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I met god in the men’s room at the corner of 4th and Broadway.

I don’t make a habit of using the men’s room, but rain was coming in sideways, landing like bee stings onto my ear and neck.

Did a quick one-two look.

Didn’t see the ladies’.

So, I ducked inside, just wanted a respite long enough to phone a rideshare.

My first fear—that I’d find a line of dudes, dicks out, piss streaming—was unfounded.

The bathroom sat empty.

Empty except for the smell.

I slapped my palm to my face but couldn’t cover it, urea and shit and stagnant water so thick it turned the air viscous.

I whipped out my phone, determined to grab a car and get the fuck out of there, but I moved too quick and flung it.

Of course I fucking flung it.

And it went careening across the yellow tile, little one-inch squares framed by more filth than grout.

It slid into the corner stall, and I wiggled my fingers as I caught up to it, as if I might get ahead of the germs I was about to touch, shake ‘em off before they clung to me.

The fluorescent bulb overhead flickered: one, two, three. It was eerie, in that horror-movie-gearing-up-to-the-killing-scene sort of way. But I wrote the goosebumps off to the lasting chill of freezing rain, averted my eyes from the abomination in the toilet–mustard yellow soft serve sprinkled with ruptured hemorrhoid–and leaned into that too cramped corner where my phone glowed.

Looking back, it must’ve been god that dropped the deuce in there.

Face turned away from the thing responsible for one third of the smell, I was eye to eye with the wall.

And if not for that, I wouldn’t have found it.

A hole.

It was about the size of a fist. Inside was that black-black, that absence of light black, where you can’t tell how far it goes.

Could’ve been Mariana’s fucking trench in there.

I don’t know what it was, a calling maybe, but something made me reach.

While my left hand secured my phone in my jeans pocket, my right slipped into the hole, careful not to touch the sides.

I felt for a stud, insulation, something, but I was halfway to my elbow and when a pinch on my hand made me yank it back.

A bug, a spider, a snake, maybe?

Three red divots in my knuckles and a pulsing feeling.

I’d been bit, and I would’ve gotten the hell out of there, I would’ve, if not for what followed.

What began as a twinge of pain rolled to my elbow then armpit.

It wrapped around my neck and spread through my core.

I didn’t realize I’d landed on my ass until my hands braced me from sprawling; but even as I felt mystery grime flake beneath my fingernails, I didn’t care.

To call it a high would be to trivialize it.

There are seven wonders of the world, people say, and I became the eighth.

For the first time, the creator of the universe looked right at me, looked right at me approvingly .

The rain outside became the constant heartbeat of the world, the fear of germs faded with the recognition that no lifeform was truly apart from myself.

Time slipped; the separation between the atoms of my flesh and air around me dissipated.

My body and spirit swelled with peace and warmth, enveloping and smothering every painful thing.

It was a state of being so close to how I’d heard religious folk imagine heaven, and yet so much more and outside of understanding that the descriptor falls short.

And I sat alone beside the gloryhole bathroom stall, alone with god, and it was certainly good.

* * *

My phone was dead and the rain had stopped when reality returned.

If anyone came in, I didn’t notice.

Meeting god must’ve stretched me somewhere inside, because while I didn’t have the dull ache in my head of a hangover, I had the prickling anxiety of a new space opened up beneath my rib cage, a birth of absence, and the vacancy there itched deeper than skin and nerve.

I didn’t catch a ride share.

I walked the three miles home.

Night air was cool and crisp.

The storm had dumped all the humidity from the air into the streets.

My breaths were easy but shallow.

Each step drew me further from 4th and Broadway.

I stopped several times.

Considered going back.

But I figured Alyssa would be worried, a notion confirmed when I slipped through our apartment door to find her pacing and frantic.

“Where the fuck have you been? I’ve been calling.”

I held up my phone screen, rapid pressing the buttons to no effect.

“Shit, I was worried.”

“Sorry, I?—”

“What happened to your hand?”

I glanced down to find the bite marks had turned from red pricks to angry, purple vines clutched around my palm.

“Bug bite, or something. I think.” My voice sounded distant, and Alyssa pressed.

I tried to explain god.

“You must’ve gotten stuck by a needle. Lucky as shit you didn’t overdose. Actually, Sam, we should get you checked out, just in case.” She moved to where her coat hung on the wall.

“No, no.” I dropped my purse on the counter.

