The young man’s body felt heavy, his vision foggy, his hearing slurred. It was like being awakened within a dream. He was so disoriented that he fell forward to the cold stone floor and saw blood from his own head wound seeping into his eyes and onto the floor.

There then arose a thunderous, slow-speaking female voice. “Raise your eyes. See that you have died, young man!”

He could see! The ground had become a mirror, and he saw an oozing gash in his forehead below the hairline of his red wiry hair, with his forehead, cheek, and chin stained with blood. There was no memory of how he got here. He could see his personhood fleeing away as if it were being fired from a slingshot and he was sprinting to catch it where it landed. He reached back to the detritus of his mind, thought back to memories that he thought were long vanquished, how his ancient Motorola phone had felt in his palm, how his middle school girlfriend had laughed at his comic impressions, the way his crusty old teddy bear had smelled, the sound of the creaky oven door in his mom’s kitchen at the first house he’d lived in. This was his life flashing before his eyes.

Somehow it was earlier than all of those memories, the faint recollection of him dying.

Yes, that was the farthest back memory, the fuzziest, but it was sharpening now. In fact, it was the most recent thing. The last thing he had ever done. Hurtling back into his conscious mind. Vivid details spurted out like the blood that was still dribbling onto the floor.

He was in his project truck, a green ‘99 Silverado 2500. He was on a bridge over the Missouri River. He had been working on his truck while drinking, must have forgotten that he hadn’t finished the last job he’d done on his project truck, and a failed wheel bearing took off one of his wheels as he hit the expansion joint on the bridge at 80mph. Heart in his throat, he had jerked the steering wheel away from the bridge guardrail, but it had rolled over and inexorably careened over the side anyway. He saw the water’s surface magnify and his own voice drown out the free-revving engine. He had lived long enough to scream and piss his pants, but the impact of the water had been tremendous, and the crunching punch of the caved-in sheetmetal of the truck’s roof piercing his skull plunged him into a numb darkness soon after impact.

Jerritt Fowler had died at the age of 22, single and childless.

“Jerritt Fowler, you have passed away from your natural life and you stand before the Goddess of the Earth, Gaia – ME.” said the presence very slowly and calmly.

“You were born of affluent ranchers and attended a private Christian university in Texas, though you have not attended your church in three years, and have not prayed with sincerity in a longer time than that. You were a sensitive boy, a boy once bullied until hardened, and one given many opportunities by friends and lovers to become peaceable. You rejected all these. You victimized and bullied those who refused to eat meat. You have verbally and physically abused defenseless women. You have threatened and attacked strangers. You have sought gratification by purposeless killing of other animals in your free time, unaccompanied by the need for sustenance, and your career aspirations amounted to marketing meat products. Your philosophy of life was predicated on the reality that it was not unfair for the weaker to be exploited, for the sensitive and open-minded to be vexed and taken advantage of, for animals to become meat, and that humans were uniquely entitled to perform this on other lifeforms. You were on a path to even greater hate and violence in the coming years, but now your life is extinguished.”

Each word helped him recall the events of his life. Though the accusations and the vitriol hurt, he could not directly dispute the facts presented, only the conclusions she was drawing from them. He had never killed another human, hadn't taken hard drugs, had managed to get through college with middling grades, and he now made enough to pay his bills. Had he lived such a bad life? He was not a good son, he had secretly stolen from his grandma before, he knew that, and his last girlfriend – well, he had smacked her around the one time, but he had planned to get better and she hadn’t given him another chance anyway. As for eating meat and hunting and fighting for carnivore rights? No, he wasn’t to blame. He had shown strength where it counted against the enemies of America. Those damn weakling liberals, nanny state idiots, vegetarians, foreigners and the way they crippled America’s strength was galling and he had every justification in taking strikes against them.

Those thoughts steeled his spine. He must be having some lame fucking dream, a defeatist delusion inspired by those PETA blowhards that he had been trolling earlier in the day. He couldn't even remember why he had been driving on the bridge, clearly this delusion wasn't well thought out enough to be real. Jerritt convinced himself he was not actually dead, but was now lucid dreaming, which relieved him tremendously. "Are you done yet? When I wake up I’m going to go fry up some bacon. You want some, or are you an eco-mentalist too?"

“The Goddess, ME, has decided to curse you into the form you so often made of others.”

“It is now your reality, your cursed reality, that you will be a lifeform to be treated as meat by a number of humans. You will know the suffering of death and feel whether it is a fair trade for your life to be ended in feeding others many times, but will be renewed each time. You will dwell with this curse until your heart is softened and you are able to convince all of your own tormentors of their folly – the folly you held in your life, and that you still now hold.”

