Alex convulsed violently, the cold shooting through his limbs again, as he once again felt his size halve. As the folds of creamy frosting rolled over him even heavier like a whirlpool of sticky cotton, he could feel himself becoming wrapped deeper, his body practically caving in on itself as he continued to shrink. He screamed again, although it was lost entirely to a thick blob of whipped topping flattening itself over his body.
When the freezing sensation finally subsided and Alex was able to lie flat for a moment, buried deeply in the fluffy globs of frosting, he whimpered weakly, wondering what the use was in trying to move. By now, the durable smears of frosting were not only heavy and gooey, they were nigh impenetrable at this point. Alex thrashed upward with all his might, making only the slightest of dents into the frosty topping. To Alex, it felt like punching into a wet moonbounce house, the balloon-like structure of each massive glob of frosting refusing to yield to the miniscule assaults from Alex’s pinhead-sized fists.
With repeated effort, his strained arms already well beyond spent, Alex managed to push his way through the glob laying directly on top of him and pull himself back toward the top. As he crawled up through a tunnel of creamy frosting, brushing past huge chunks of crunchy coconut shavings which by this point dwarfed him completely, Alex could see the light from the kitchen streaming in through a crack. If he could just reach the top…
Alex gasped as he felt the soft ground underneath his feet rumbling, almost bending to the side. The boy was jostled against another blob of frosting, but was bounced back again. He dug his fingers into the goop, trying desperately not to fall deeper into the cavern of cake frosting for fear of being hopelessly buried in the succulent pastry topping, and managed to keep his grasp as things returned to normal. However, just as soon as the shifting to one side ended, it began again, the sticky tunnel of frosting trembling around Alex and bending toward the opposite side. Nearly losing his grip once again, Alex clenched his fists around puffy, gooey strips of frosting and pulled himself up, his entire body caked so thoroughly in the sugary smear that he couldn’t even see his own hands as he clawed his way steadily up the tunnel of frosting toward the opening.
With a triumphant gasp, Alex burst through the tiny opening and into the light, flopping over as he climbed over the edge of the frosting and onto the lunar-esque rounded surface of the cake. Panting heavily, Alex blinked, his eyes readjusting to the brightness of the light, and felt his heart skip a few beats as everything came back into focus.
Michelle’s face stretched high above him, so impossible large he felt like he had his own face pressed directly against an IMAX screen that happened to be performing a close-up of his mother’s head. Despite everything Alex had seen to prove to the contrary, the face he saw didn’t even seem real. It was like looking at a building in the shape of Michelle’s head, and yet her features were so perfectly defined and life like, her breathing affecting each corner of her lips and eyes, nose and chin, that Alex knew that this was his mother. It just was hard to swallow. Her lips stretched on for what seemed a couple dozen stories, full and pink, the slightest indications of chapping cracks forming along the otherwise bulbous, curved surface. Laugh lines around the titanic woman’s eyes cracked like soft indentations into the living, breathing landscape of her face, her tremendous lips curling into a wide smile. Her head itself was like a planet, her skin made of intricate, peachy hexagons all slowly changing shape with each marginal move of her facial muscles. Her nose flared in a steady, paced rhythm, sending out a whirlwind of hot air with each simple exhalation, an unstoppable tornado of cold attractive power with each inhalation. Her teeth, like massive white boulders to Alex, seemed carved to perfection my ancient master craftsmen and glistened with the thick slime of her saliva.
Alex trembled.
As he looked side to side, forcing himself to remove his eyes from the attention-consuming features of this colossal and beautiful goddess that just happened to be his green-eyed, brown-haired mother, the fifteen-year-old began to put together the pieces. The bending and bowing of the frosting he had experienced had been the changing of pressure on the cake as Michelle carved herself out a slice of dessert from the chocolate mountain Alex found himself stranded on top of. And now, as the boy stared ahead, completely camouflaged with the cream-colored peak of the pastry mountain from smearing his body through so much of the pasty stuff during his escape, he realized something far worse.
Michelle had lifted her chosen piece out of the massive cake and was setting it down onto a plate. And Alex just happened to be right smack in the middle of that piece. The boy gulped hard, shaken hard as the slice was set down calmly onto the glass plate, unable to process what was happening, as he looked behind himself. The trail of chocolate crumbs from where the ground had literally been split by the mile-long utensil fell like an avalanche, raining downward onto the rest of the cake with great pounding thumps as the slice was dragged messily from the sugary mountain.
“MOM! MOM! MA-” shrieked Alex, coughing as thick globs of frosting clogged his throat, tugging to free his limbs from the sticky surface of his mother’s enormous dessert like a gnat fighting to free itself from flypaper. “MOM, IT’S ME, DOWN HERE! LOOK… DOWN… HERE!” he shouted desperately. “PLEEEEASE!”
Things didn’t seem to be going in the boy’s favor as he continued screaming. Alex watched, distraught, as his dear leviathan mother, completely unaware of his plight, smiled widely at the idea that her beloved son had taken the time to make her a special birthday treat. Then, slowly, with fingers stretched out like fleshy skyscrapers to Alex folded inward, gripping a fork like Poseidon’s trident, Michelle’s hulk of a slender hand descended on the cake eagerly, prongs of the fork glistening silver as they dove downward toward the vulnerable surface of Alex’s carefully prepared pastry.
Shutting his eyes tightly while still struggling fruitlessly against the globs of frosting binding him powerfully onto the top of the cake, Alex felt the soft ground around him bouncing downward for a moment as the towering spears of each prong of the fork easily punctured the relatively soft surface of the frosting and cake, digging deeper and twisting at the base until it was good and low into the ground, as if Michelle was driving her godlike weapon into the fragile ground of Alex’s very world. As the boy slowly opened his eyes again, he realized he had fit easily between two of the fork prongs, which stretched upward incredibly on either side of his head. He swallowed hard, clenching his teeth and fighting wildly against the steadily hardening frosting, and found it nearly impossible when combined with how exhausted he already was.
