The first time. Wondrous terrible devouring but still alive. The four panels of mouth unspooling in breach and sough. All encompassing. Breathy and close. The wind rising with the glint of stars within. Oh that close, close friend, chained to me those many months. Untethered only a day, and now the Company fed me to the maw and kept feeding me. Told me to think of it as burrow, but no burrow plunged toward you. No burrow lay thick around and breathed. No burrow made of you in your bubble of air a morsel.

Implosion. Launched. Acceleration and pressure. Until nothing lay around me but darkness and fragments of time that slithered and knocked against me and with the rumble or growl the fresh green beatific scent of corpse. Was I dying to live? Was I released elsewhere as haunt or curling question where once had been flesh? I could hear as up above in the dark of throat a glimmer of deep sound, of sound that held me distant, that cocooned in sonorous discharge the friction of the travel. The hum of engines of flesh. The function of a creature that lived to transport.

O in the middle. Weightless. Thoughtless without guile. Without body. Without mind. The stars not wrapped around me, but something else. Something elemental. The worlds seen through scrim and skin. No space between me and … everything.

It was over in seconds or days or centuries. I was a fiery tail chasing a mind. I was a mind tumbling end over end until the halt.

Vertigo and bewildering color, too sharp for a fox’s eyes, and I came to rest on the verge of a vast plateau of wildflowers, their scent the pinprick of itch in some places and the solace of velvet in others. Over the edge to which I’d tumbled and dug in my back paws: a desolation of black ravines and riven places stuck through with machines like mausoleums.

Behind me: nothing. No old friend to devour me back to where I had been. No hint of what had delivered me here.

The shattered splinters of my bones reconstituted. The matter behind my skull bone floated, spun, reconstituted. My legs were my own again. My mind, some semblance.

Then, sudden, from eclipse: the sun. Earth, stung pleasant with the sweet of earthworm and opulent beetle. I dearly wished the joy of triangulation, the pounce based on a good ear’s geometry.

But what was I to do here, before hauled back, unwilling servant? Just be: here. All the dead told me that. All the other animals that had failed to survive this journey. Returned in seconds, rancid flayed broken smudges shoveled off to the side. Burned. Bagged. Fed back to other animals that wanted nothing of that meal.