I had a dream that I died.

I think it was a car-crash or something. I remember glass breaking, looking out a broken window at a fire raging near the gas-tank. I remember hearing a sound so loud I couldn’t hear it at all, a light so bright I didn’t even have to walk down the tunnel.

But that was not the worst dream I ever had.

The worst dream I ever had came about two weeks later. I was talking to someone (in the dream) one of my writing gurus, the man who had written one of my favorite films of all time, whom I had met a few months earlier at a screenwriting conference.

I was telling the man a story about battles in space, a sci-fi arc I’d been working on, and he kept telling me to raise the stakes. So I imagined Nicholas Scatterhull escaping on his ship from a planet crumbling through seismic instability–the end of the world.

No. Not a dying planet. A dying star, gasping its last and taking the entire system down with it.

Perhaps not a single star, but a cluster in the galaxy’s center, like in Larry Niven, all supernova’d at once, and wiping out the galaxy.

I was talking to my guru about this when suddenly–that white light again, the end of the tunnel, swallowing me up, and my dying thought realizing that this time, it wasn’t just me. The light itself was dying. And it was taking everything with it.

Voyager hasn’t even left our solar system yet. We are alone in the dark, and know of no one who can help us. No one who might even know about us. This means that, in any given situation, no matter how dire, the single worst thing that can ever happen, the worst case scenario, is the destruction of our sun.

It would take just over eight minutes to reach us, and assuming the blast comes at the speed of light, we will never know.

It would destroy not only every human life, but every human endeavor. Every memory, every monument, every accomplishment put forth by every single living being in the history of the planet, would be extinguished.

I wrote this at a time before we knew (for sure) that the Mayan Apocalypse wasn’t going to destroy the world on December 21st, 2012. If you are reading this, the world has not ended yet, even now.

If you are reading this, the sun still shines, no brighter than it did the day before.

The waves still crash against the rocks, clawing at the moon.

People die, but are also born.

People fight, but make love as well.

And their endeavors are remembered. They are meaningful.

If you are reading this, there is still hope.

If the sun has not exploded, whatever is bothering you, whatever has made you upset, is not the worst thing that could have happened.

It is not the end of the world.

You can be sad. I will understand, and not hold it against you. But it is still possible to be happy.

Once upon a time, there was a little Lamb who liked to play by herself, away from the flock. The Sheep who were her parents—and especially the Ram who was her father—kept warning her about Wolves, but she never listened.

One day, while she was hopping around near the forest, a Wolf did come out to her. “Hey, there, little Lamb,” said the Wolf. “You want someone to play with?”

But the Lamb was too clever for him. “I don’t need anyone to play with!” she said, “and least of all you, because you’re a Wolf!” And she boo’d and baa’d and stuck her tongue out, then hopped and skipped away, leaving the Wolf in the dust. “Well, now that was pretty rude,” said the Wolf, and no sooner had he said so than he heard someone laughing behind him. Upon closer investigation, it turned out to be an Older Wolf.

“Boy, you really are something,” said the Older Wolf. “expecting some lamb to fall for that old trick when she’s obviously smarter than you.”

“But I’m a Wolf!” said the younger one. “Wolves have to eat, don’t they?”

“Times change,” the Older Wolf explained. “You can’t pull that kind of wool over little lambs’ eyes anymore. You need something a little bit thicker.” And with that, he produced a cloak made out of sheeps’ woll and handed it over to the younger Wolf. “Nowadays,” said the older one, “to catch a decent Lamb, you gotta be a Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing.”

Meanwhile, the little Lamb ran home and found her father. When she finally saw him, she cried out “Daddy! Daddy! I saw him! I saw a wolf!”

“You saw a wolf?” said her father. “Well, what did he do?”

“He asked me to come and play with him,” said the Lamb. “But I said no and I ran the other way.”

“Good for you,” said her father. “That’s exactly how we act around wolves!”

But the Wolf had this new plan to work on, now, so he put on his Sheep’s Clothing and hovered at the edge of the woods.

“No, no, no,” said the Older Wolf. “You’re a sheep now! Go into the flock with the other sheep!”

So the bumbling Wolf in the wool stumbled over to the flock of Sheep, who baa’d and bleated at him in greeting. His mouth was watering, but he didn’t do anything because he remembered exactly what the Older Wolf had told him: “This time, you’re only out there to watch them,” he’d said. “Just learn what they’re all about. Trust me, it’ll help you in the long run.”

While he was out there, he saw the little Lamb he had met earlier and she didn’t recognize him. “Hello, sir,” she said. “My, my, what an awful lot of wool you have!”

