Since Colleen’s mysterious absence as a teacher, Frances Woodfield had explained to the school, that Colleen Balfour would not be returning due to personal private developments in her life. They had briefly engaged a substitute science teacher, who had filled in during Colleen’s earlier sabbattical. However, the teaching position needed to be filled in a more permanent way at the start of the third term. So the school turned to someone with tried and true staying power: Colleen’s longest serving predecessor Sandra Corlani.

She was now 57, and had begun teaching at the school when she was 21, after graduating from a teacher’s course. At 41, she had gotten married, and at 46, she had had a baby daughter, only to become a widow in the same month, and gone into semi-retirement to raise her daughter at home, while spending her available time on perfecting something she had been working on all her life: time travel.

She was not aware of the Ring of Reversal, and would not have considered it a form of viable time travel anyway, as it was used more for reversing the flow of time, thereby resetting most people’s memories, rather than actually travelling into the past with one’s memories of the intervening years retained in the mind.

She had explored every possibility that came into her mind, and had developed a number of theories and methods which may or may not work reliably.

Now, as she returned to the science teaching position, reverting to her maiden name, she wanted to pass on the knowledge to her students and let them be free to make their own experiments.

She had passed on each of her techniques as she’d acquired them in the past, to trustworthy students back then, in the days of teaching from age 25-46, but now wished to present the entire course of options to a future generation of potential time students.

One Friday she asked a number of students she had selected from each of her classes to come to an information seminar in the science classroom after school. When they were all assembled, she began by saying, “I’d like to talk about a subject which would not be recognised in the school curriculum, and nor would I want it to be: time travel. I have been working on the means to bridge the fourth dimension for many many years, and would like to make my findings available to any students from any of my classes who are interested. I am prepared to offer a special after school voluntary lesson each week, for anyone interested, on the understanding that it would only be known to the teaching staff as a remedial lesson. I would not wish it to be disclosed to the school staff that I was teaching additional material not found in the curriculum. So anyone who is interesed can come to the first session next Friday afternoon at 3pm and stay for as many lessons as they wish.”

Every student selected had showed high aptitude and each of them was interested in the subject. They suddenly found themselves grouped together with their ages ranging from 11 to 18 in the same after school class. By the end of a term of this, they would all have gained knowledge of a number of potentially successful methods of time travel. Some were ready to experiment with it less than halfway through the term.

Dillon was a twelve year old student who had always had a crush on Miss Balfour in the first term of that year, when she had taught at the school for the last time before leaving to become a giantess. Dillon didn’t know why she had left the school, only that she had. The one useful thing that he had observed during lunch hours was her friendship with Miss Woodfield, who was still at the school now. Dillon told her that he missed Miss Balfour and the two became friends and talked about the former science teacher many times. Miss Woodfield shared everything she’d learned about Colleen’s early life in the course of their friendship, and briefly entertained the idea of leading him off to Colleen’s giant house as a surprise meal. However, it seemed, in this case, to be worse than unfair to betray the boy’s trust so completely. She was unaware that Dillon was one of the students in Sandra Corlani’s extra-curricular time travel class.

Once Dillon had managed to steer the conversation around to Colleen’s school life, he learned that she had been at an all girls’ boarding school in a nearby village when she’d been in year 12. Miss Woodfield recounted what Colleen had told her once, and quoted Colleen’s narrative almost word for word:

“On the last day of my final year, when everyone else went home at lunch time, and all the teachers had left as well, I just stayed sitting on the window seat of my downstairs room in the boarding house, knowing that I’d be moving on to study teaching at college the following year.”

Dillon, using some of the knowledge imparted by Miss Corlani, had been working on a time machine for several weeks, hoping to take acceptable currency still in circulation back into the past and go on a date with Miss Balfour back when she was a teenager and ask her for a kiss.

