Inventory before Prayer
- Dec 5, 2025
- 3 min read
by Joseph Randolph
It’s two a.m. in a gas station outside Kokomo, and Jim is counting the seconds between the compressor’s kicks. Twelve, then twenty-one, then something irregular enough to mean entropy has arrived ahead of schedule. The clerk’s watching a muted sitcom on her phone. The laugh-track pulses through her earbuds like a private religion. Jim’s buying a Styrofoam cup of coffee he won’t drink. What he wants is the heat — the human permission of it.
He’s been awake thirty-eight hours, which sounds like a confession but feels more like continuity. The benzodiazepines ran out two nights ago. The caffeine is a moral crutch, and the moral is that he’s still here. A boy in a bright hoodie wanders the aisles, talking to someone in his headset. “Bro,” the boy says, “bro, I swear I’m in a loop where I don’t even need to make decisions anymore.” Jim almost laughs. He wants to tell the kid he’s right, that this is where the world’s firmware idles — between purchase and guilt, fluorescent and dark.
Outside, the parking lot is a frozen sea, its islands of salt like half-remembered stars. Jim sits on the curb. The coffee cools beside him, giving off that thin gray steam that smells like effort without purpose. His phone glows in his palm. He opens an unfinished note titled “Thesis on Kindness”:
1. Every system eventually repurposes mercy into management.
2. The body can’t tell the difference between safety and sedation.
3. To persist without faith is to metabolize your own absence.
He scrolls no further. The words feel like fossils — proof of a version of himself that believed clarity was possible. Now even the thought of editing them feels indecent, like disturbing a grave for grammar.
A trucker pulls in, engine coughing, headlights sweeping the lot like searchlights from a moral universe that still polices meaning. Jim watches his reflection slide across the cab’s chrome. He looks tired but precise, like an idea that survived its author. Somewhere behind the interstate’s drone, a train sounds — a single, absolute note — and for a moment he thinks of his mother’s voice calling him home, decades gone. The overlap is unbearable.
He wants to pray, but the last time he tried, it came out as inventory: things that still worked, things that didn’t. The language collapsed under verification. So he settles for attention, which is the secular form of reverence. He studies the frost pattern on the curb: hexagonal, symmetrical, almost mathematical in its sincerity. Each crystal begins as a failure to remain liquid. He writes that down in his head.
When he finally stands, the blood rushes wrong, as if gravity’s been renegotiated. The clerk waves lazily through the glass. The boy in the hoodie is gone. The ice machine hisses again — steady this time, almost merciful. Jim thinks: there’s the proof. Even the inanimate seeks rhythm.
He dumps the untouched coffee into the slush and watches the steam rise. For a second it looks like breath leaving the earth. Then it’s gone, folded back into the general problem of matter.
Joseph Randolph is a writer, artist, and professor from the Midwest whose work spans prose, poetry, painting, and experimental music. He is the author of Vacua Vita (essays) and Sum: A Lyric Parody (poetry), and his debut novel Genius & Irrelevance is currently out for publication. His writing has appeared in Action, Spectacle, Unlikely Stories, Clade Song, and elsewhere, and he received second place in the 2025 Bath Flash Fiction Award. His music is available on streaming platforms, and his paintings can be found on Instagram @jtrndph.