The better to reel you in and eat you, thought the Wolf, but he didn’t say it because he knew that would blow his cover. “Thanks,” he said instead, then trying not to show how angry he was at the little Lamb for how she’d treated him before, he returned, “that’s not a bad coat yourself.”

“Thanks,” said the little Lamb, beaming that this cute, only slightly older sheep had actually given her a compliment.

But she was distracted by an all-too-familiar voice. “That’s my father calling,” she said. “I’d better go. I’m not supposed to talk to strangers.”

I’m not a stranger, the sinister Wolf thought as she left. You’ve met me before. Or rather, I’ve met you…

So the Lamb’s father called her away, saying he had a Nice Young Ram to introduce her to, saying he was the Cleverest Nice Young Sheep in the whole flock, but the little Lamb thought only of the Mysterious Sheep with the thick wool coat that reminded her so much of her grandfather’s.

That night, the little Lamb continued to think about the Mysterious older Sheep she’d met, about how big and dark and handsome he had seemed, and all the old adventurousness she’d lost when she’d met that Wolf, came tumbling back.

Meanwhile, the Wolf went back to the forest after his excursion to brag to the Older Wolf. “That—went—splendidly!” said the Wolf in Sheeps’ Clothing.

“Tell me about it,” the Older Wolf invited.

“Oh, I met that damn Lamb again,” moaned the Wolf. “The one who spurned me! I gave her a piece of my mind and I’ll give her the rest of my belly, come morning.”

“You’ll do no such thing!” said the Older Wolf. “Have you no sense of style or art? The fun of it is in the hunt, man, not the kill!”

The Wolf wasn’t quite sure how to take that. But he thought about it and decided that maybe he should relish how this impudent Lamb who had once been so cruel to him was now fawning over him in his disguise as a sheep.

So, the next morning, he returned and found the Lamb again in her flock and they spoke and he listened and laughed at her jokes until it was time for her to go. And when she went, she was glowing at this Ram who liked her and he was gloating that the Lamb didn’t know.

And this went on, day after day after day, over and over they would talk until one day, the Wolf’s belly started to rumble and he realized how long it had been since he’d had a decent meal. Perhaps it was time, he thought.

So he lured the little Lamb away. “I want to go on an adventure,” he said. “I want to leave the flock and march right up to the edge of the woods, where no one will see us.”

“And what would we do there?” asked the little Lamb.

“Well,” said the Wolf, “I’ve heard they have the crispest, greenest you have ever tasted, right at the edge of the woods!”

“They do! They do!” cried the little Lamb. “I’ve even tasted it myself! You’re right, we should totally go! We should go right now! Wood grass! Yaay!”

And as the Lamb leapt off into the forest, the Wolf found himself sincerely smiling after her.

At the edge of the woods, the Lamb started crunching away happily at the blades of grass that grew there, while behind her the Wolf started licking his teeth.

But that was when the Wolf started to notice that his mouth wasn’t watering any more when he looked at the little Lamb and he realized that maybe, just maybe, he didn’t really want to eat her all that much anymore.

“What’s wrong?” asked the little Lamb. “Why aren’t you eating?”

“I’m not hungry anymore,” the Wolf lied. “Come on, let’s go back to the flock.”

That night, when the Wolf went back to the forest, his mentor was waiting there again. “So,” said the older wolf, “You’re probably thinking right now that your chase is close to over.”

“No,” said the Wolf. “I’ve given up the hunt for little Lambs.”

“Oh,” said the Older Wolf, “don’t tell me you’ve fallen for your prey. I thought you were better than that.”

“I found,” said the Wolf, “when it came to it, that I just couldn’t do it. She meant too much to me for me to settle on dinner. So I let her go.”

“Well, what will you do now, then?”

The Wolf thought for a moment until his growling stomach answered him. “I’ll go into the woods,” he said, “and hunt Rabbits. They’re easy enough to catch.”

And, without another word, the Wolf threw off his sheep’s clothing and dashed off into the forest.

That was when the Cleverest Nice Young Ram took off his Wolf’s Clothing and sighed: “Well, at least he’ll leave us alone now. That’s all I was after.” And he went home to win the heart of a little Lamb.

And they lived happily ever after.

It’s 5 AM and her mother and brother are both still asleep, not knowing that the girl has been up all night. The witching hour has past and this girl has done plenty of witching, as witching goes. Though she doesn’t quite understand herself how much. Until she starts screaming.

