Ellie is a woman in all the ways Jesus is: a sacrifice thrust unto a body unwillingly, to a mother who screams with bloodied hands for a son taken by an entity too vast, too faceless to offer a satisfactory reason.

Ellie’s bed is all the things God is: empty, and grey, hollow, resenting and disgusting in its refusal to be. There’s crumbs in the sheets and pen on the headboard. The mattress and her spine hold the same ghosts, trapped and twisted in between springs and vertebrae.

Her legs, Mary.

Her heart, the desert.

Ellie Denverman was never meant to exist for more than six years. Yet here she was.

Laid out like a window display, amid dust ridden bears and a striped blue duvet, trying to find any semblance of feeling in the space between her body, her hand, and the parts of her brain that long since flickered off. The eyes on the walls watched, pop stars and footballers pressing into her with such intensity that it hurt.

Not that Ellie would know.

She could do all manner of things to relieve the creeping feeling. She could coat her body in leather and lace and black nylon spiderwebs, safety pinned with such reckless abandon that her thighs would bleed before her and the second body had even stumbled into the stall together. Fluids rushing, dripping in time with the bass, tears and sweat and teeth and ink. Lube and prayer.

Ellie began as a decision made by adults who didn’t act like it; nurses who spoke in hushed tones, doctors who talked around her mother rather than to her. She was a complication before she was a child. A prognosis. A countdown.

It was in her blood before she had vessels to carry it.

Her mother loved her with a kind of frantic devotion, the kind that comes with finally getting something you’ve prayed for so long that she had become faithless, terrified of God finding out and ripping His blessings from her.

El’s room, for she was El before she survived, as if full names were for tombstones and obituaries — was always too tidy, too curated — as if someone was preparing for the day it would become a shrine: dolls in boxes, bikes never ridden, sheets always crisp.

Ellie learned early how to be still, how to be watched, how to be the center of a room without ever being its inhabitant.

She survived, and the adults didn’t know what to do with that. They had prepared for grief, not for a living child. Everything became improvisation, then. Ellie felt like she was trespassing in her own life — a guest overstaying a welcome she never asked for.

Even now, carving her hips into the legs of a stranger, plastered with sweat and spit and vodka, she feels as if she will be lost again after tonight. A spiritual corpse rocking gently, skin to skin, against a man, a boy, a princess, the latest corporeal form stupid or high enough to crawl into the gutter alongside her decaying bones and lay there amidst the throbbing heat and pulse of sacramental worship. A wafer on the tongue, a brief salvation, and gone as fast as he came.

Her blood is poison, and she faults her mother for it as if naked sex wasn’t a hand-me-down she had worn out threadbare and blackened spoons not an original invention, the escape hatch she had constructed for herself before sealing herself off in a stupor of oblivion and stolen needles.