At the nearest Catholic church, an emaciated priest answered the door. He was cherry-haired, his cheeks two rosy bulbs; a head like a strawberry sucker.

“Is it true?” I asked.

“Please come inside,” he said.

“Listen,” I said. “I’ve got someplace to be.” I didn’t. But my mother had taught me to always have other plans.

“Take me with you.”

“Do you have a car?”

He did. I told him okay. He yanked out his clerical collar and started to dance. How ready he was to abandon his life. He seemed so stupidly free, wagging his arms. I wanted to unchain myself from myself, to revel in his excitement, but instead I muttered, “I am with child.”

He stiffened. “Are we going to see the father?”

“Maybe,” I said. I never commit to an answer.

Whatever the ex-priest and I had was doomed from the start. I had hoped that after years of celibacy he might make an exuberant lay. He didn’t. He wasn’t. He was awed by his erection. We’d lie on a motel bed and with a finger he’d hold his shaft to his thigh and release, watching it weeble wobble into a tower, giggling as I flipped through a fuzzy TV.

After a week on the road he told me he needed to return to church. We were beboothed in a diner. He said he missed his old life. Yeah, I thought, like I don’t miss hiking through the woods with my mother. Like I don’t miss hearing her badmouth the men I loved. Like I don’t miss sinking into the pit of a couch and watching the months flicker by.

“Take care of the baby,” he said. The coward.

“Bahhhhh,” I replied, and waved him away.

He slipped a white paper napkin under his collar and scrammed. Somebody shot him in the parking lot. It wasn’t safe for priests anymore—nobody, really, associated with God.

The man with the gun entered the diner. He asked whose priest he had killed. I can’t say why I lifted my hand. Perhaps I wanted to talk to somebody new. Perhaps I was in love. The man was burly and bruised, in ragged flannel, a beanie, Carhartts spotted with blood.

“You a nun?” he asked.

I pointed to my stomach.

He thumped into the booth and called my beauty transcendent. The food arrived. Pancakes for me. An omelet for the priest. The man gobbled it down, then got after my bacon.

“Let’s run away together,” he said. “Tell me your name.”

He was a Davy.

“Nuh-uh,” I said. I was so damn tired of Davys and Jimmys and Johnnys and Paulies and Markys and Adams and Steves. “You need one of those dead guy names. Like Dedelion. Or Telys-Akakios. Perhaps Nichominazr.”

“But my dad was a Davy.”

“That’s what’s wrong with the world. The Davys and Johnnys and Paulies and Jimmys and Adams and Markys and Steves get all of the jobs and all of the guns and go around shooting all of the people. We’d all be a little bit better without any Davys and—”

“I like the sound of the last one.”

“Nichominazr?”

“I need your love in my life.” The radio said it. But it spoke for the man.

We fled to a ranch in Nevada lipped by barbed wire and mines. A month into our stay, Nichominazr spearheaded a coup. We took over a mansion. Chandeliers hung from every ceiling. My reflection shined in the floors. A seamstress sewed me maternity clothes. Nichominazr only wore suits.

But the staff was plotting our murders. Every night, Nichominazr crouched at our bedroom window tapping his gun on the glass, preparing for an attack.

Tuk, tuk, tuk.

“This is it,” he told me one night. “Get ready.”

Terrified, I twisted myself into prayer. Not really a prayer but a string of apologies: sorry for cheating on science exams, sorry for drinking too young, sorry for every cruel sentence I uttered, sorry for sleeping with boys, sorry for leaving home without explanation. I didn’t expect a response. But: lightning sutured the sky. The floor beneath me grew slick.

In bed I gave birth to a boy as Nichominazr tapped his gun on the glass. Tuk, tuk, tuk. I held the boy in my arms, overcome by an urge to bring him home to my mother. I imagined us in her kitchen inhaling the hovering dust, sipping instant coffee, dunking ginger snaps in my cup as she disparaged my parenting habits. But I couldn’t go back to her now. My mother’s a grudger. She never forgives. If I showed at her house she’d shoo me into the woods.

A battering ram flattened our front door. Boots stomped up the steps. Chains clanged in the halls. I held the boy to my chest and cocooned us under the covers.

Nichominazr lifted the blanket. “Is it mine?”

“Of course,” I told him, and for some reason he believed me.

This news instilled him with purpose. He ran into the hall waving his pistol, transformed into a father. Proof that we are created by our conditions. But there were hundreds of them and one of him. His death was immediate.

The attackers spilled into the bedroom, carrying pipes, chains, table legs, hoses, fire, hammers, stockings, and pans. Mud crusted their faces. They smelled like chemicals kept under sinks. They surrounded the bed and readied their arms. I lofted my son overhead.

They released their weapons—thuh-thunk-thunk-thunk-thunk-thunk to the floor—and bent into bows. “King! King! King!” they said, voices creepily synched.

That night they built him a throne. Three days later a golden crown, fly-eyed with jewels, was lowered onto his conical head. During the coronation he cried. I stood behind a velvet rope ten feet away, feeling him wanting me with him, the way the earth must feel rain wanting to fall.

I ran to the throne, scooped him into my arms, desperately humming a lullaby sung to me when I was a child. For a moment—two seconds, though I tell myself it was three—it felt like they might leave us alone, that I might hold him until he grew calm. But security swarmed. They tore him away, settled him back on the throne. He flopped on his side and continued to cry.

The next morning, two guards led me into the woods. They handed over a sack fatted with bread, apples, and fish. One guard gave me a map.

“But where does it lead?” I asked him.

“If you weren’t His mother you’d already be dead.”

I must’ve been walking for weeks. My breath was a mess of sour and stink when I reached the foot of a forested hill. I tossed the map over my shoulder: I knew where I was. Birdsong seeped through the trees. Nightingales, maybe. I’d never been able to tell. At the top of the hill sat a squat stone house, its windows ignited by sun. I knew every brick in the chimney, could already taste the dust in the kitchen, felt the couch sinking beneath me. At the door, I shouted Hello, expecting a What? from my mother. Instead: silence. I could have followed the map back to the ranch. Perhaps I could have stolen him back, brought him here. But I was learning to live with my loss—my freedom—as all of us must. I thought of the priest dancing over his clerical collar. It’s bad enough that I felt such joy in this moment. I don’t plan to defend it.

At least they built him a throne, I thought. At least he would be worshipped.