Are you an ant, an oarfish, or a mountain lion?

If you choose to be an ant, read paragraph 12. If an oarfish, read 7. If a mountain lion, 2.

1. THE END.
   

2. Crouch in the brush. Watch a deer approach your hiding place—watch the way it blinks, pauses, blinks, grazes. Be very quiet and very still. Watch it step within range, and then leap to paragraph 9. 
   

3. Drift to the surface. After days or weeks at the mercy of the currents, wash up on a beach in Malaysia or Morocco or New York, dead or close to it. Let a dozen strong men pose together for pictures, holding you at chest height. If you still have the strength to struggle, don’t—let them count off, lift, and hold you up, all together, for a few straining moments. Become food for myth, or at least for somebody’s Instagram page. And—well, off you go to paragraph 1. 
   

4. Step out of the palms onto sand, and notice that the sea is a flame again today. Gentle coal-orange waves lick the beach. Below the high tide mark, sand melts into an impure liquid glass. How can you drink up the sea when the sea is made of fire? Tomorrow—maybe tomorrow you will drink up the sea. Have you tried to climb the highest mountain and eat the snow at its peak lately? If so, head to paragraph 11. If not, turn inland and make your way to 14. 
   

5. Keep swimming, up and up. Swim up past the water’s surface and into the still, salty night air. If you’d like to head over to the nearest landmass and live as an ant, read paragraph 2. If you’d rather keep swimming upward, 10.
   

6. You’ve clearly left the mold—aren’t you special. Go to paragraph 8 or 15.
   

7. Are you hungry? If so, read paragraph 13. If not, wait a while. Glide slowly through the deep, watch for distant bioluminescence. You’ll get hungry eventually, and then you’ll read paragraph 13. 
   

8. Do you want to be something other than an ant, an oarfish, or a mountain lion? If not, why are you reading this paragraph? Go to 6 or 15. 
   

9. Eat the weak. Afterward, you have a full stomach, and a long hunt has ended in success—but you’re still hungry, and a little thirsty. If you’d like to drink up the sea, trek to paragraph 4. If you’d rather climb the highest mountain and eat the snow at its peak, 14. And if you’d like to actually be the animal you chose—well, tough. 
   

10. Swim up until the salt smell fades. Swim up through the layers of a towering cumulonimbus cloud. Swim up until the sun illuminates your chrome body for the first time. Swim up until you see the curvature of the earth. Keep swimming, and become food for the stars. Read paragraph 1 (or don’t—by now, you know more about all this than I do). 
    

11. Travel to the sunlit stream at the center of the oldest hemlock grove; travel to the cool spring surrounded by green life among the dunes; travel to the permafrost at the edge of a frozen sea. Everywhere, pick green paper, roots and all. Once you have as much as you can carry, return home, rinse each sheet, make a salad, and shovel it down. Find that you’re still hungry. If you’re eating with anyone, end the conversation as soon as you can without being too rude. Slink over to paragraph 2.
    

12. Work with your brothers and sisters to carry the carcass of something that could’ve eaten you all. Eat it. Build mountains in the dirt. Make them complex, make their insides beautiful yet practical. Eat and work and eat and work and work and work and eat. Sooner or later, read paragraph 1. 
    

13. Orient yourself vertically, if you haven’t already, and swim slowly away from the sea floor. Eyes straight up, and no need to move your great smooth streamer of a body—let your dorsal fin’s undulations carry you. Spot your prey, silhouetted against the sun’s distant light, and eat. Do you suddenly feel very sick? If so, swim up to paragraph 3. If you’re feeling okay, and you’d like to return to the depths, paragraph 7. If you want to do something you’ll never understand, 5. 
    

14. Climb down into the valley where the nights are twenty hours long. In the village at its lowest point, find a small house on the outskirts with its door cracked. Nudge the wood; hear it creak as it swings open. Step through the doorway and onto the mountaintop. Stand tall on bare stone, and realize that the snow melted during your journey. Have you tried to drink the sea lately? If so, make the long, long journey to paragraph 11. If not, make the even longer journey to the coastline and 4. 
    

15. Aliens abduct you while you’re out mowing the lawn. Read paragraph 1. Before you do, I want you to know that each alien can read three things at the same time, one with each eye. They’re reading paragraphs 9, 10, and (almost certainly) 1.

Isaac Fox reads, writes, plays clarinet and guitar, and spends as much time as he can outside. His work has previously appeared in Bending Genres, Tiny Molecules, and 50-Word Stories, among other publications. You can find him on Twitter at @isaac_k_fox.