THE THREE LIVES OF CHRISTINA THE ASTONISHING (#5)

As Told by the Holy Woman in Her Own Words
A Hundred or So Years after the End of the World

How I was caught by the authorities and ran away and fed myself from my own breasts

When I walked out of our cabin the next day, the merciless rays of our earth’s bright sun pierced my eyes like knives. This may seem like a strange reaction for someone who had dwelt in a world of endless Light, but I had it just the same.
I ducked into the barn for shelter. Shaggy heads turned toward me in the dim light. A mass of strange thoughts, cow thoughts, intruded on my consciousness. Immersed in the smell of wet hay and dung, I felt their strange skeletal structure from the inside—four legs! hooves! horns! tails!—as if it were my own. The sensation was so strange I fled the barn for the cool dark pine woods surrounding our cabin and leaped up easily to the branch of a Douglas fir thirty feet over my head.
From this higher vantage point—that was the literal sort of way I thought then—I tried to absorb all that had happened to me. This was hard to do because I was still so unformed in my feelings and my spirit. It was as if someone had tried pouring an ocean into a canning jar and then screwed the lid on tight. I perched there in deep reflection until midday, when I heard a man’s voice calling me.

“Christina!”

I peered down through the clumps of grey-green needles. A crowd of people had gathered outside the cabin. It was all the neighbors who had run away after I sat up on the dining room table and more besides. Off to one side a squadron of the duke of Sequoia’s militia stood in formation. Matilda pointed to my tree and everyone looked up. The guards, led by a tall man in a faded mustard yellow parka, marched over.

“Come on down, Christina,” the man in the parka said.
“Why?”
“I want to talk with you.”

Thinking this would give me a chance to tell him about the world of Light and Love, I leaped off the branch and lit down a few feet away from him.
(to be continued tomorrow)