Wait, what? How long was this dream going to go on? Now that threats were being made, he was suddenly paying rapt attention. Jerritt shook his head trying to get some of the haze out, but his brains actually started seeping out of the side of his head. With no pain to feel in this state, though, it was merely an irritation. He shoved the brains back into his head and tried to humor the presence’s delusions of holiness.

“Why am I here? Where is my God, whose son is Jesus? I do not believe in your power. I am a Christian. Maybe a sinful one, but I wasn’t that bad that I deserve to be tortured forever.”

The words didn’t come out. His mouth didn’t work. But he clearly thought the words in his head, and the presence replied to him.

She started with a cackle, and shed the formality it had previously had. “Which God is that? Yahweh? Allah? Amun-Ra? Zeus, believed by some to be my grandson? Brahma? Amaterasu?”

Straining to come up with the right ecclesiastic vocabulary, Jerritt sputtered. “Jesus Christ in union with the Holy Spirit! That’s my God! Where is He?”

“If He is another God, and wants to come take you, I would permit Him to do so, but I don’t see Him around, do you? Until I find another power source like MINE, I consider MYSELF the only God, and I have gone by all of those names you have heard. I have been able to infuse MY powers in the lives of all creatures I encounter, and I have lived for over 100 billion years, and taken millions of deity forms. I’ve witnessed the birth and collapse of many universes and shown MYSELF in forms and situations where I think it benefits the most misbehaving lifeforms which attract MY attention.”

Jerritt couldn’t work out if that last sentence meant that this punishment was somehow for his benefit, or for the benefit of the lifeforms he was eating. But he could feel his spoken thoughts no longer being responded to by the Goddess, and he stopped trying to express himself to her.

“I have decreed the terms of your curse. Your tormentors will resemble, in aggregate, those whom you wronged. They will be female, as you have shown so little respect for women. They will be from outside of the United States of America, as you have shown xenophobic bigotry.”

Jerritt felt a presence in the chamber, as though others were now viewing him. The haze around his brain cleared and he suddenly felt that he was in a schoolroom. Perhaps a chemistry class, as there was a clean-up sink with an epoxy-coated countertop beside him. There were large bookshelves against the back wall filled with identical-looking volumes. He was at the front of the class, his injuries were healed, and he felt almost normal in that moment.

Except that he was now about an inch tall, standing on a wooden platform.

Was this a dream? Was he still in the Silverado and was this a dream before he died? How had he been restored to health again?

His platform stood at the front of the classroom next to a personified form of Gaia, who appeared as a fluorescent green-tinted, mesmerizingly proportioned woman who resembled ancient Egyptian depictions of Isis. She waved her hand atop Jerritt’s platform, pointing him out to the pupils.

Five women sat at school desks facing Jerritt. There was a plump woman with heavy makeup chomping gum, an effete Asian teenager with her feet propped up on the desk, a meek-looking woman with graying hair sitting with her hands folded on the desk, a middle-aged blonde who was looking skeptically around the room, and a pencil-thin bespectacled brunette who looked ahead, puzzled, with her arms extended upward and hands rubbing the back of her neck.

“Ladies, remember well the form you see here. You are all eaters of meat. Each of you has been picked by the stochastic judgment of the Goddess. Each of you is to participate in the punishment of this form you see here. The form you see here has been found to be an odious human being while alive. Now that he is no longer alive, he will sustain you.”

“Listen well to the following FOUR details.”

“He ALONE shall sustain you. You shall not crave, nor derive any real sustenance, from any other foods other than his flesh in your future years. If you do not wish to eat him, you will perish from lack of sustenance after a period of time comparable to starvation in ordinary human time.”

“He ALWAYS shall sustain you. By the power of the Goddess, he shall be made present in rejuvenated form after being eaten as many times as needed, for all of your natural lives.”

“He AT ALL NEEDFUL TIMES shall sustain you. You shall have him in your presence at the moment where your hunger pangs are manifest. His flesh shall sustain you for some time. Perhaps a day or two, depending on your exertion and desire.”

“He ENJOYABLY shall sustain you. The flavor of his flesh shall be made joyful by the power of the Goddess; you shall find greater joy in eating him than any food you have eaten before. His flesh shall be as delicious as the finest preparations that humans have devised for one another.”

“Ladies – I have explained the rules – you are now dismissed and may return to your wakeful states.”

Jerritt saw the desks disappear, though the classroom remained around him.

Gaia turned to Jerritt, her featureless fluorescent face widening as it came closer to his.

“They will all believe they were dreaming when they awaken, and many of them will forget the rules I have given them, but their instincts to survive and their hunger will eventually cause them to seek you for nourishment. You may believe you too are dreaming. But I warn you when you awaken, far-off and distant as this dream appears, not to forget the rules of the curse.”