Her mother knows exactly what’s going on—or thinks she does. She doesn’t want to know it, she doesn’t want to accept that something like that could be happening to her own daughter, but there’s something about the screams that feels unnatural. Inhuman. Something terrifying.

Dios mio, she thinks, let it not be true! Please tell me my daughter has not been dealing with forces she does not understand. 

Dealing with forces that we don’t understand is the only way we can possibly learn new things. Her brother understands this. He’s only fourteen—two years younger than the girl screaming him into consciousness—but he’s already somewhat of a scientist. If he were better off economically, a gringo in a better part of town, at a better school where they believed in him, he would probably be at M.I.T. by now. But he lives in the ghetto and looks like a Mexican thug. There are forces that he “couldn’t possibly understand” like white supremacy and whatever nationalism tells people to send a natural born citizen “back” to his mother’s Guatemala or his father’s Bolivia. But not understanding these forces doesn’t mean that he doesn’t have to deal with them—hell, dealing with them is how he understands them better.

Little does he know that’s exactly why his sister has been dealing with me.

It’s not just the bed that she’s thrashing on. She’s not levitating—not yet. She isn’t able (yet) to crawl up the walls and on the ceiling, but she’s spasming, thrashing around. She fell off the bed and crashed into the desk. Then she fell to the floor, but she bounced and by the time her mother bursts into the room—Dios mio—she’s rolling around on the wall.

“What’s happening?” her mother asks, “What’s wrong, little angel girl?”

The brother appears in the doorway behind her before she can cover his eyes and push him out. She doesn’t want the boy seeing this, his own sister in such a state! Who knows what she could do? She’d be tearing off her nightgown soon enough!

But the boy has seen enough to know what’s happening (he thinks).

“She’s having a seizure, mamá. We need to call a hospital! An ambulance!”

“A hospital?” his mother scoffs. “What do they know of such things?” Mamá calls a priest. For some reason, she can’t get a hold of Padre Ramón at her own church, but she happens to know some people. Finally, after an hour (after she had secured her daughter by tying her down with sheets), she gets hold of Father Mosby from the Irish Church, and he believes her because he is a man of Faith and he tells her he will be there within half an hour.

“Half an hour, angelita! Don’t worry! This will be over soon!”

Half an hour. I’ve already been inside the girl for twice that—half this time again? I don’t know if I can bear it.

There’s supposed to be a vetting process for these things. We’re supposed to be matched.

A young girl requests the aid of an Angel of the Lady, she wants us to suffuse her. She wants us to build a temple on her Soul.

At least, that’s the theory. But that other God has convinced too many of them that Our Lady is the devil’s dam.

Too much of this girl’s Soul is soaked in concrete. I should have been prepared for this. We should have known her background, should have been briefed, and now the operation is bungled and this girl is paying the price: a Demon, an Angel cut off from her Mother-God, is too big for a Soul that doesn’t accept her. I am tearing her apart and there is nothing I can do to stop it.

“Where is the child?” the Priest at the door asks after his promised half hour is up.

By now, the power she’s been channeling from me is pouring out.

Things even her genius brother can’t explain are happening in this apartment. Flickering lights. Discoloration in the walls. Random Psychokinesis. Black, blood-like ooze spilling from the drains. His sister levitating as the horror transpiring on her Soul starts to break out on her face, her skin and even the structure of her bones.

I’m killing her. I want to tell her I’m sorry, but my screams come in a language she couldn’t possibly understand, which is why she’s killing me, too. Some ironic justice.

It will be over soon. The Priest will kill me, probably by summoning an Angel of his own to push me out, one that her Figments will accept to make them calm down. She will be free and my suffering will be over. I take comfort in that. I will have failed my mission and I will probably be unraveled completely, fragments of my being used by Celestials and Conceptuals to build new principles and Messengers for them.

But this poor girl, this poor “little angel” her mother keeps calling her, will know herself better.

“You have a rosary?” the Priest asks the mother. She hands it to him. “Good. And I will need water to bless. A bucket, if you have it. As much as possible. And lock the boy in his room. He should not be made to bear witness.”

The woman nods because she is a woman of Faith and does as she is told, over the objections of her son who is even now beginning to restructure his understanding of the world in light of new events. A true scientist. He will go far.

“You will knock and await my answer before entering,” is his last command to her before he closes the door and ends up alone in the room with the girl I’m inhabiting.

“Alone at last,” he tells me. But he says it in a language so ancient no ordinary Earthling could possibly know it, and I realize my mistake in trusting human priesthood.

I recognize him now.

