There comes a moment in a young horse's life where everything makes sense.

I did all the right things. I kept in shape. I taped my ankles when I ran. I studied hard, and took courses in business while the rest of my high-school friends rolled in the grass and wrote bad poetry and smoked anything they could get their hands on. I worked nights during college and paid my own tuition and graduated without the crippling weight of student loans. Good for me, right? I listened to my parents and when I dated seriously, I kept to the herd families. Even when I was dallying, though - sowing my oats, so to speak - I didn't mingle outside of the hoofed species. No matter how slinky those vixens looked in their spandex shorts on the tennis courts, I wasn't like the rest of the campus, with my tongue lolling over my chin and my fingers white-knuckled where they hooked through the chain links. When the tigress in my Chem 101 class used to sit behind me and purr in my ear, or dig her claws into the back of my chair, or let her tail flick around my leg, I just ignored her. I didn't answer any of her email. As my parents were fond of repeating, it doesn't matter what fancy libertine speeches college kids make in the classroom - what happens behind closed doors when the hormones begin to flow is another matter entirely. Meat-eaters are meat-eaters, and you're either a breeding partner or you're meat. I suppose someday they'll figure out how to allow species to interbreed, but I'm no biologist. In the meantime, there were enough missing students each month - and enough glossy-coated, self-satisfied carnivores - that I didn't have any reason to doubt my parents. I kept to the plan. I graduated with Latin on my diploma.

A trip down to the islands for the summer was my parents' way of saying thanks for not destroying their savings, I guess. Or maybe they were telling me it was time to focus on more than a career. Three months of kayaking, kite-surfing, and beach volleyball created plenty of opportunity for meeting eligible females. The islands are pretty popular among the East Coast herd families anyway; a new harem of fillies arrived every week or so, and I guess I caught a few eyes. But I was still young, and while I didn't have anything against mares, I wasn't going to impose limits on myself just yet. There were just too many other shapes, too many other customs. Too many memories to make before I plunged into the business world and a family, before I found my parking spot in life. So when that big Jersey cow (and I mean a BIG Jersey - she had at least a meter on me, and plenty around her hips to swing when she walked) emerged from the waves and walked right across the sand toward me, I didn't have any qualms about staring. When she asked me for help with her sunscreen, I read the subtext in her eyes and told the fellas to find a replacement for their volleyball game, since I'd be busy the rest of the day.

And then it all happened so fast. One minute I was gleefully obeying her instructions to rub further and further up the back of her thighs, until I'd actually slipped my fingers beneath her bikini bottom to squeeze two handfuls of her ass; the next minute she'd flipped and I was thrusting hilt-deep into her, humping that waterbed of her belly as much as her sex, still swallowing the aftertaste of her hot, frothing milk as she wedged me between her breasts. And now...

Now time has stopped. I think she's pulling me to her for another kiss, but her mouth is open so wide.

I realize even before her tongue slips beneath my chin that she means to eat me. No, it's not just an intention; she's going to eat me, because in this post-coitus daze I'm as limp as a doll in her hands, but she has the energy of a filly. And that's when suddenly it all makes sense. Her humid breath is washing over my face, she's blacking out the sun, and a single thought is crystallizing in my mind: it doesn't matter. All my careful planning, my grindstone-scarred nose, my dogmatic devotion to my head instead of my heart or my loins - none of it matters now. I realize next that my head fits entirely within her mouth as her teeth and lips close behind my jaw. The strands of saliva dribbling between her palates have draped across my nose, and her tongue wriggles like an anxious anemone beneath my throat. The ridges of her hard palate press into my forehead and nostrils. She shifts her grip to beneath my arms since I'm not fighting, and I can hear and feel another thunderous breath rush in and out through her nostrils above me. Her jaw is like a vise - she could probably snap my neck with a toss of her head - but she's surprisingly gentle.

Gentle! Ha! She is a noisy, greedy beast as she sucks on my head, but she doesn't ever bite. Besides the immediate heart-clenching terror of claustrophobic suffocation, there's no pain at all. That's lucky for me, because while the whole thing probably takes a minute, to me it's a lifetime. Her mouth has flooded with saliva, so my long nose slips into the back of her throat when she begins gulping. It's really only half-gulping - just enough to keep the muscles in her throat squeezing around my cheeks and neck while she twists like a snake and forces her lips around my shoulders. Her tongue is pinned to my chest, but that doesn't prevent it from wrestling to flick against my nipples and slather me with the saliva dripping from between her teeth. I'm being deep-throated.

Once she's wriggled my shoulders through the tight portal of her jawbone, one of her hands brushes over my belly to find my erection. It's still there, still dripping from when it slipped free from her, and as soon as she squeezes I gush again - probably some instinctive last gasp by my testicles. She's lifted me into the air now, above her head so gravity can do the rest of the work. She rocks her head side to side to keep me from lodging between her teeth, but I'm slipping down inches at a time, as fast as her throat can squeeze and gulp. Her hand is a mirror of her esophagus, relentlessly milking out wave after wave of my seed while I'm squeezed down the long, rubbery tube to her gut. I kick when my hips slide through her lips, but it's involuntary - a spasm from the final orgasm her tongue wrenches from me.

After my thighs are in her throat, I slip quickly to plop into her rumen, I guess - I didn't pay a lot of attention in comparative anatomy. I gasp for the bit of air in her stomach, but it smells more like beer than acid. The walls of her gut cling to me and squeeze. When she shifts her weight to roll onto her side and lay down, I jiggle with the rest of her belly. I gasp again but there's nothing, no spare air. I can feel myself starting to fade. Even through inches of fat I can feel her fingers rubbing her belly, pushing divots into the same skin I'd caressed minutes earlier to trace the bulges of my shoulders and thighs. Her belly gurgles around me, and her gut squeezes again, like a thousand fingers gently kneading me in a patient effort to soften me up.

I choke on my own laugh at my final thought: that in a few hours my carefully-scripted future will be shit.

My laughter makes me jiggle, and her fingers probe through her belly fat again. The last thing I hear is her satisfied moan.