Jo was never someone I paid an awful lot of thought to. We were co-workers, and that was that; no prior friendship, no previous relationship or attachment of any kind, not even someone I was connected to on social media. We both came into work, did our jobs, engaged in casual and friendly small talk, and went home. She never made any attempt to make it more than that, and neither did I, so this wasn't a bad thing. For all accounts, anyone would be forgiven for thinking that the relationship would stay that way until our lives parted ways once more.
It was as if it had never happened. I woke up, in my own bed, sometime around the middle of the afternoon that Tuesday, and even I had doubts about what had happened. All the memories of my plight and my struggle against the titaness and her torturous mouth were there, down to the most visceral details, but something in me told me it was merely a lucid dream, a manifestation conjured up by my overactive teenage mind based on my strange fantasies. It seemed almost too detailed, too etched into my mind to be a dream; yet, at the same time, it had this hazy quality about it, combined with the sheer logical impossibility of what had happened, that made it too absolutely crazy to be reality. As I sat there, pillows propped up behind me and duvet draped over my lower body, I had to sit and wonder, pondering this question that would plague me for days afterward.
Life continued as normal. If I had actually been through that crazy escapade, my body, now definitely back at its normal stature of six feet, seemed no worse the wear for it; I felt about as well as I normally did on a day-to-day basis. The people around me seemed to take no notice of any absence on the Monday; not even my own parents seemed to have any worry or wonder as to where I was, commenting that they rarely saw me these days anyway. As the days wore on and life continued with its typical mundane fashion, my thoughts slowly faded from wonder to myth, the seemingly legendary dream of my battle against Jo's mouth and digestive system, that was so lucid it almost seemed real.
Seemingly to put the icing on the cake, not even Jo herself acted any differently upon my next shift at work. Everything occurred as normal, and our work relationship seemed as trivial and ordinary as it always had been. We worked, exchanged small talk sometimes, and otherwise got on with our professional relationship; even if, thanks to the recent memory of my lucid dream my fantasies were even more hard to keep under wraps. I simply told myself I would address them that night; if I was lucky, perhaps I could experience another dream quite as lucid as the one from the previous week.
After what seemed like an age, I saw the clock tick over to four in the afternoon and breathe a sigh of relief. My shift was over, and finally I could bugger off home and not have to worry about being in such close proximity to my co-worker with such amplified feelings of fantasy as I was experiencing. Like usual, I sat down and wrote out my time working, before grabbing my jacket from the cloakroom and heading for the door.
"Wait!"
My hand, pushing at the wooden door to go back into the outside world again, fell down to my side, letting the door gently swing back on its hinges to rest closed. The voice calling me from the back of the café was unmistakably Jo's, and my heart seemed to skip a beat in sudden wonder and fear. Suddenly my mind was racing, wondering if perhaps it was real all along, that she was about to explain everything to me, perhaps even shrink me down again to start the whole wild ride anew. Closing my eyes and trying to breathe slowly, I turned around and looked at the girl who had been at the back of my mind for the past week.
"Yes?"
"Don't forget this." She walked towards me and pressed a brown envelope into my hand, with my name in black typeface on a sticker in the centre. I knew the sort; we received them every few months as proof we'd been paid. It was most likely just more pieces of paper documenting the pittance I had earned in the last few months.
Trust my mind to over-think everything.
I said my goodbyes and went out of the door, breathing in the warm air. Spring had now fully sprung, and I had to smile at the blue sky, the lush green that adorned all the trees again, the bustle of activity on the street as I walked back through the town to the suburbs where I lived. There was no use dwelling on dreams from weeks past; much as I wanted them to be real, much as I desired, I had to concede that everything from my parents to my friends to Jo herself were giving signs that my lucid dream really was just that; a dream, nothing more. There was so much more to focus on in the present, and dwelling on the past wouldn't help. Pushing the thought to the back of my mind, I continued to walk out of town, enjoying the scenery and the strangely beautiful weather.
Yet, despite absolutely everything- the evidence, my own reason, even the seeming obliviousness of the fixation herself, the thought still lingered, gnawed at me from the very crevice of my conscience.
I was 99% sure it hadn't happened. But I couldn't shake that 1%.
Something about it seemed too real, too detailed and gruesome and fantastically vivid to just pass it off as lucidity in slumber. As I lay in bed that night, I almost felt like I could smell Jo's breath as I thought about it, feel the swamp-like environment of her mouth and the rough yet slimy surface of her tongue. The picture of her maw in my mind as I lay there in bed again that night was just too realistically vivid for me to pass off; I had, to my knowledge, never seen Jo's mouth fully in my time working with her, and yet I had a clear as crystal picture of it in my mind's eye. It just didn't add up. Something, anything had to give me some clue as to what happened.
And then I remembered. The envelope.
In my haste to get on and do other things that afternoon, I had not opened the brown paper envelope, assuming it was indeed just paycheck documents and the like. But now... now I wasn't so sure. Even if I was again overthinking, as I so often did, I couldn't be dismissive of the idea, fantastical as it seemed, that the envelope was the key to figuring out the mystery. Nothing was impossible; one could not be 100% sure about anything in the world, aside from their own existence. At least, that's what I always told myself.
Tentatively, as if reaching for a newborn babe, I grasped the envelope from my desk and took it in both my hands. Unsealing it slowly, I felt my heart racing, and as I completely undid the seal I screwed my eyes shut and upended the contents of the envelope onto my lap.
When I opened my eyes again, the sight that met me made all my doubt disappear, and suddenly the events of that fateful day a week ago rushed back to me as if they had happened mere seconds ago, real as the brown paper I still clutched in my hands.
Scattered across my duvet were several photos, medium-sized rectangular images of which there were about a dozen. All the photos depicted largely the same thing; a large, filthy-looking maw, adorned with grimy yellow teeth and ringed by thin, red lips that were unmistakeably Jo's. In every photo, this same mouth was captured in image with the same miniscule, bedraggled and thoroughly slimy-looking person, which I was quick to recognise in my sudden photo-initiated clarity as myself. The photos were numerous, and my eyes only widened further as I looked at each in turn; Jo dangling me above her open mouth, my tiny form perched on the tip of her tongue, my tiny form laid out and looking completely bedraggled on the surface of her tongue, and another like it with bits of masticated cake covering her mouth in brown slime. Each moment was frozen in time, captured in scarily graphic high definition, these snapshots of the insane, terrifying and yet wondrous adventure trapped within Jo's maw. The last photo sealed any doubt away permanently; the infamous selfie, taken that morning by Jo herself, posing with her jaws agape while I was sprawled on my belly on the grimy surface of her tongue, trying to recover after my first five minutes in that stinking, sweltering trap. It was then that I noticed I was visibly shaking; my heart was going at machine gun pace, and my breathing had quickened as if I had been running. Slowly and shakily putting the final photo down, I tried to calm myself, overcome the fact that dear God, I had actually been shrunken down to the size of an ant, been toyed with and actually eaten by the behemoth posing in the photo I had just seen, and lived to tell the tale.
In all my scattered and chaotic thoughts, the cynical part of me suggested that by God, would it make a good story.
It was only then that out of the corner of my eye I happened to see the writing on the back of the last photo. In my attempts to calm myself down I had completely missed it, and slowly I picked up the postcard again to get a better look at the blocky text written on the back.
"YES, IT DID HAPPEN. AND WE'RE GONNA DO IT AGAIN. YOU HAVE ONE WEEK TO GET READY. SEE YOU SOON..."