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.