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.

Had she tried to find solace in other places? There was Buddha and Shiva and Allah and other self important deities that ended in A and presumed their high up place in the sky warranted a condescension unbeknownst to the mortal plane in their asinine injection of philosophy into every crevice of human nature seen by their many eyes.

Ellie found something close to divine rebirth in crevices, human and free from that incessant philosophizing on the state of life she was never warranted.

The girl that took her home called herself Naomi, and the three a.m light bled through her red curtains like the stretched skin of an amniotic sac. A womb, wet and thin and wobbling with wine-reformed memories of the magic of last night, where a falsified God had touched them both, fluid and perfect and smooth, the bumps and jags ironed out by alcohol and bleeding noses.

Her spiderwebs lay across the floor in sweeping, black tendrils, and her blood hungered for that which it had been denied since before birth. She unsheathed her hands, sticky, glued shut with sin, from under the woman’s shoulder, and rubbed the skin in the crevice of her elbow gentle as a mother.

Naomi’s purse lay spread open like woman-as-victim beside her.

By 10am, the curtains in Naomi’s flat glowed like a cauterized wound, sealing the day behind them. Ellie lay still, listening to the breathing of the woman beside her, the soft uneven inhale-exhale of someone who believed the world would still be there when they awoke.

Ellie had never had that luxury.

She reached out and nudged the purse from its resting place. Its contents stumbled out and scattered. Lipstick uncapped, pink, with its tip still slick and shiny and wet from kissing Naomi lips. A wallet swollen with receipts and loyalty cards. A small, folded photograph of a dog with cataract-clouded eyes. A life arranged in tiny, ordinary artifacts.

She slid out of the bed quietly, her body stiff with the residue of too many nights like this one. The floorboards were cold, striking the soles of her feet like one long, flat blade. She crouched beside the purse, her fingers hovering above it as if waiting for permission. Naomi murmured something in her sleep, a name, maybe, or a plea. Ellie touched the wallet first; the leather was soft, worn at the edges, warm from the room’s stale heat. It felt like something that had been held often, trusted to carry a livelihood in its soft leather folds. Ellie had never been trusted with anything that mattered. Inside: cash, not much, but enough. Enough for a train ticket. Enough for a meal. Enough to pretend, for a few hours, that she was someone who could choose where she went instead of being dragged there by circumstance.

A small key fell out when she closed the wallet. Brass, tied to a cheap plastic tag with a number printed on it. A locker key. Ellie stared at it, then pocketed it, and then stood, pulling her clothes on, leaving a stranger's room like routine, the liturgy of slipping cotton over her head and buttoning up jeans like clockwork, as if as ordinary as a commute.

At the door, she paused. Not out of sentiment, not exactly, out of reverence; the morning light caught Naomi’s face in a way that made her look almost holy. Not the kind Ellie had been raised with, punishment and prophecy, but something softer. A holiness made of small things, human things: sleep-swollen eyelids, the faint crease of a smile triggered by a brain left in the reverie of the night before.

Ellie felt something like grief pass through her. Then she left.