Sandra awoke to a cosmically induced sense of wonder and horror. Her feet rested on the barn floor and she found herself ensconced in darkness. Or at least it looked like darkness. But she saw stars too, like she’d been smacked on the head and left in the barn to rot.

Reaching up to the back of her head she felt for blood or a lump or a bruise, suspecting the worst of Moose. There was none.

Then it all came back. The rush through the infinite void. The gaze of starlight. The impeccable maw of absolute zero clamping down on her throat as she forced herself to breath. She did breath. She inhaled the gasses of alien exoplanets. Saw the flickering of distant quasars and swam on the edge of an event horizon.

Then she forgot again. Her ears rung with a peculiar whine and roar and thumping bass. Thick vibrations squealed in her ear while her bones rattled with a deep, excruciatingly ecstatic bass rhythm. It was calling to her and it was outside the barn now. Moose was outside the barn.

She managed to move her legs in the pitch-black barn, the starlight dissipated within her. Each step was less familiar than the last and each time she moved her muscles the less she knew herself. Something had awoken, something was bidding her move.

Sandra thought back to her backyard. To the tent her parents set up to look at the moon and stars. In the beginning they cuddled with her and giggled as they pointed out constellations and anomalies and shooting stars. Then, as Sandra became obsessed with the stars, they became worried. They tore down her tent and took her telescope. They turned off the internet and ripped her books away from her. She would scream and cry and wail.

But then at night the terrors would come. And she’d scream and throw her covers off, shouting about the shadows creeping into her ears. Her parents thought her obsession raged into her dreams. Sandra thought her obsession would cure them.

And now, here she was. She’d bathed in starlight and nothing could be clearer. Moose held her secrets and she would have them.

As she left the barn she heard the static of a dead radio join the chorus of the cosmos still roaring in her ears. She saw the creature called Moose perched on the hood of a black pick-up truck. “They never heard ya,” she heard Moose say. Then he let his black ichor licked claws extend, his face still wavering between the rough rural face Sandra associated with all Vermont old men and that melting, shifting morass of star skin. It was like he wore a skin of pitch over the crude stickman drawing of a child.

The guy in the truck, wearing a Sheriff’s vest and cop accoutrements was ripped through the windshield as easily as a man might pull a weed from a garden. His screech was lost on Sandra who was still listening to the echo of the stars.

Moose, or the creature that was Moose,  slammed the Sheriff’s limp body on the ground. Sandra felt the body thump and then quickened her pace, the star monster had yet to see her.

As she stalked closer the wailing of the cosmos grew in her ears like the roar of the ocean in a seashell. Her stomach began to churn with hunger and she wondered how long it had been since she ate. She had to spit excess saliva from her mouth and calm her twitching fingers. Her stomach ached so bad. It ached so bad that she wondered if she had swallowed a bit of the stars.

Now, as she was standing behind the star monster, she watched him pummel the body. She watched the pulp and the gore fly into the night sky. When the star monster finally turned to her he said, “Two, must be two. One to consume, one to subsume. Always two for me, maybe different for you.”

Sandra smiled to Moose and opened her mouth to speak but she was interrupted, “Sandra? Get away from him!” She snapped her head to the sound of the voice. Samson stood at the foot of driveway with a flashlight in his left hand and a Glock in the other. “Sandra if you move I can shoot him.”

Moose growled, “Now four. Am sorry. Two to consume, two to subsume.” And he turned to her and watched curiously as she waved Samson away.

“No, Moose,” She said, her voice confident and hungry, “I’m sorry.” Moose tilted his head and she thought she saw those obsidian gems leak spackles of star. Before he could react, before she even knew what she was doing, she gave in to her hunger. Her first bite took him in the shoulder and she tasted burnt toast. Her second ripped into his neck and she tore like a hyena over a tough piece of meat. She tasted nails and a nine-volt battery. Her third bite settled on his nose as he fell to the ground and she swallowed that too. It tasted like homemade French Toast covered in Vermont Maple Syrup.

Sandra wiped the blood of the universe from her chin, “All I need is you,” and she leaned over to finish her first meal.