When the doctor hands the braying baby to her parents, he tells them to think of it as a sign from God. He tells them that if you try hard enough, you can find God in most things. They try, but all they see is a human baby with a horse’s head, a daughter who screams and bites and kicks her way into adolescence. And when her strong arms tense and the rage flails through her, all her parents can do is murmur a calming woah, woah there, and back out of her room slowly. They try, but still can’t see the beauty in all that threat. Sometimes all you can do is avert your eyes.

Everything in her room is pink, like the inside of a body. Everything is where she wants it, and she touches as little as possible to keep it that way. She decorates her bed with beads and the shiny bits of glass she’s always finding though she refuses to say where. She sleeps standing up, so comfort is irrelevant. 

Yes, she has secrets. So what? Big deal. She’s a girl with a horse’s head and that entitles her to some complexities. She has a boyfriend, too. Does that surprise you? It’s the boy with the face that looks like meat, who works at the grocery store. He was born like that, too. Her parents don’t like him but tough shit. They’re in love. When she and the meat-faced boy park behind the gas station and sit on the hood of his car, smoking cigarettes and looking through a chainlink fence at a meadow that used to be a Jiffy Lube, she feels like love and hunger can coexist.

And that length of rebar she keeps under her mattress? She licks it for the iron. But she knows how to swing pain around too. She knows how to break bones. And why shouldn’t the smell of blood thrill her? Maybe, like everything else, it’s just another sign from God. Maybe God is a thing in a room that sleeps standing up. Maybe when she looks down at the shards of glass in her bed she sees only herself, ready to pass judgment. 

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Ivan Davenny was born in Honolulu, HI, but has moved so many times that he just says he’s from “all over.” He recently graduated from the MFA program at Virginia Tech, and his work appears in The Writer’s Foundry Review, Olney’s “Kiss Your Darlings” Anthology, and LIGEIA.