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I met God once. He looked like Ahab and rode a great white whale through the sky. He wound up his left arm, thickly corded with muscle, and threw a harpoon into my belly. Despite its size, when it hit me, I did not fall back. There was no noise as it flew through the air. The tearing was minimal, surgical even. There was blood.

The wound bled for days; red, with flecks of some shimmering golden-white material. As I bled from my stomach, I cried from my eyes and my soul. God laughed and floated away into the sky. The Kingdom of Heaven was revealed to me, briefly. I saw the wings of His seraphim and the beaming face of His son. The various books of His worshippers spilled forth. They left me to perish; to decompose. As the Gates of Heaven shut, they began to laugh. Their laughter was beautiful and rude.

My Dad found my crumbled body and had me cremated. He spread my ashes among fertilizer and planted a small tree in the back yard. The tree grew for 24 years. I grew for at least 20 of those years. I was reborn into a world where my whole family, everyone I had ever known, was dead. I wanted to cry for them, but tears would not come. In lieu of this, I tried to scream, but had no voice. I settled on spending great stretches of time rustling my leaves and creaking my wood with rage unbecoming of a tree. I ate the sun and drank water. I grew stronger still. Ate a few animals in the outrageous hope that in that way I might transform back into something dead one day; a dead boy, perhaps. Some birds tried perching on me and I let them. Animals saw this and tried to make me their home but I told them I wasn't a slut, that I was waiting for the right critter to make his home inside me and start a family. I was angry, so I uprooted myself and walked away.

My neighborhood was bigger than before. The houses were closer together and the air smelled somehow fresher. People walked the streets at night in droves. It had become a village. My house looked the same. Cars looked the same. There were more bikes. I looked into the window of my house and saw a family that did not resemble my own. They had a lot of food at their dinner table, and the table was freshly set. They were just sitting down to eat. In a fit of mischief, I took a huge shit on their doorstep. The shit was a crude bundle of leaves, kindling, squirrel bones, sap, pollen, and water.

I left and walked south among the forest and noticed voices. I could hear other plants speak in voices I recognized from my previous life. Sadly I did not hear my friends. The walk was easy and good. Their souls were generous; I was offered many friendships as I walked. I got to the edge of town and saw that it had become a city. I pulled a Traveling Squirrel from my core and sent him on reconnaissance. I ruminated on my situation. A turtle came to me and spit creek water into my roots. Other turtles appeared. There were never this many turtles in town when I was a man. They surrounded me, emptying liquid into my roots. I drank it in: reflexively at first, then eagerly. After my drink there was burning, then blackness, then nothing, then less than nothing. I came to feeling a fundamental difference inside of me. The bark flaked and burned off, revealing steaming-hot brown skin underneath. There was frost on the trees around me, but I was not cold.