He finally perfected the machine. It was about the size of a backpack, and was worn in the same way. Now he had to know the year that Miss Balfour had finished school. One day, during mid-term long weekend, which gave a Friday and Monday as holidays to the school students only, not the rest of the village, he went to the neighbouring village to visit the Girls Boarding School’s library which was still open on those holidays. He looked at several yearbooks, until he saw a picture of the prefects for her final year. Miss Balfour was one of them, named Colleen in the photograph. He found the boarding house photographs too, and learned which one Colleen was in. The boarding house was 3 stories high and only had one students dormitory on the ground floor. He walked around and located the window that she must have been sitting behind in her final year on the last day of term.

Returning home, he put on his time backpack and used the screen and the dials on the strap control to set it for the exact day, time and place, so that he would appear just behind her bed.

If he convinced her he was a time traveller, by making a dramatic entrance, she would be fascinated enough to think of him as more than a mere stranger, back at a time when she was closer to his age and was still single and available.

He activated the device, and saw everything turn into a kaleidescope of images around him. Then he heard sparks coming from the machine, just before it reached the destination. He appeared in the dormitory behind the bed in 1966 on the correct day, as far as he knew, but the machine had reduced itself and him to tiny size! As Miss Corlani had not personally tested all of her methods of time travel, she was not aware that the technology involved in breaching the fourth dimension could also run the frequent risk of altering the first to third dimensions of the time traveller involved.

“I guess this is the risk of playing around in the 4th dimension,” he thought, “Now I’ll also have to appeal to Colleen on the grounds of needing her help.”

He walked under the bed and saw her seated by the window, with her hair up in a bun.

Dillon stepped into view until Colleen saw him. She stood up and looked down at him.

“You’re the smallest little boy I’ve ever seen,” she said, “I read a lot of fairytales, and I’ve always been interested in the strong possibility that the little folk actually existed. I’ve hoped to meet a leprechaun for some time.”

He thought quickly. If she liked fairytales about little folk, then she might like him more if she assumed him to be one of them, than if she learned he was a time travelling boy who had accidentally shrunk himself.

“It’s nice to meet a girl your size,” he said.

“I’ve just finished my final year of school. I’m going to teacher’s college in a few months’ time, until I’m ready to become a teacher. For the next three months, I’m on holidays by myself. I’ll take you home with me now. I’ll have the house to myself for the next week or so.”

Colleen picked him up and put him on the vanity unit.

“It’s nice of you to let me come with you,” he said, “Thank you.”

“Think nothing of it. I expect you’ll make a delicious holiday dinner for me at some stage. I’m sure I’ll be able to gobble you whole in a single mouthful. I don’t think you’d want to be bitten. I’m Colleen.”

The fact that he might not want to be eaten at all didn’t seem to weigh into her considerations. The announcement stunned him.

“I’m Dillon,” he said.

Colleen carried her bag under her left arm and carried Dillon in her right hand. He looked up at her high long neck and her full lips and the look of carefree indifference to his plight in her eyes. She had been a prefect for a whole year, and would one day be a schoolteacher. And she was now going home to enjoy her holidays with him as an upcoming meal!

When she reached her home, she sat down again and asked him, “Do you folk age at the same rate as us?”

“I think so,” he said, “I’m 12.”

“I’m 18. Let me know if there’s anything I can do for you to make your stay here enjoyable until I’m ready to eat you,” she said.

“Well… I think your lips are so big, even in proportion to your sized face. It would be so lovely if you were to give me a kiss.”

She stared at him intently.

“You do look very handsome, in a tiny sort of way,” she said, “And I’d be happy to kiss you on several occasions in the weeks ahead. You just need to remember that it won’t go on forever. When the time comes, I’m going to eat you all up, no matter how much I like your company in the meantime.”

“I understand,” he said.

“Alright then,” said Colleen.

She held him closer to her face, and pressed her full shapely lower lip against his entire face at once.

“Wow!” he said, “That was wonderful!”

“I’m glad you liked it. It was nice for me too.”

