe compulsions and thought constantly about suicide. He left suddenly one day, unceremoniously, and he never came back. Soon the woman was gone, too. They no longer belonged to each other. They no longer belonged to me.

Of course, it had been me all along. I had left the door open. I did it because I had to. It’s my nature; it’s my spark. I ruin.

I’ve done it in crueler ways. In 1847 I grew slowly smaller around a British aristocrat until I crushed him completely. One especially hot summer, I locked a family within me and boiled them alive. I would be lying if I said these acts had not pleasured me. The little dead boy, however, made me feel only tired. Exhausted. Even doubtful. The spark of what I am was so diminished I could hardly feel it, and for the first time in my long life, I was experiencing guilt. This made me temperamental. I threw tantrums. Nobody could sleep restfully within me, I moaned so loudly all through the night. Fresh food rotted within hours. I loosed dogs and ensured they would not return. I could be sweltering and frigid at the same time. I was as uninhabitable as I could possibly be.

Then—suddenly, it seemed—everybody was gone, and nobody would attempt to live within my walls ever again.

So I waited,

and I waited. And I grew decrepit, hosting only the modest company of vagrants. I eventually came to enjoy their company. The world had ruined them, so I could not. Windows broke from stones and my roof caved in, and where once I had walls there were wounds. The world spilled into me, and I was no longer separate from anything at all. I touched the sensation of everywhere coming into me, and I reached into it. It was transcendent.

Tonight the moon shines into me and the ground rumbles. The world riles as I tire, grows hot and angry. Beneath me, the sleeplessness of rebirth. I won’t be a part of this new world. They’ve surrounded me with an army of great canary-yellow machines, and when the sun comes up they will destroy me. I’ll let them.

When it happens, my man is there watching. I’m surprised at how badly I’ve missed him. He’s mine again, if briefly—old now, looking like a ghost there across the street that his boy went on. He’s come to see me off. He’s looking at me like he knows what I did. It’s OK. When the dozers hit my frame, I’ll be exorcised. I’ll be forgiven. I’ll be relieved.