“Finally – for your own soul’s sake, forget not the possibility to break your curse!”

“Begone now, Jerritt!” Gaia thundered, as he saw the dark form of the previous chamber return, and his view faded to black and he lost consciousness.

A burly, simple, luckier-than-smart man, Mack Fowler, born in 1954, had made a minor fortune in Texas oil during the 1970s and 1980s, and put much of it back into real estate, with a massive ranch intended to be his primary legacy. He and Mae had four daughters in a row (Kayla, Hayley, Molly, Jenna) with Mack getting increasingly desperate after each one, hoping for a son to take over the ranch at some point. He finally had a son, Jerritt, in 1998.

The household went together to church on Sundays, to a rural Baptist congregation that numbered about 200 over the space of 40 square miles. He was as tough and uncompromising a parent as he had been in business. All of them worked to help their daddy with the farming equipment and livestock, but Jerritt was Mack’s pride and joy, and he spared the boy from his fearsome temper, which was borne chiefly by Mae and the girls. But they had opportunities for travel to larger cities, and to other countries, due to Mack’s business efforts.

As the girls aged out of their wide-eyed good-natured conservative upbringing, each girl in turn went to college. The twins Kayla and Hayley ended up shifting to the left sharply when they both went to the University of Texas, and in response Mack forbade his next two girls from going there, stating that Austin was a liberal cesspool. Molly went to Texas State instead, and ended up leading an informal student socialist group. Mack, unable to cope with the mounting family discord, finally coerced Jenna to attend a small, private Christian university where he felt he could keep an eye on her. Through it all, Jerritt remained Mack’s golden boy – he could be counted on to be even more right-wing than his father, he tormented and pranked his older sisters, baited them into arguing with him about politics, and he was all too happy to accompany Jenna to the same private college to continue it. Jenna had become a vegetarian, a card-carrying PETA member, and loathed all the experiences she had had helping with slaughtering livestock and preparing meat at home. As Jerritt was still a hardcore carnivore, he could get under Jenna’s skin very easily.

Jerritt was a middling high school student, and a bit worse than middling as a newly minted college student, but had a talent for brazen self-promotion and weaselly fact-stretching. In his first year, Jerritt had not declared a major and had taken only general core courses, and then met his counselor with little preparation, as though choosing a path that pleased him was a mere formality. The counselor had met with Jerritt before and was not impressed with his skate-by work ethic.

In that meeting, he had started by cockily asking if he was going to be able to do pre-law, as if he was surprised they hadn't asked him already.

The counselor raised both his eyebrows in amused surprise. “Yes, you can do it here, and it’s a very good program – but you’re going to have study a lot harder than you’ve done so far. The GPA does matter for that. If you want to take a few more core courses and nail it with a 4.0, we could maybe get you started on that path next year.”

Jerritt stroked his burgeoning beard hairs as he pondered the suggestion. “OK, what about engineering? What kind takes the least math and least computer stuff?”

“There is not yet an established engineering school, but we offer many technical majors. There are great chemistry and applied mathematics programs here. However, I would urge you to consider if you really want to take that route based on the fact that you don’t like math so much.”

Jerritt had derisively shrugged off the advice. “I’ll think about it.”

Jerritt did not think much about it.

Fortunately for his college career, he had a kindred spirit with Dr. Gower, the econ 101 lecturer, a slow-speaking neo-monetarist whose worldview aligned well with Jerritt’s. After the first office hours session, Jerritt reckoned he wanted to be an economist and tell people how the global financial system worked. A profound inability to understand calculus stood in the way of becoming an economist, he later was told – but he made his way through a business major with some effort.

At 22 years of age, in his final year of university, Jerritt took a position as a marketing intern at Pinnacle Foods, one of the largest vertically integrated food companies in the world, with origins in meat processing, based out of Omaha, Nebraska. He had leaned on his dad’s contacts to get the job, but it was a perfect culture fit.

Pinnacle had looked at the efforts of competitors to develop plant-based meat substitutes and decided that it was a fad doomed to fail. The company was deeply conservative and felt that traditional meat products needed to be defended and rebranded, and they could usefully exaggerate efforts at legislating against meat consumption at the federal level in order to discredit alternatives – perhaps even create a popular groundswell in favor of literal subsidies for meat producers. In the marketing department, Jerritt was tapped to use social media to break down any arguments against beef and pork being made by health experts, climate scientists, and animal rights groups. It was an astonishingly successful effort for Jerritt, whose particularly acerbic Twitter posts became legendary among corporate competitors, and he drove tremendous engagement by Pinnacle’s standards. They wanted him to make meat a political statement and position them to benefit from the polarization, and he was very experienced doing that in his own family.

