Elijah sat in the chair, struggling to not mind that it was uncomfortable. It was the strange sort of chair hospitals presumably had specially made - it had padding yet it was terribly uncomfortable. The proportions were all wrong, it was an ergonomic nightmare. His legs were too high. The seatback cut across his massive trapezius at an exactly wrong spot unless he slouched in a spine doubling position Clippit himself would avoid. The fabric was undoubtedly easy to clean, but aside from that it had the feel and yielding comfort of burlap stretched over a few reams of paper.

He held his study book to the Good News bible open in his left hand, using his thick right finger to hold his place while he read. A circle of incandescent light illuminated the text, shining down from a free-standing reading lamp. The rest of the room was dimly lit and sepulchrally silent.

In the hospital bed a woman lay, small, frail, and empty. She breathed like someone in a deep sleep, heedless of the tube snaking down her esophagus to her shrunken stomach, the monitors keeping track of her heart rate, respiration, blood pressure, pulse oximetry, and alpha wave function. That last monitor produced a graph as flat as eastern Kansas. Her hair was cut boyishly short, but still held a curl that was probably beautiful when it was long and she last graced a dance floor or dinner table. She looked to be about middle-aged, but gracefully so.

"The part I like best about this book, Sue, is the overwhelming faith and loyalty here. Ruth changed her faith when she joined Naomi's tribe, she and Orpah were Moabites before they married into this Israelite family. Naomi, their Mother-in-law, tells them they can go after her husband dies and her sons die. There's a famine, and they're all dying, and Orpah goes home. But here we see faith and loyalty, because Ruth, Ruth stays. She knows they are going to starve to death, they're doomed, and she stays with her Mother-in-law, Naomi, because her tribe is her tribe, Naomi's is Ruth's, and that's forever to her, or at least until they die."

Sue said nothing.

A woman in scrubs, an orderly, came in. She was overweight but not grotesquely, and had a floral print on her scrub top. She was African American, with short braids and thick framed glasses to go with her thick middle. Middle age and bad luck were putting an ever increasing number of dark freckles and even a few moles on her creamed-coffee cheeks. "Elijah, you still here?"

"We were just finishing up - we ran a little long tonight."

"We did, did we?" Muriel looked over her glasses incredulously. "Why do you keep coming? She's not here."

"Sure she is, she's right there." Elijah sounded a little defensive of the inert woman.

Muriel sighed and regarded him with pity and resignation. She knew in her heart that Sue Warren was not going to rise again, and that the bed was vacant save for an amygdala that was not yet willing to put chairs on tables, sweep up, shut the lights and lock up on the way out.

"Has her family been visiting?" Eli asked.

"Not much. Her husband came by to tell her they were divorced. Judging by the tissues he left he had a good cry about it, but his life has to go on I guess." Muriel didn't sound convinced, but she said it without rancor or judgment. A persistent vegetative state was a fancy way of saying hopelessness and heartbreak, which just left her sympathetic to everybody involved, even the empty living body in the bed.

Elijah scowled at that. He tried not to judge anyone too harshly if he could help it, but in light of the chapters he'd just been discussing with Sue it seemed worse for her, and for her husband.

"It's been two years, Eli. Everyone has given up except you and her heart. Her body is healthy as a horse, but her mind isn't there anymore."

"She's in there. I believe she's in there."

"It would be a miracle if she so much as winked." Muriel and Eli had had this conversation before, but Eli had permission to visit and so there he was having the same argument again.

"I believe..." he started.

"In miracles," she finished. "I know you do, and that's why you're a sweetheart and I'm bitter as day old coffee. It's past visiting hours, Eli. Time to go."

"Five minutes? Please?" He put on the big blue puppy dog eyes and looked as sweet as candy.

"Don't get me in trouble or you'll get a bed of your own big guy." Muriel raised a threatening fist, wielding it with mock sincerity. She might have been five foot six, and Elijah was built like a stevedore.

"I won't," he said. "See you Thursday," he added to her departing back. He turned his attention back to Sue, supine on her hospital bed.

"Look, Ruth and Naomi stuck together, and because of that, because Ruth was true to Naomi, she wound up marrying Boaz, and her great great great grandson was Joseph of Nazareth. So they went through this really hard time together, but they came through it okay, hanging on to each other and to their faith, and in the end they had an important role to play in the world. If Ruth had gone home with Orpah, there'd be no Joseph and Mary would have just been a girl in a lot of trouble instead of the mother of the savior." Eli took a breath, and searched for his point.

"What I mean is, what I want to say is, I'll stick by you, through our little famine here, and in the end things will come out like they're supposed to. I'm going to pray over you now, OK?" He took a few shuffling steps up the very edge of the bad, and lay his large right hand on the small mound of her belly. As he did he could not help but reflect on the children that belly had carried, both in the womb and later on the lap, and the meals that had been eaten, from picnics to Sunday dinners. And then the last two years, inert, empty, barren, wasted. A famine in microcosm.

Saint's lips moved as he prayed silently, asking to be a vessel for the Lord's power, however flawed, however culpable he was. A white Saint Elmo's fire arced and spread around his right hand, and arced to Sue Warren's stomach, and spread to cover her body for several seconds.

"I'll see you on Thursday, Sue. Same as always. Wake up soon, OK?"