“I’m fine, just need some sleep.”

She argued for five minutes more before surrendering to the bathroom to brush her teeth.

I rehearsed lines over and over in my head, but couldn’t come up with a way to get her to go back with me, not tonight.

The empty space beneath my ribs hummed as I settled into bed.

I had to go back. To be with god.

To feel unburdened and wholly seen.

But I told myself it could wait until tomorrow, when Alyssa was rested and her curiosity might get the best of her.

Uneasily, we slept.

* * *

In the men’s room at 4th and Broadway, Alyssa clutched her hand over her nose, just like I had.

“Christ, Sam.”

“Just look.”

I tugged her by her shirt sleeve, candy pink against the jittery fluorescent glow of dying bulbs and grime-yellow tile.

She squinted to read the graffiti surrounding the hole.

“ Margret Ashbury is a whore. Dylan: Fridays 6-7pm, suck & fuck . Very nice, Sam.”

A flash of impatience made me bite back a retort, but my eye caught the words scribbled in red sharpie beneath the gloryhole.

The devil made me cum.

“I see it, okay? Your hand looks…”

Purple tendrils shot from an indigo center, swelling that pulsed offbeat from my pumping blood.

“We need to get you to a doctor. What if a black widow was hiding in there? You could have sepsis or something.”

“Please, just try it. I can’t explain it. There’s no way you can understand unless you?—-”

“Hep C. HIV. Sam, no fucking chance I’m putting my hand in there. I humored you, alright? I came, I smelled, I saw it. Let’s fucking go.”

The vacant space inside my ribs expanded like heated air, a void that screamed without sound.

I wanted to reach behind the wall, to grasp for more, but I let Alyssa walk me out, even agreed to lunch and half-listened when she brought up that coworker who steals snacks from the communal fridge again.

Better if she didn’t realize, I figured.

Would make it easier to sneak back.

The thirty-five-minute lunch stretched on, an infinite purgatory of watching my lover butter bread, draw soup to her lips spoonful by too-small spoonful, sip sprite, ice cubes clinking against her teeth.

“I’m not hungry, really,” I told Alyssa, I told the waitress.

I offered my card before the waitress brought the bill, and as I signed the check, the lie came out like a song.

“Totally forgot, promised to head into work for a few.”

Suspicion crinkled her freckled nose.

“Thought you were off today.”

“I am.” I got up.

“New hire, helping to get him oriented. Rob, lives with his mom type, not gonna last.”

Alyssa shrugged and her expression relaxed.

I leaned across the table for a parting kiss, half wondering how I conjured Rob so quickly, half walking the route back to 4th and Broadway in my mind.

The walk was an impatient blur.

When my fingers met the metal door handle, the aching void in my sternum nearly ripped my breastbone in half.

I rolled my sleeve to the elbow, coy flicks of my wrist, cherishing the moments before my fist disappeared into the dark.

Seconds ticked by like sludge as I waited, eager for the little prick and the ecstasy that followed.

Then, the slice made me cry out.

I yanked my arm back out of instinct, but bliss gobbled me up before I had time to observe the injury.

And it didn’t matter anymore.

I floated. Everything was fine.

God spoke.

Does it hurt?

He asked. You’re doing so well.

Does it hurt?

“Yes,” I mumbled.

A slump brought me flat down, my sandal sliding off my foot.

I want more, god said.

“Of me?” The words rolled over my lolling tongue.

Give me more of you.

I dragged myself across the tile, inch by impossible inch, eyes rolling and vision blurred.

My head grew too heavy, flopped to one side.

I tossed a crooked arm toward the hole, and almost thought I saw empty space where the tip of my pinky usually was.

I probably saw it.

But it didn’t matter.

My aim floundered, hand missing the hole entirely, but my elbow made it into the black, and no sooner had I offered it did god accept it, hot agony racing up my nerves, fingertip to armpit.

The most delicious emptiness chased all thoughts and pain away.

Only a throbbing remained.

It traveled through my blood.

It gathered in my center.

It congealed between my thighs.

God wanted me, intimately, vulnerably.

And I wanted to offer myself.

In the flickering fluorescent light, I removed my top, let it fall, and when the hem dipped into the toilet, my fingers raced to my pussy instead of saving it.

I pressed my left breast against the hole, working myself into a frenzy.

I thought of god’s teeth.

I thought of razored bicuspids, sharpened as only a deity’s might be, piercing my areola, shredding the membranes beneath.