“I don’t know why you lot even bother,” he scolds me. “No one wants you on this planet anymore. So you end up like this.” He casts a spell to calm the girl, but it’s one that keeps me trapped here. “Do you have any idea how long exorcisms have been known to take place here? How much this woman would sacrifice to keep the devil out of her child?” He smiles and it scares me more than lifetimes trapped in here. “Do you have any idea how few of the subjects survive?”

The girl’s blood runs cold through me.

He leans down and whispers into her ear: “We are going to have fun tonight, you and I…”

About eight years ago, I worked as a meat-cutter at a grocery store. That’s how I got this scar on my pinky.

When I first started working there, I trained with this guy, call him Fred, he was pretty relaxed, no-nonsense kinda guy.

One day, he brought up the concept of a cutting glove. It’s basically chain-mail, and if you’re wearing it, you can’t cut yourself while you’re cutting the meat. The way he put it, “some guys” liked safety, but he preferred control, he preferred to be able to “feel the meat” (*snort*). To have some connection to it.

I asked him could I please use a glove, and he said sure.

Well, then there was this other guy came in. I suppose maybe he was relief or something. Maybe Fred went on vacation—I forget. Let’s call him Billy. I’m changing the names here, to protect the innocent. And other folks, as well.

Billy had a different style. When he saw me wearing the glove, he chuckled. “Nobody actually wears those,” he told me, and then expounded on the virtues of going bare.

I took the glove off. This here? Scar on my pinkie? This is the result.

But that wasn’t the only problem with Billy. Billy didn’t exactly have the greatest work-ethic. Once, after Fred had been off a couple days, he came back, and it turned out Billy hadn’t switched out any of the old meat. See, you’re supposed to put the older meat up front, so that people will buy that before it expires. He hadn’t done that. He hadn’t rotated any of the meat, and now all kinds of flesh would not be eaten.

It’s a shame, really, I thought when I heard. It’s like all those farm animals died for nothing.

“If he pulls any of that shit again,” said Fred, “I’ll kill him!”

I thought that was a rather strong reaction, but didn’t actually take him seriously.

The next day, though, Billy didn’t show up for work. Or the day after that.

He was fired, of course, for truantcy, or whatever they call it when it’s work and not school.

But then he was reported missing by his girlfriend.

She was recently pregnant, so he could’ve just run off, that was definitely a Billy thing to do, but no one else had seen him, either. I don’t know how, but the police ended up figuring he disappeared under “mysterious circumstances”.

Maybe they’d heard about Fred’s threat from someone else before they called on me to testify.

Did I think he did it? No. He was Fred. Nobody named “Fred” of all things, could kill another body. And there wasn’t even any other body to find.

They brought in another relief cutter, since one guy was missing and the other guy, quote, “probably did it”, end-quote. He was all right, I guess. I forget his name. Call him Carl. He was the one who found a patch of what turned out to be human flesh in the freezer confirmed through DNA tests to belong to Billy.

That was when I started to think, well, maybe Fred did do it.

But then I met the Cow-God myself.

Crap. Now you’re gonna stop believing me, ‘cause I didn’t set this up.

Well, yeah. OK. That’s fair.

So this is what happened:

One day, completely by accident, I did the same thing that Billy had done. I was in a hurry, I didn’t properly rotate, then I forgot about it and a bunch of the meat went bad. But when I say it went “bad”. Well.

Let me tell you about meat gone bad.

When meat goes bad, you’re supposed to throw it out, and we got a dumpster out back. So I’m taking all this expired meat out back and thinking, LITERALLY, Carl’s gonna kill me. I mean, look what happened to the last guy.

But as I’m carrying the meat, something weird happens. The meat starts to move. I mean, it’s always gross if meat starts to move like that, I’m thinking, holy fuck, what is going on with this? It hasn’t been out THAT long—are there maggots festering? Is it infested with bees? Is it infected with boils that are gonna burst open and cover me in goo?

But these aren’t bubbles like you’d expect from that, these aren’t boils. The actual meat was moving.

I dropped it, obviously, on the floor. And on the floor, it kept moving. At first, it was just twitching and messing around, but then it started gliding, like it was magnetic with itself,

attracting other pieces of bad meat. The stuff I’d already brought to the dumpster CAME BACK ON ITS OWN. It was the scariest—Oh My God, you don’t even believe me, I don’t know why I’m being so—

Anyway, these pieces of rotting meat all came together and then rose up, bonding themselves into this enormous figure that, I shit you not, looked like a minotaur. Horns and all. And I’m going, where the fuck did those horns come from? ‘Cause, really, that was the most disturbing part of it, right?