“It will be an interesting experience to be kissed by someone who’s going to eat me, and then to be eaten by someone who’s kissed me.”

Colleen laughed. It was mid afternoon. He wondered if she had left for home earlier than she had done in the original timeline, simply because this time she had found him.

She placed him on the windowsill and said, “Have a look out at the garden, while I go and see about dinner.”

As she left the room, he looked out at the lawn and then at the garden bed below. There was a vegetable garden just outside the window, and large lettuces were growing there! They could be just strong enough to stop his fall painlessly. At any rate, it was less of a risk than waiting to be eaten.

He jumped off and managed to land right on top of a lettuce, digging his feet into it a bit at first, as it broke his fall. Then he slid down a leaf to the garden and ran across the lawn, in the direction of the property’s border. He was now in a time when he hadn’t been born yet.

He reached the far end of the lawn and heard Colleen calling.

“I’ll catch you, little boy!”

He turned and saw her running across the lawn in her long white dress, until she caught up to him in next to no time, and took him back inside.

“You can’t escape from here, little boy. It’s quite natural for a girl my size to eat a boy your size, and you’ll just have to make the most of the situation. I’ll be enjoying my holidays both before and after our final dinner date, no matter how you cope with it.”

She folded her arms and looked at him sternly.

“Are you angry with me for trying to get away?” he asked.

Her facial expression softened a little.

“No, I’m not angry, but I want you to understand how pointless it is for you to entertain thoughts of avoiding your eventual journey to my stomach. Think how much energy you wasted and the risk you took jumping out the window, when I soon caught you again in a fraction of the time. I know that being eaten’s not what you had in mind for yourself, but there’s really nothing you can do to prevent it. So why not just be reasonable?”

“Are you being reasonable by doing this to me?”

“I’m six years older than you and an awful lot bigger,” she said, opening her mouth wide as she spoke in assertive tones, while he looked in at her tongue, “I don’t need to be reasonable to you! I have my entire adult life ahead of me to enjoy after you’ve gone your tasty way. And I told you just before I kissed you that there was nothing you could say to change my mind about it. Think about that.”

She popped him into her mouth for several minutes, and then took him out.

“Have you anything else to say?” she asked.

“I suppose you’re right,” he said, “Only, I hope you’ll still give me more kisses.”

“Of course I will,” she said.

She closed her eyes and brought him to her lips and pressed hard against hisneck and face.

“You’re certainly a beautiful girl to be eaten by,” he said.

She smiled radiantly.

“And you’re certainly a tasty boy to kiss.”

She slowly placed him into her mouth again, left him there for a ver long time, and then put him on a high cupboard, and walked away, let down her hair and walked around outside and then came back in and sat with him and kissed him for several minutes.

Then she lay down and let him climb on her shoulders and neck and then bade him to climb into her mouth for a while. She let him out later and took him to the dining room table  with her dinner and sat down.

“I’ve decided that there’s no time like the present,” she said.

He watched her gulping neck as she tilted her head back high above him and placed other food items into her mouth and then drank some water.

“It’s been lovely to meet you, little Dillon,” she said.

“You’ll meet me again,” he said, as a sudden inspiration.

“I doubt that,” she said.

“In the future. You’ll have a student called Dillon, who will invent a time machine that takes me back to today.”

“How could a boy invent a working time machine?”

“It didn’t work as well as it should have. That’s why I shrank to this size.”

“Well then eating you now is going to be even more interesting,” she said, “And you can be sure that I’ll enjoy getting to know your younger self in the time he has left.”

She was going to eat him anyway!

Then she picked him up and placed him into her mouth.

The back of her tongue looked strangely exciting, and he rested his head and shoulders on it and waited, thinking frantically for ways to return from both her mouth and her time period and restore his size. When he felt her gulping him eagerly into her throat, he knew for certain that there was nothing he could do.