Alex felt the ground underneath him shifting as his mother’s goddess digits twisted the aircraft carrier-sized fork at a lower angle, scooping up mounds and mounds of delicious chocolately earth and rippling waves of thick frosting. Slowly, the prongs drove upward, lifting up a tectonic plate of chocolate cake, with a lone citizen along for the ride, the towering woman blissfully oblivious to what was going on a mere few inches away from her fingertips. The carnage she was inflicting with a simple flick of her wrist. A gentle lift of her forearm, raising the bite of moist chocolate cake clump closer to her chin. A quick lap of her tongue along her full lips as she sampled the intoxicating aroma of tangy coconut and sweet chocolate hanging in the air.
Alex looked on his mother’s tongue, sinewy and muscular, raked along her lips like a bright pink whale, twisting and turning as gallons upon gallons of broiling, goopy saliva dribbled between the rubbery taste buds like a flood flowing between fleshy molehills. Then, slowly, the lips parted, like plushy dams of bouncy peach skin, allowing a blast of warm breath to unfurl into the open like flame belched from the belly of a dragon, the deep and imposing cavern of Michelle’s mouth, painted with saliva, thick stalactites of dribbling phlegm and spit hanging around the deathly powerful chompers, stretching before Alex like the dark inner circle of hell.
The blood rushed to Alex’s head along with the adrenaline as his heart rate kicked into high gear. It was now or never. With the last iota of energy he had left in his arms, Alex roared and broke free of his bonds, staggering wearily to his feet, so badly beaten and tired he felt like he had just fought a war and run a marathon in the same day. Breathing so heavily he could barely get the words out, Alex clutched his stomach to prevent himself from puking and sighed before speaking.
“MOOOOOOOOOOM!” he screamed at the top of his lungs. “I’M DOWN HERE! IT’S ME, ALEX, YOUR SON!” He paused for a moment, hacking again and trying unsuccessfully to fully catch his breath. “DON’T TAKE A BITE! PLEASE! DON’T… DON’T EAT ME!”
Almost as soon as the words had left Alex’s mouth, he felt himself plunging forward into the black depths of his mother’s mouth like he was on a roller coaster shooting down the final drop and into the inner sanctum of the structure. He screamed, feeling the clump of thick cake smashing against the surface of his mother’s flattened tongue, the frosting beginning to melt in the intense heat. Instantly, Alex began to sweat from the unbearably hot temperature of Michelle’s oven-like mouth. A second later, a tidal wave of gummy saliva rolled over the entire bite of cake, washing everything in a thick layer of goopy spit and practically liquefying the cake on contact. Alex felt himself washed away with the tide of his mother’s spit, bouncing between broken cake crumbs and clumps of melting frosting, as the last crack of light sprayed into the mouth cave before Michelle’s lips closed satisfyingly.
Michelle sighed happily, savoring the flavor of the perfectly prepared cake on her tongue, allowing the flecks of frosting to flow over her teeth and against her cheeks, the chunky coconut shavings becoming pleasantly stuck in between her teeth.
“Oh, that son of mine…” thought Michelle to herself joyfully as she mulled over the first euphoric bite of her favorite dessert in her mouth. “He’s so, so special. I just wish he was here so I could tell him.” Nodding to herself, Michelle bit down on the soggy ball of chocolate cake sitting on the tip of her tongue that hadn’t yet been broken up by the saliva and moaned with pleasure at the taste.
The clashing of the massive ivory statues forming Alex’s mother’s teeth sent a stormy ripple through the pitch blackness, the crashing sea of broiling sputum that had the Lilliputian lad practically lost amongst the rolling waves of drool spinning wildly. Alex was mashed through several soppy cake crumbs that then stuck to his body, weighing him down and making it harder to find anything. Suddenly, Michelle’s tongue rose up underneath all of it. Alex felt his feet make contact with the rounded hills of his mother’s taste buds for an instant before the entire vast, writhing platform of the tongue was rolling backward, pushing the bite back toward the awaiting entrance to Michelle’s esophagus.
Alex stopped thrashing, and instead let himself lie still as the tremendous monster of a tongue flicked his flea-sized body back amongst the impossible mess of soupy, gooey dessert remnants and motherly froth. He just closed his eyes, slowed his breathing, and let himself float peacefully on top of the sticky waves. He sighed quietly.
Somehow, it wasn’t as bad as Alex had always imagined “it.” The feeling. The feeling that his life was about to come to an end at any instant. He had always imagined having great fear, apprehension, and pain leading up to a climax of torment. He felt none of that now. His weary body was finally at rest in a warm, soft environment, and most importantly, one of the most important women in his life was here. Even though she didn’t know the part she was playing in it, and even though the very notion of the current reality crossing Michelle’s mind would undoubtedly drive her insane with sorrow, Alex’s mom was here for him as he passed from the land of the living into whatever awaited in the great beyond. And somehow, Alex wasn’t worried about this either. He was at complete peace. He had no anger at the universe for whatever bizarre circumstances had caused him to be in this position so arbitrarily on today of all days. More importantly, he noted to himself that he didn’t blame his mother for indirectly killing her son. Now, he didn’t have to die of some disease, or in a painful accident, or slowly in a nursing home. He was about to die painlessly in the gargantuan stomach of someone he loved and who loved him back, and more importantly, it was all in the name of making his mother happy.
“Happy Birthday, Mom. I love you...” gurgled Alex, hardly able to speak anymore as he disappeared easily and insignificantly down the slide of his loving mother's esophagus amidst a river of sopping chocolate cake morsels.