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there on the grass beneath the canopy of swaying branches and the fluttering leaves above. He closed his eyes and did what came naturally. She responded to his motions, moaning all the while. He felt a great pressure building inside of him, the darkness behind his eyes sparkling as if with a million distant stars. Then those stars all went supernova simultaneously and he cried out as all thought, all memory was wiped clean beneath a blinding flash of pure ecstasy. It was some time before he could remember who he was, where he was, and who he was with.
    “Oh, Julia,” he said, smiling. “I missed you. I love you so much.”
    He opened his eyes.
    It wasn’t Julia beneath him. It was someone else. Some other woman. He knew her, although it took him a few moments to remember who she was. Her eyes were closed, her cheeks flushed, her breathing quick and shallow.
    “Dana?”
    She laughed. “Isn’t this… Isn’t this…” She laughed again. “The strangest thing, Bill?”
    Now it was her turn to open her eyes.
    “Bill?” She wasn’t laughing anymore. Now she was pressing her hands against his chest, pulling herself out from underneath him. “You’re not Bill!”
    Then they were both on their feet, staring at one another. Dana tried to hide her nakedness with her hands and arms. “Thomas?”
    That’s when the shame came over him.
    “Dana…”
    A sob escaped her and she turned and fled into the forest.
    “Dana!”
    She was quickly lost to sight and the trees seemed to swallow his voice. He thought about pursuing her but the amalgam of emotions swirling within him—the confusion, the hurt, the loss, the remnants of pleasure—left him immobilized, unable to decide on any course of action. He felt rooted to the spot where he stood even as the light faded from the sky and the air turned cold and the rustling of the leaves began to sound like hoarse whispering. There were words there, he was sure, words like “morsel” and “flesh” and “hunger” and still he didn’t move, not until the branches started to reach for him with terrible cracking and creaking noises, only then did he break free of his paralysis and dash off into the deepening darkness of the forest.
    On and on he ran, the branches reaching out toward him, clawing at him, flaying his skin like the gnarled and battered fingers of ravenous, ancient giants. Each time he managed to escape the grasp of those wooden, clutching fingers another strip of flesh was taken from him, leaving in its place another searing patch of agony. Fear and pain drove him onward until he thought he saw a thinning of the trees ahead in the near total darkness. The hope of escape quickened his step but also made him clumsy. His feet became tangled in something, a root perhaps, and he fell. And kept on falling as the ground opened up and swallowed him into an even deeper darkness that seemed to have no bottom and therefore no end.
    As he fell he screamed until his throat was sore, until he could scream no more. Further and further he fell, on and on until eventually there appeared a light beneath him, a dull red wash that slowly claimed the whole of the blackness below. With the crimson glow the air grew increasingly warm and there came a stench like that of sulfur and something even less pleasant. Then came the screaming, the wailing, the crying of an untold multitude, a dull sound at the edge of hearing which rose into a great blaring shriek that left him incapable of discerning his own thoughts. The red was everywhere, and the heat, and the terrible odor. Other colors appeared: orange and yellow and all the subtle hues in between. Fire, he knew. Lava. Great pools and rivers of it running between shores of coal and scorched earth. And there were people in those rivers, thrashing about and shrieking in agony. Above them hovered human-shaped beasts with long claws jutting from their hands and feet, horns sprouting from their bald heads, and wide, bat-like wings growing from