And then it starts to speak. This was a bull’s face and it was speaking to me. I felt like I was in a cartoon. Written by Stephen damn King.

It told me “You have been found guilty by the Cow God.”

I froze. I mean, seriously, what are you supposed to say to that?

“I’m uh,” I swallowed. “I’m sorry?”

“How do you plead?”

Well, it had already found me guilty—maybe it didn’t quite know what “plead” meant.

“Hey, man,” I started, “This is just a job, I’ll quit if you want me to—“ To be perfectly honest, I wasn’t excited about this job, anyway. I mean, four years of college, and I’m doing this? Fuck this generation. But then I started to think—hey, wait a minute. This is a cow. Like an actual cow. And every hamburger I’ve ever eaten flashed before my eyes in a blaze of glory, in a haze of gory mulch, and I mean, I’m not an idiot, I know not all hamburgers are made from cows’ meat exclusively, but some of them are, and cows do die in the process, so I fell on my knees and wept and sobbed and held out my hands to beg the Cow God’s forgiveness.

“What are you, an idiot?” he said. “This is not about you eating cows.”

Wait—what?

“Do you think we don’t know what’s good for us? We want to be eaten. That is our purpose in life. Think about it—human beings have kept cattle for thousands of years, just like horses and pigs. How many cows do you think there are in the world? And as long as you’re eating us, there is no way we’ll go way of the Buffalo. You’re keeping us around. And we like that. That’s why we founded cow-heaven. It’s the place dead cows go when they’ve been eaten by humans. Because that’s our religion, see? That is our core belief—when a human eats you, you have served your purpose for the rest of the species.”

I had never heard anyone but another human being give a speech that long. If I hadn’t been so dumb-struck, I probably could have figured out the answer to my next question, which was some non-verbal expression of “But why are you attacking me?”

“We’re attacking you,” said the Cow God, “because all of this meat that has gone bad has come from the same cow, and now no part of her gets to be eaten. She can’t go to cow heaven now, and it’s your fault! How Do You Plead?”

Holy shit, thought my idiot brain, I was right, it was because all those cows died in vain!

“Hold on,” I said. “What if I made it up to you?”

“Our Religion is as valid and as arbitrarily strict as your human religions!” the Cow God insisted. “There is no possibility for atonement!”

“But wait—what if I…” The prospect sounded gross, but not as painful as being eaten—or whatever—by a giant cow. “You said someone, some person, had to eat her… What if I did?”

“You would do this victim the honor?”

“Yeah, sure, what if I took… Like, say, that piece—“ I pointed to a piece of what looked like top round right over the monster’s heart. It was a little bit discolored, but looked edible enough to save my life in a pinch.

“You must eat the entire piece,” said the God. “Cook it first, obviously, since that’s what you humans do. But under no circumstances are you to vomit it back up. She must be completely digested. She must become a part of you.”

“I promise,” I said. Because really, what else could I do?

“Well, all right, then,” said the Cow-God, and I could see him—or was it her?—start to disassemble.

“Wait!” I said, and it stopped. “Fred is standing trial for murdering Billy.”

“Yeah. So?”

“So, if you killed Billy, shouldn’t you like…”

“I didn’t kill Billy.”

“Wait—what?”

“No, that guy Fred? He’s a psycho. He totally did it.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah, fuck that guy.” And that’s when he disassembled.

So it occurs to me now—‘cause I’m a fucking moron—that if the Cow-God didn’t kill Billy, I was probably never in any real kind of danger. But that piece of top round I was still holding in my hand didn’t look that bad. I’d thrown away all the packages, but it couldn’t have been that far past its expiration date… And it only made me a little bit sick, not enough to really throw up. I might have had a fever. And there’s a chance I have mad cow, but that’s a whole other story.

The next day, I nicked myself with the knife again.

That other guy—what was I calling him? Chad? Carl! Whatever his name was, he looks at me, he goes “Dude, why’d you do that? Why don’t you wear a glove?”

I looked at him, somewhere between incredulous and sheepish. Like a cow caught eating grass where it shouldn’t, only dumber. “Because Billy made fun of me?” I offered.

“Billy made fun of you for following standard safety procedures?”

“And Fred said I probably didn’t need one.”

“Well, Fred for sure is an idiot, and Billy sounds like a dick. Wait here, I’ll get you a band-aid and some chain-mail for your hand.”

I liked that guy, but I still wasn’t gonna keep working there. Never work in a place where there’s a Cow-God made from rotting meat who could kill you if you fuck up, that’s what I always say.