The Varieties of Religious Experience

Some monstrous thing struggles to tear itself out of you. A brutal labor, of which the pangs alone almost kill you, but not soon enough to keep you from experiencing the explosive birth. As the beast bursts free, it eviscerates you in a supernova of muscle and sinew, tenderizing you into choice meat for its first meal, a nurturing sacrifice of the creator to its creature, a nightmare unfolding lovingly before the ghostly presence of a dead god fading...

Fading away, melting, and melding into your shadow. You are the monstrous thing destined, damned, and doomed to take the dead god's place—the dead god who once called itself human.

Your myriad eyes watch your insectoid limbs shovel desiccated flesh into chattering mandibles that churn like turbines, grinding the squelching mass down into the darkness of your gullet, filling you with the glorious Eucharist of your former self. The old life is an ecstatic vision, an image of light—your creation story.

As you suckle on the flesh of your womb, images accelerate through your consciousness, all the knowledge of what came before, assimilated through gore. This is my body, you think. This is my blood. A reference to some pervasive belief from the culture you left behind and which you will soon overcome. A golden chalice passes from hand to hand. Faintly, you hear chanting, you recall the smell of incense, but like the smoke that bears the scent, the memory scatters and disperses into the thin air of your newly developing mind.

You thought you were so smart. Little did you know the monstrous thing you would become. No inkling at all did the human who played God have of the terrible fate that hid within its DNA, waiting to be unlocked by its own biochemical tinkering.

Your consciousness is accelerating so fast that all these memories—these thoughts and feelings of a busted cocoon—are seared into nothing, like the tortured remains in your stomach as your metabolism accelerates your new body rapidly on to its death, which will only be days away.

You better get moving. You can sense other hosts just beyond this dimly lit room. Heated bodies will become living incubators. You are the generatrix androgyne, and you have eggs to lay.

Just before your buzzing body smashes through the window, wings rapidly beating, flying off into a sweltering summer night, the last memory of the old life flits across your mind, a recollection of a cherished book you read as a child.

Something about a Mr. Hyde.