I moaned.

The slickness of my pussy lips let my hand slip inside, slowed only by the constraints of my jeans.

“Come on,” I said, breathy, impatient, arching my back to press my breast further into the hole.

The pressure built with the anticipation, wetness bleeding through my jeans as I kept the rhythm, anxiously awaiting the slice.

Is this a gift?

“Yes,” came out like a plea.

I’d already started coming when god freed my nipple from the bounds of my flesh.

There was everything, then: The stinging, the soul-wracking climax, the gentle oblivion.

I collapsed onto the tile.

Life-warmth poured down my stomach, my jeans were stained burgundy, and I checked my hand to find my little finger missing and gore flowing from elbow to wrist.

But it didn’t matter.

I took a deep breath.

I laid flat.

I studied the water stains on the ceiling.

I let my fingers trace the graffiti.

I hooked my nail into a hardened piece of gum affixed to the toilet paper dispenser.

“Can I stay like this forever?” My voice sounded dreamy, and god didn’t answer.

I let myself be held by something which had called to me.

Maybe all my life it had called to me.

And I knew that nothing had ever felt right until this.

I didn’t go back to Alyssa’s.

* * *

My remaining days were hazy.

Alyssa kept calling, my parents kept calling, my boss kept calling.

Alyssa texted. She said lots of things.

Things about losing.

Losing her. She named a lot of other things, which didn’t matter.

There was knocking sometimes, and I got good at being quiet.

Very quiet, until it stopped.

Then nobody was calling.

Or texting. Or knocking.

And that was good.

The first time god fucked me, he wasn’t gentle.

It wasn’t a romance in any way I’d seen or experienced, but the seduction burned hot and fast and desperate.

I’d pulled my jeans and panties down and pressed my pussy right up against the hole like a dog.

I wanted to feel god’s tongue.

I wanted it to plunge inside me, to rip out my cervix with its barbed tip, to gush come and blood until the writing on the bathroom stall was washed away with my liquid, depraved pleasure.

God took my other nipple, my left thumb, my right hand to the wrist.

God had a fat cock and a warm pussy.

I fucked and I got fucked, I gave and I got and I gave pieces away.

The pain was gone, even as the blood soaked through my tattered clothing, dried and crusted and flaked off every part of me.

I came so hard I pissed myself.

Even when hunger had me so weak I passed out, it didn’t matter.

God was all I needed, god’s gifts were abundant and if there was still a world outside that heavy metal door, it didn’t need me anymore.

And I didn’t need it.

I’d given Alyssa a chance.

I’d tried to show her.

Yes, it wasn’t my fault she couldn’t see.

And now she’d never know.

She’d never know him .

She’d never know the fullness of being empty.

Fuck Alyssa.

I squatted in front of god’s hole and gave him my ass.

I knew the freedom of giving myself selflessly, of receiving gratefully, of lightening as I was unburdened of my intestines.

They made the sound of slop as they went coiling onto the yellow tile.

God slurped them up like spaghetti.

One long pull and they raced into the gloryhole like a speedy toy train, leaving a slick trail behind like smudged tracks.

I’d never been so savored, my body like a sweet wine, ripe for consumption.

I dipped my fingers in dark liquid.

On the bathroom door I scribbled, Resplendent suffering .

We had braided, god and pain and the cosmos and completion and never-having-been, and my throbbing clitoris.

And my flesh could not be parsed from the most intimate particles of the universe.

No separation stood between me and the oldest suffering and the first pleasure.

God fucked me into nothingness.

I consumed carnality in its purest form as god drew my head to the glory hole and beyond it, took me into her pussy as his cock penetrated my throat.

Clenching and thrusting and a kind, contented knowing.

God came.

And I blinked from being.

A snap in which I relived my many years of existence and my very few days of living.

I came to this one reflection:

If I’d known that first rainy day what I know now.

If I’d realized what would happen, how Alyssa would spend her birthday crying, how dad would never again hear a phone ring without a stitch of anxiety, that my body would rot on the yellow tiled floor for six days before anyone found me, that the insects would’ve chewed through my sclera, that shit leaked from my gaping anus at the end, and the mortician felt embarrassed for me and had to tell his wife about it just to throw off some of the shame, my shame.

If I’d have known on that first rainy day, I would’ve shoved my hand into that hole even faster.

I would’ve never taken it out.