But even at Pinnacle, Jerritt’s naïve Western chauvinist outlook was starting to chafe on his boss Reggie. On the last workday before he had plunged his truck into the river, there had been a minor argument after he asked for the dozenth time if he could get an India-focused gig.

Jerritt had started to get defensive. “There’s a BILLION people there, and there’s NO beef market! They buy our Harleys, they buy Jack Daniels – but Pinnacle does not sell one pound of beef there! What are you going to do about it? I thought we were a BUSINESS here!”

Reggie grabbed the bridge of his nose in exasperation. “Jerritt, for the last time. We’re not sending you to India! They have a strong belief against eating beef. You go there and try to take down a village cow, you’re going to end up stoned by a mob.”

Jerritt shook his head. “I can convince anyone to eat anything that tastes good. Individualism is sexy. Taking from the Earth what is yours is good for everyone worldwide, it’s just a question of marketing it right!”

“Okay, you’ve got a dog right?”

Jerritt frowned. “What’s that got to do with it?”

Reggie smiled. “So that’s livestock right? Are you going to slaughter and eat it?”

“Hell no!”

Laughing, his boss responded, “They do in parts of Asia – why aren’t Americans eating dog and why aren’t we selling it? Do you see how that works?”

Jerritt did not take the point. Cows and pigs were meat, dogs and horses were companions – it should be that way everywhere, he reasoned. Koreans and Chinese people who slaughtered dogs, Mexicans who slaughtered horses – they were just living wrongly. But he let the argument drop – he couldn’t convince everyone all at once, but he would do it over time. He had plenty of time to get there.

Jerritt left the office that afternoon and headed back home eager for a cold beer and the chance to do some side-trolling on Tiktok and Twitter. Maybe some work on his truck before he took it on a road trip this weekend. It was such a nice summer.

An administrator who worked in Admissions for 12 years, Amparo Gutiérrez was a familiar face to thousands who had passed through Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education in Monterrey, Mexico. She led a private personal life, spending most of her time alone or with her family, and making just a few friendships among her coworkers. One of them was a nurse in the campus clinic, in whom she had confided her weight loss goals a few weeks ago.

Amparo started the new year, the 35th year of her life, intending to lose at least 80 lb. It was going to be tough. But recently, she had been doing a very good job avoiding carbs and maintaining a high-protein keto diet – more meat than ever, but it seemed to work. Her 5’5” frame currently weighed 240 lb, down 10 lb from her peak weight.

Her obesity had come from a place of depression and loneliness. After she learned she was unable to bear kids, her husband divorced her, and it had been an ordeal for her to come to grips with her new reality. Cooking and eating was a coping mechanism. Colleagues commented favorably on the cakes she brought to the office, and asked what the terrific smell was as she microwaved her leftover barbecue to take lunch privately in her office. Some of them quietly wondered, however, why Amparo had so many leftovers that evidenced such large, ambitious meals when she lived alone and cooked only for herself most of the time.

Nurse Aimee Davila greeted her friend with a smile as she saw Amparo approaching in the clinic just after both of their workdays ended. They talked on the move together across the lush green campus on the way to the parking garage.

Amparo seemed concerned and could barely reciprocate the smile. “So the diet… it started to work, I was losing some weight, but I started feeling tremendous hunger. I’ve been so weak ever since yesterday! I ate a big dinner last night and it didn’t help.”

Aimee, somewhat accustomed to this level of dramatic suffering by her food-loving friend, asked Amparo basic questions to try and see if it was anything serious. Amparo wasn’t dehydrated, didn’t have a fever, had a normal blood pressure, had been having normal bowel movements, was not nauseated or vomiting, and had been eating and drinking enough. Cautious of dispensing bona fide medical advice, but without perceiving an imminent emergency, Aimee suggested that she should go see the doctor if she was concerned.

Tomorrow I will go, Amparo resolved. She didn’t want to go to the ER for this tonight, and hoped that the weakness and hunger pangs would subside.

Fast forward three hours, and they hadn’t ended. She kicked off her flats and laid down in bed without changing clothes. She had eaten a hearty dinner to no effect. Falling asleep was impossible. Amparo rubbed her temples and sighed. She was nearly ready to cry, wishing to herself a solution to her unexplained pain and weakness. She set her phone down and closed her eyes. It was 8:34pm, and she would try to rest.

Jerritt awakened sharply, on the bedside table of the enormous woman. It seemed like one second ago he had been in Gaia's illusionary classroom doing nothing. He had convinced himself while drifting around the empty classroom after Gaia’s departure that it was a dream, but the dream was now going on so long and passing through so many phases that he was starting to wonder if he truly was dead and this truly was his purgatory.

