It was late, the clock was growing nearer to dawn than to dusk, and he decided just this once, it might be okay to lay his head in the witch's lap. No one would know, he told himself, eyes slowly drifting asleep as he watched the heavy dark liquid swaying gently inside her glass.
The man had been here many times, and the witch knew him well. He had nothing to fear from her, he felt. She knew him better than his own wife, even. She knew the demons that lapped at his soul when there was no one else around and she knew the women he lusted after when his wife wasn't around. Good woman, his wife, God knew. God knew everything, the witch always said. And she'd smile her horrible, putrid smile, showing off her rotten teeth like they was made of gold.
Yes, God always watched him when he went inside the witch's tent. God had a very curious eye for witches and wizards alike and for a great many things that seemed too close to home. The truth is, the witches worried him most. They'd been around far longer than he had and they'd be around long after he'd gone to sleep. So, he watched them and he worried. About the day the witches would come to claim their throne back.
But for now, they seemed content with their spot on the very edge of belief - where mothers would drag their children by the hand a little faster when they passed them by. It's a lie, they'd say, but what did those mothers know? What did they understand of hemlock and broken hearts and broken backs? The witches knew how to fix them. The witches knew how to fix everything, but they waited. Patiently, they dangled their feet off the edge. They'd been reduced to this - a side-show attraction, living inside smelly tents at some funless fun-fair. But their time was yet to come.
So, God watched. He kept an eye out on all the men like him and they upset God something awful. Because when they went to bed in the middle of the night, they forgot their nightly prayers to him. The men were too busy thinking about the witches' words. As were, indeed, the women. It seemed God had been abandoned in his old luckless sky. And perhaps it was him that was on the edge of belief, on his way down, not the witches.
The man with his head in the witch's lap opened his eyes from dreams of God and eternal screaming and thought maybe, he'd been condemned to hell.
'Punish me, Father,' he whispered, slinking off the couch and falling unto his knees, 'for I have sinned. It's been an age since my last confession. I was bewitched. I was lied to. I shouldn't have come here.'
But he would come again, they both knew. As did the witch, who watched him from her spot in the shadows. They all came back to her in the end, more than they did to their whores or their wives or their priests. Because witches were the only ones who told them the truth, the only ones who gave them promises they could keep and the only ones to know what the future will hold.
So, the repenting man would have no choice but to retrace his steps, eventually. And she would be here, waiting, same as always. It was people like him kept her going. Not those filthy rich, though those too would sometimes visit her tent under cover of night. But it was these, the poor, the many, who would one day give her back her throne. One day.
