The priest held a wafer out to me: “The body of Christ.”

I saw myself as a composite creature of the Middle Ages. My mouth was open like a young bird’s, my tongue flat as a cow’s, and my teeth as buck as a rabbit’s. As the wafer laid on my tongue, I tried not to think that Christ’s entire body was in my mouth, compressed to a bite-size portion for my own salvation.

With my tongue, I tried moving Him from left to right but He stuck to the roof of my mouth and though I knew it was bad manners, I had to use a finger to get Him down. However I attempted to encourage myself, I could not bring myself to chew Him. My saliva rose and eventually softened Him, until He was like a tiny mouthful of dough, which I swallowed. If I am completely honest, I must admit that I was glad to be rid of Him; He was far from the most delectable thing I’d been forced to eat. I concentrated on my body to see if I felt a difference now that He was in me, becoming an integral part of me. I know this will sound strange, but it felt as if the dough began to rise, to expand until He filled me, stretched me out. My skin tingled everywhere and I was filled with a sensation of well-being I had never known before. Organ music and voices of all ages mixed. Christ was in me. I could feel Him, it was like love growing. It was rapture.

A bit of stray Eucharist found itself trapped within the crevice of my molar. With my tongue, I nudged it out, wondering if it weren’t by chance the finger or some other small leftover from Our Saviour, when an amazing thing happened. Where for so many years the idea of eating flesh had accumulated into a mountain of revulsion, this last thought suddenly pushed my revulsion to such an extreme that it was like toiling up one side of the mountain before tumbling down the other side. I was unprepared. I had only seen the first half of the mountain I thought went eternally up.

Something new was opening up in me, a strange new appetite from somewhere below, a pleasant tug which I wished to satisfy, and then again, did not.

I squeezed my knees together like Jesus did on the cross. I wanted to hold my arms out wide open and hug anyone or anything, even a pillar. The Holy Spirit, I thought, was flooding me with love, a love so great I could have eaten any of my neighbours. My heart thumped wildly at this thought, as I stared at the strong veined hand of a man in the pew in front of me. In my mind, I nibbled at the webbed skin between his strong fingers. My body tensed with an ever growing hunger.

A woman was holding a baby so chunky that its arm was dimpled where there should have been an elbow. Each time the baby began to cry, the woman simulated eating it. I wanted to groan, scream, tell everyone I loved them, and would gladly eat them. I imagined the fattest women in the church, Belinda Moors, naked on all fours as her doughy breasts dragged on the floor. I imagined kneading them with my hands and face, tugging at them with my teeth.