Then he looked over and saw Amparo. He recognized her face as one of the women from the classroom. She had been the one chomping bubble gum. She was the chubbiest, with massive breasts, tree-trunk thighs and a bulging gut.Of course she was going to eat him now.

Oh, fuck, he mouthed breathlessly.

The words, tinny as they were at his size, were heard by the slightly groggy woman lounging in her bed. She heard him faintly, and Jerritt had little time to flee as he saw the mocha-colored skin of her pudgy hand groping across the bedside table.

She grasped the strangely resistant intruder, and held him wordlessly over her face by his clothing, peering at him with her hazel eyes, raising and lowering eyebrows in bemusement. What was this creature? Why did it look so human? Did she have a toy that looked like a person that she had forgotten about? But it was so realistic! She was as uncertain of the reality as he was.

Amusement overtaking her, Amparo grinned widely and started to laugh, peppering Jerritt with her stale breath. “¿Quién eres tú? (Who are you?) ¿estoy soñando? (Am I sleeping?)”

Jerritt, above her, tried to plead for his life. “DON’T eat me! This is all a mistake!”

She was so startled to hear the words that her mouth flung open involuntarily, and then she tried to respond to the thing in English, at which she was passable.

“W… wow! Are you a person? Really, so small!”

“I am a person! Wait, don’t you know who I am?” Jerritt asked, swaying above her face with some sudden relief. Maybe if she forgot the rules she had received in her dream, it wouldn’t occur to her to eat him. Maybe he would be saved yet.

“I know who you are.” Amparo’s eyes narrowed and she suddenly looked very mischievous and thoughtful. She put a finger beside her lip and pulled downward on it, exposing her lower teeth, and causing a popping sound as the lip snapped back into place.

“You’re a dream. I don’t know why I dream of a tiny, cute boy, but I only have one use of you now. You see, I am so hungry. So very hungry!”

Jerritt gulped. He started to get the same feeling of blood-curdling fear and desperation that he recalled experiencing before he had plunged to his death on the bridge. This was real, not a dream.

“So you are here to feed me. Maybe I can at least feel full in my dreams.”

“But I don’t want to be eaten!” Jerritt said. “Please don’t, I am a person!”

Amparo’s face twisted into fake concern. “Awwww my little sweet! You not a person, you’re my food! It is my dream, and I know no people are your size! So I say you get to be my food!”

Her fingers parted. Jerritt floated in air, feeling a few seconds of gravity pulling him to his doom. Her eyes disappeared from his vision. The dark red tongue shot towards him as her full lips, clad in faded maroon lipstick, passed beyond his vision. The light receded.

He hit the tongue with a splash, its moist fleshiness softening the impact, but the rough texture of the taste buds leaving his skin raw from the impact as though he had landed on a bed of pickles. The woman’s powerful mouth organ swished him around, and he heard her moan in pleasure. It was not quite an orgasmic sound, but the sound of a person deeply enjoying their favorite food. Hot, thick, stale-smelling saliva was forced all around him. He pinched his nose, slippery with moisture, squeezed his eyes and mouth shut, but as she swirled him around, his arms were forcibly separated from his nose which he could not force shut. She started to suck his body with tremendous force, causing painful pressure in his ears, and her spit promptly wicked up his nostrils and caused an agonizing burn in his sinuses. He was stewing in her mouth while she sucked him like a hard candy.

There was no air to breathe, and he was starting to taste her musky, sour saliva as it coated the inside of his nasal cavity and throat. It tasted faintly of her last meal, something with meat and potatoes.

Jerritt knew he could hold his breath for at least 3 minutes, from when he swam as a kid and timed such things. Unless his vaping habit had cut down on his ability to store oxygen somehow. But, pausing to remember the mantra that he had heard, that calm people survive and panicked people die, he tried to hold out. Maybe she would let him go and stop before he gave out. It was his only hope. But another full minute passed as he lay there motionless. The woman kept playfully sucking him, seemingly energized by his passivity and wishing to demand his response. She wasn’t releasing the pressure but was ramping it up. His ears were bleeding now, and he could feel the air being sucked fully out of his lungs and his diaphragm was powerless to resist the external pressure.

Finally the pressure released and he instinctively inhaled, but there was still no air. His mouth, throat and lungs were inundated with her spit. He lost all ability to stay calm and start to flail about realizing he was truly drowning and there was nothing he could do.

Amparo savored the treat. She was in a stupor that she thought was a dream, motivated by the hunger she still felt, and the tremendous satisfaction that eating this little creature had brought her.

Jerritt’s consciousness began to fail. His life systems were shutting down, he started to see a hazy white sheen creep over his vision in the darkness of the woman’s mouth. He knew he was dying, that it was for real this time, and he wished profoundly to be saved by God and cast into Heaven.

