Door Halo For The Damned [Wraith]
O little ring of evergreen wired tight to rotting wood, smug as a saint in a thrift store frame,
you hang on the front door like a seasonal apology, pretending you’re harmless, pretending you’re hope with a bow and some berries and a smug little smile no one drew but everyone feels.
The porch light hits your plastic holly and your winter-green halo of needles that never drop,
a frozen grin of foliage hiding the fact that you are the first lie guests touch,
the handshake they get from the house before anyone even opens up and lies to their face in person.
Your ribbon looks soft from the sidewalk, hot red and harmless,
up close it’s frayed and stained in the corners like it has seen every argument that ever happened in that hallway,
each thread a replay of last year’s fight about who never calls,
who drinks too much,
who didn’t show up,
who did and shouldn’t have.
Delivery drivers knock under your watchful circle and step back into the cold,
you stare down at cardboard boxes full of things nobody needs yet bought anyway to stuff the hollowness,
listening as tape peels, as paper tears, as another round of forced gratitude hits the air like cheap perfume,
you remember every year that same performance played under your plastic needles until the words wore grooves into the drywall.
Kids point at you from the sidewalk,
say you look pretty,
say you mean Santa,
say you mean magic,
but the closer they get the more your little berries look like dried drops of something left behind from a bad winter,
and the scent of fake pine feels less like forest and more like the candle aisle in a store that never closes and never feels clean.
Behind you, somewhere deeper in the house, somebody is crying in the kitchen with the water running for cover,
someone else is rehearsing a speech in the mirror about forgiveness they do not actually have,
plates clatter, phones buzz, a timer screams from the oven.
You hang there calmly, the doorman for all of it,
a smug little ring of needle and wire that never flinches when the emotional shrapnel flies.
Every nail through your spine, every staple in your frame, holds another holiday hostage,
year after year they drag you out of the same dusty box,
shake off the cobwebs, snap your bent branches back into shape,
like resurrecting an inside joke that never was funny but everyone is too tired to rewrite.
You watched last winter when the door slammed so hard you rattled on your hook,
watched the suitcase roll down the walk, wheels chattering over cracked concrete,
watched a car taillight glow and then vanish into the dark,
and you stayed, steady little halo, pretending the house was still a home.
You listen to carolers pretending they mean the words,
to neighbors forced into ugly sweaters and smiles for group photos on the porch,
to the quiet moment after everyone leaves when the lock turns and the person inside presses their forehead to the door,
right behind you,
breath leaking around your wreath-shadow like a confession.
Every pine needle on you carries a rumor,
every tiny ornament woven into your ribs remembers a different promise that never made it past New Year’s Day,
your glitter catches porchlight like an ambulance in miniature,
flashing that something inside is not quite stable,
that the cheer has warning tape around it if you squint hard enough.
Still you hang there, seasonal jewelry for a tired house,
saying to every passerby in your silent, smug wayeverything is fine hereno ghosts in these hallwaysno grudges stuck in these ventsjust cinnamon, sugar, and gentle forgiveness.
Inside, the dog growls at nothing at three in the morning and stares directly at you,
kids wake from dreams where doors open by themselves and voices breathe through keyholes,
the hallway light flickers in a pattern that would spell something out if anyone still believed in omens,
and you sway the tiniest bit on your hook without any wind at all.
January comes pretending to be a clean slate,
they take you down at last, fingers numb, eyes dull with post-holiday hangover,
and you leave a faint dark circle on the wood, a bruise where you clung,
a ring that says even stripped bare this entrance is married to what it has already seen.
Back into the cardboard coffin you go,
packed with torn ribbons, cracked bulbs, and that one ornament nobody wanted but nobody can throw away,
tucked into the attic where summer heat cooks the dust into something that smells faintly like regret and plastic,
waiting for the next time they need your help lying to themselves.
You are not just decoration,
you’re the doorway’s halo of denial,
the circle they pass under every time they choose politeness over truth,
every time they swallow the thing that would change everything and call it love.
One day, when the wood rots through and the hinges sag and the house empties for good,
you will still hang there for a while, crooked and proud,
gatekeeper of a vacancy that finally matches your smile,
little ring of ever-green that outlived the ever,
still pretending to offer welcome when there is nobody left to fool.