It was born small and inhumanly ugly, seeming like some creature swept from the ocean floor to suffocate on that pebble beach. The morning was newly undark, the clouds level as if pressed against glass, and the rays breaking through like Godsent searchlights over the water, seeking out this escaped abomination still wet with its mother’s blood.

The mother lay eagled with her eyes-closed, only humming. Around her, others on the beach wrapped her child in spare insulants: nothing important; socks and gloves, tissues and sellotape. They leaned over the mother while she softly moaned to the child and the child moaned softly back. She held it to her and stared at its deformities and did not breathe to blunt the pain as she attempted to learn them, to appreciate those rare contours for the face they formed and not as a knotted mask of jelly-soft bone that needed surgeries nobody the child could ever know would ever afford.

The tide rose, licking its way up the beach, and the others left. The mother held her child and let the child’s first sleep be to the sound of waves. She wondered how this sound might stay with it through its life, if the sound would rouse security or awe or terror, and she let that sound rock them both until the green sea touched her feet and she stood up and left the beach.

Then the child was a toddler. The years since its birth began to hang from the mother’s face in a pouch about her neck. She would wrap the child in a blanket and bring it with her to work until those there would no longer accept its presence, and then it stayed at home until her housemates refused it their accommodation. She took to sauntering the streets at dark and empty hours, prodding the child for a mouth though if it had one it never spoke or fed. She fastened a drip to its one crooked limb and holed up in an abandoned hangar, fearing men in fluorescent jackets who would come to separate her from the child. She encountered barking dogs sent to flush her from empty factories and storage wards. Social Services had issued cawing biddies who would tempt her to surrender the creature with chocolate and shelter, and these she met with shards of glass and carrier bags holding the child’s excrement.

At length, there were news articles; there were sketches, jokes. Of course the infamous and unsympathetic documentary. These and more, until mobs formed at night to hunt her. They burned her haunts, they greased the streets and had men with nets on every corner. They took her creature and dashed it upon the curb and led the mother to the beach where they baptized her until her body was white and wrinkled with salt water and her soul was most certainly with the God she’d stolen the creature from.

The creature grew wild and hungry and was captured. It was stripped and photographed. It was cuffed to a crooked streetlamp with a burned out bulb behind the Marlboro factory and left to eat tobacco, while they came during the day to stare at its cornflake freckles and pull at its parts. Years rolled in wrinkles across its face, like rivers through rock. It escaped, dug a tunnel with its fingernails and its mother’s menopausal fury.

It roamed. Took to sleeping in a church. Newly an adult there, the only adult of its kind, an adult with unsteady legs and knees who learned to firm them on old oak and crap carpet, who first chewed on eucharist and saw by candlelight. Nuns came to bathe it. The clergy took its confessions in shifts. It said, “I don’t remember where I was born, likely not cuffed to the crooked streetlamp. I remember shimmying up it and falling. They came during the day and woke me and asked why my legs were bent aside of my knees, or didn’t ask exactly, but posited various methods in which the damage might have occurred, for minutes at least, then took no further notice of it, it being rare I was forced to stand.”
“We didn’t know you could speak,” the clergy said.

It coughed and stopped speaking and thinned with guilt, until its hand was too heavy for its wrist, carved a vow of silence onto the Madonna Statue’s breasts. The clergy began to feed it with warm, sugared milk after it choked on a pocked coin of Christ’s Flesh it thought looked like the moon. They read it its last rites and it was buried in Autumn, without a name. There were five words on the headstone and nobody was ever really sure who wrote them.