Jerritt drowned, mouthing the word “mommy” as he slipped away from the world.

At that moment, Amparo tilted her head back and swallowed the now-lifeless boy. She found him surprisingly, inexplicably delicious, and her hunger was rapidly mitigated as her stomach accepted his body with a thankful groan. It was an amazing, delightful feeling. She was so satisfied and thrilled; the initial stages of digestion seemed to give her tremendous energy. This was the moment to dance, she just felt so good!

On standing, she promptly stepped on a hair pin she had mistakenly left on the floor. Yeeeeouch! She exclaimed with fury. But she didn’t wake up.

Pain, like this? Sharp pain in a specific part of the body? In a dream? Was it possible? Was she actually dreaming at all? It was so much more vivid than any dream before.

As Amparo sat back down on the bed, she heard a faint buzzing sound that repeated. Brrzzzzzz. Brrzzzzzz. Brrzzzzzz.

Ah, it was her phone vibrating on the bedside table. She picked it up and noticed that the time was only 8:39pm.

Wait, what? If she had been asleep, she would have been out for less than 5 minutes from when she had last looked at the clock. She thought to herself, “That is not a normal amount of time to sleep and dream in, it takes longer than this.”

But as the phone stopped vibrating, it started again. She accepted the call.

“Hello?”

“Hi it’s me Aimee. How are you feeling Amparo?”

Amparo’s face fell and her dancing impulse left. This was not a dream. The details, the pain, the friend calling in a way entirely realistic with her day. It couldn’t be. She had not been dreaming; she had literally eaten some small, living thing which spoke English. But nobody would believe her. This was some evil curse placed on her.

Amparo could barely speak to her friend over the phone. After assuring her that she was now feeling fine, that she must have been sick with something minor, Amparo hung up the phone.

She had not only killed the living thing, she had drowned it in her mouth. It must have been so frightening and awful for it. She started to feel shame and unease from her actions, and she sat up to pray at the foot of her bed.

Oh God, if I do still dream, please awaken me and forgive me for my primordial instinct to kill for food. I don’t want to hurt any person, I just wanted to be full. If I am awake, please make clear to me your lesson, I am so confused how a person could be so tiny. If I have killed a person, please forgive me, I did not know what it was I had done.”

Amparo, hobbling unsteadily from her tender foot pierced by the pin, went to the bathroom, and forced herself to vomit into the toilet. An angry orange stream of acidic liquid belched out of her gullet, leaving behind mostly liquid and some food particulate. The boy was almost an inch long, had been reasonably big to swallow, so he should be visible among the other undigested detritus.

There it was. The nervous woman saw a lifeless, slightly bloody corpse floating in her toilet bowl, about the size of a Lego figurine. It had certainly been real.

Her hunger was also real. It was now back strongly. It was painfully back – she felt as though her stomach had kicked her internal organs in every direction, demanding more sustenance.

“Aghhhh free me from this stomach pain! God!” Amparo cried. It was the worst pain yet.

She felt the strangest, most repulsive impulse to grab the corpse and swallow it again. It was as though part of her was possessed. The unpossessed part of her stuck out her tongue and yelled “Ewwwgh!” as her hand forced him into her mouth again.

Pushing him straight down her throat, ignoring the cloying acrid taste of the vomit soaking her snack, she swallowed the boy for a second time. And a second time, the hunger disappeared.

Amparo soberly realized that this little creature was the only thing that could make her feel good and full. She had to hope it wasn’t a real human and that she wasn’t damning her soul for this, because she knew that if she saw another creature like it, she was damn well going to eat him. Yes, she would. The pleasure gotten, the relief garnered, was so acute that she could not pass it up. Her newfound fullness was so pleasant that she was able to fall asleep soundly, unvexed by any more thought of the possibility of humanity in the creature she had killed and eaten.

Jerritt woke up with a start, as though he had been in a dream where he was falling. He was back in the weird classroom setting he had seen earlier but he was again alone, sitting at one of the desks.

Time to do some checks on the breadcrumbs he'd left behind.

Interestingly, the books he had taken off the shelf remained as he left them on the desk surface. Including the intricate paper airplanes he had made. Jerritt had had hours, perhaps as much as a day, to sit alone in this classroom after Gaia departed. Then there was the whiteboard. He made marks of sufficient detail and randomness in five different marker colors, that he would prove to himself that it was not a dream if he uncovered them later.

And there they were. All the marks, in all their strange glory. This was no dream. He actually was dying and going back to this place each time.

Jerritt staggered with the weight of this realization. This had been his second death. He really had drowned. The pain and desperation and realness of it – he would feel the weight of mortality over and over again. Would the panic and fear that he felt from his primordial soul ever stop happening in these perceived final moments? Would he be able to act upon the knowledge that it wasn’t truly over, that he was going to be resurrected to be eaten again, or would it feel this terrible each and every time?

And how long would he be here? He got absolutely nowhere convincing the first woman to so much as pause and hear him out before he was eaten. Would he be here for the rest of their lives, until all the women had died? Would he be here forever- was this Hell?

Would his memories of his real life fade and be replaced with memories of this classroom and the countless number of times he was going to see the inside of their stomachs?

For whatever comfort it offered, it seemed that this classroom, this illusion of whatever kind it was, had an ongoing and consistent role. This was the place of Purgatory, the concourse where he would reside alone with his own thoughts until he was called next.

And he knew he would be called. If this woman was the first to become unbearably hungry, the others couldn’t be far behind. With so much of Gaia's words proven already, he had no choice but to believe her seriousness when she had stated that he would be selected to be eaten at their beck and call.

At least he had a surfeit of books to read while waiting. The shelves in the room were stuffed with volumes on art, history, science, languages, and philosophy.

Jerritt suddenly became very tired and laid down on the desk to sleep again… it seemed like his time was already up. Time to be a piece of meat again.

The five-foot tall girl hissed with the fury of a cobra, and angrily slammed shut the door to her near-palatial bedroom. She was seething. Why couldn't they do anything about it?

None of the doctors could do anything for her. They were accusing her of being melodramatic! How dare they!

The Yifan household, under its industrialist patriarch, was not short of resources for medical care. Xie, 23 years old, was very accustomed to having whatever she thought was desirable, often almost before she could even express it. Her father intentionally immunized her against hard work and fair play and cultivated her loyalty and ruthlessness to take a prominent place in his organization. In the meantime, he showed endless patience and largely made certain of her happiness through whatever material ends were required.

But today had proven that wealth was not capable of fixing the pain she felt in her stomach. When she begged the pain to disappear, in the presence of a doctor it did, for all practical purposes - there was no abnormal reading or measurement they could find anywhere in her body. She was a fit, athletic, hardy young woman who was rarely sick. She had spent the past sixteen hours at the hospital, cycling through tests and panels and demanding that the results be hastened to her while her father hung on her every suggestion, and showed the greatest deference to whichever doctor could come up with the more outlandish theory for why she felt this pain.

Spending money was requisite to Mr. Yifan. He was firmly convinced that the staff were simply not thinking hard enough and needed the right incentive. They were told enticingly that a check for a "research grant" was waiting for the one who could heal her. The doctors came in waves, eager to question her and find out what the problem was. An administrator was bribed into text-spamming dozens of doctors off duty to come in if they had even the faintest idea. Xie saw almost every tangentially-related specialist, and ultimately the hospital staff was at a loss. They offered to keep her in the hospital for as long as she wanted in case some of the symptoms would manifest. But Xie was not content with that vague promise, and demanded that they come up with a plan of care for her right now.

Starting to lose hope, the administrator called in a psychiatrist quietly. Xie bristled and screamed for the man to be withdrawn, that this was decidedly not in her head.

Several of the frustrated attendings in the room at that point were convinced it was completely in her head for a different reason. To them, this was some elaborate, cruel prank that had distracted them from the care of others. A sociopathic experiment, where this petty and egotistical millionaire tried to convince his daughter that nothing was shameful anymore, nothing too low.

But Xie's pain was real, and it was unlike anything she had experienced before. She was desperate for something to feed herself with that would sate the urgency. The desperation grew. She started to cry alone, making her way to the bed. Hot, heavy tears of desperation that she was going to die of an unknown and unprovable condition.

She knew that her wailing would be perfectly contained in her cavernous room. Nobody would bother her when she shut that door, not even daddy.
It was therefore a heart-stopping surprise to feel a small, humanoid presence falling onto her lap.



Aaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

Jerritt screamed ineffectually as he tumbled from the solid floor of the fake classroom at an indefinite point in space to Earth. It seemed like miles. He had fallen through the blue and white of the sky, through the hull of an airliner, seen the globe grow larger, and the continent of Asia come into focus in front of him. Still falling into a gaudy mansion in Shanghai, passing through the roof as if it had been a fluffy stratocumulus cloud, finally landing on the creamy bare thigh of a young Chinese woman wearing shorts sitting barefoot on the edge of her bed.

He looked up at her face. It was red and puffy. Her long black hair fell roughly across her shoulders and face. She looked genuinely distraught and he didn't know what he was supposed to say. Did she also intend to eat him? How would he talk to her - did she know English?

Xie immediately stopped crying and tilted her head in rapt curiosity. What was this thing? She looked around, and up. There were no holes in the ceiling, no open windows, no open doors - how had this small human doll landed on her lap?

"Ni hao....." Jerritt said finally. That had exhausted his Mandarin already.
To his surprise the girl's sad face twisted into a smile and she giggled. Her high-pitched voice was slightly grating. He couldn't tell if she was more amused that he had spoken at all, or that he had done so in the local language with a Texas accent.
She started to talk to him with great familiarity, and he couldn't understand her at all.
"Wait, wait, what are you saying? I don't actually know Chinese, sorry."

Xie's smile disappeared. She shook her head showing confusion. Jerritt's fear increased as he realized that either she didn't understand him at all, or couldn't respond in English.
How long would it take her to figure out he was food? As the girl paused to think, and absentmindedly pulled down her lower lip with her finger, he could see into her mouth. Her teeth were pearly white and straight as a supermodel's. It was a glimpse into his near-term fate.

The hand came for him. She grabbed him uncaringly like a doll. He felt the soft, clammy skin of her hand grip his torso as he faced her enormous visage. She pointed at him, and grabbing her phone, pointed to a picture of the human body. She pointed at the stomach, pointed at her stomach, and made a moaning sound as to indicate pain.
"Yes I understand that you are hungry, but really I don't have anything to do with this...."
"Hung-ry!" She said with satisfaction. She rapidly continued talking to him, making intonations as if asking questions and then answering them herself.

Finally she decided what to do with him. Maybe she had worked out that he was a small robot and not a living creature, or she was thinking she was dreaming, or this was some superstitious response. But she suddenly opened her mouth and held him out over it.

He saw her petite pink tongue snaking about, the mouth wet with anticipation. He could smell no odor nor see any evidence of a recent meal in her teeth. Here we go again, he thought.... was he going to drown in there? Readying for a third death, all he could think to himself was, at least she's my age and hot. And her breath smells good, at least. But it was such a lame distraction when faced with imminent death. His heart was pounding again. Nothing can prepare you for the sure knowledge that you're going to die, and for no good reason, with no end in sight to follow.

"ahhhh.... " Xie said as she dangled the boy over her mouth, finally letting him go.
To Jerritt's horror, she did not pause to suck on him and while he did wrestle briefly with her tongue, she was just trying to position him between her teeth and hold him in place to be squeezed. She was fully intending to chew him up, bones and all, as though he were a sardine. Then the teeth came down. First on his left side, crushing some of his ribs and severing his left arm and leg messily. Jerritt closed his eyes and screamed in agony. This was a million times worse than drowning. He felt the angle of his body tilt slightly. She was brushing him playfully with her tongue so his head was in direct contact with her biggest molar. The pressure built up and he felt his nose break, his cheekbones start to shatter, and finally his skull was squelched by the great force of her jaw like a grape. With his brain crushed, his earthly senses disappeared, and his last image was of pure white.

Xie tasted a hemoglobin-drenched cascade of warmth swirl around as her teeth crunched into the flesh and bones of the small creature, spurting his blood to coat the inside of her mouth while she could barely hear the cries within. She imagined that this was some strange gift, maybe the drugs she had tried to take earlier were giving her hallucinations, but she had been overcome with the desire to cure her hunger by eating this thing. She wanted to eat it completely, crunch its bones into dust and take it out of existence. Cute little things did not please her now, but the intoxicating power of overcoming her hunger did.

And the flavor was mangificent to her. Jerritt's blood coated her mouth like a decadent syrup, and the meaty, silky texture of his body felt like high-grade Waygu beef between her perfect molars. She heard the cries fall silent after the second big crunch, and he had clearly died by that point, but she kept chewing and gnawed the internal organs as though they were tapioca balls. She continue to pulverize his corpse, and swallowed it in one gulp when it had been adequately masticated. The boy's remains went into her stomach, then full of watery, mostly-digested chicken and rice.

She suddenly felt the pain vanishing. She felt so good. What was happening? It was like the whole condition instantly disappeared. No evidence of her suffering in the medical records, no pain currently - what had happened to her?
Daddy wouldn't care. He just wanted her feeling good. He would believe her if she had told him that she had eaten a small man and it had made her feel better. And for good measure, he probably would have fed her shrunken dudes for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Starting with his business rivals. She snorted and wondered if she could eat her little sister's boyfriend Yupu. He was such a jerk.

But of course the thing she ate wasn't a real person. It looked like a little human but it couldn't be. Weird genetic experiment maybe. But surely there was nothing wrong with eating them, whatever they were. And if she needed to find sub-humans to eat for sustenance, why should she feel guilty?

But it was still really weird. How would she explain this to her mom and boyfriend? She was going to have to fake it for a little while longer and come up with an excuse for her recovery that made some kind of sense.

Exhausted and satisfied, Xie laid down and fell asleep as she digested the mortal remains of Jerritt.