Arthur was another student at the school, who took a walk in the forest behind the school and found the warp that led to Miss Balfour’s giant garden. He saw her and re-introduced himself and told her how beautiful she looked, and then became a little embarrassed.

"It's alright. I’m flattered," she said, "I have something to tell you too. You look so young and delicious, that I would love to eat you."

The idea fascinated him.

"Do you think that I would taste nice?"

"I'm sure you would."

"I think I’d enjoy watching you eat something, and pretending it was me,” he said.

 “Do you really mean that?” asked Miss Balfour.

“Yes."

That night, Miss Balfour, at his suggestion, prepared a ham salad for main course, and pavlova for dessert.

"This is very nice," she said, during dessert.

"I must confess, I chose this, because I wanted to watch your tongue dealing with the pavlova."

She smiled.

"I noticed you paying close attention, every time I put out my tongue and spoon another mouthful onto it."

 “I’ve thought of your beautiful mouth wanting to eat me for the rest of the day. It’s amazing to consider it,” he said.

"I'm so grateful," she said, "You're a very special boy."

She kissed his entire face.

"I love you, Miss Balfour."

"I love you too, Arthur, and I really would like to eat you. Would you go along with it, knowing that?”

 “Yes, I know I would.”

"Arthur, look at you!" she said, effervescing with happiness, "Where would you like me to eat you?"

"If you do it, sitting up in your bed, you'll be able to lie down and stay there for the night, once I'm in your stomach."

She carried him to the bedroom of her giant house, and climbed into her bed.

She sat there, with the reading lamp on, and raised him to her lips.

"Shall I start?" she said.

"Yes, Miss Balfour."

"Farewell then."

She opened her mouth, and placed him onto her tongue.

After a few minutes, she took him out of her mouth.
"Arthur, this isn't quite what I'd dreamt of. You've offered yourself to me. Part of the fun was to eat someone, who wished he could escape."

She told him of how she’d originally invented her shrinking device for the purpose of reducing and eating boys, and later used it in reverse to become a giant.

"What if you didn’t know I was a willing participant?" he asked, and told her of the time machine he’d built as one of Miss Corlani’s students, and of the idea he’d just had, “Your past self wouldn’t know I was willing, and you could tell me everything I need to know in order to sneak into her house and get hold of the machine and reduce myself.”

She put him on the spare pillow beside her face, kissed him several times, and they talked themselves to sleep.

In the morning, she awoke to see him staring in adoration at her. 

She told him everything that would be pertinent to what they were planning:

"The past Miss Balfour won’t know you’re a willing quarry from this time, if you don't tell her. So you might as well let her know that you’re Arthur and let her think you snuck into her property for other reasons and accidentally shrank yourself while playing around with her shrinking device. Would you be happy to go out there and pretend to be afraid of being eaten?"

"I guess so. You wanting to eat me has made me feel very special. If your other self eats me, even in the past, I'd be happy to do your idea then."

"Arthur, you're a darling!"

“Well you’d better fill me in on the best way to set this scene up.”

"That’s just what I had in mind. Now Arthur, if my memory serves me well, she'll prepare a morning tea snack, and then bring it out and sit on that seat facing the flowerbed, while she eats it. You’ll have to hide in the flowerbed, while she's inside.”

"Don't you wish you could come back in time with me after reducing to normal size, and watch what happens?"
"We'd spoil our plan, if she saw me. I'll remember what happens to my younger self, when I'm in my time anyway. Don't tell her you're a time traveller."

"Yes, Miss Balfour."

"You can call me Colleen," she said, "I'm not your teacher now."

"You'll always be Miss Balfour to me," he said, "I wonder what she'll be like, when I make sure she sees me."

"She's had her teacher’s qualification for a while. She enjoyed teaching at your school, and then taking on her sabbatical break. She's used to having authority. She has everything she wants in life. When she captures you, she'll be pleased, amused, and quite unsympathetic to your apparent plight," said Miss Balfour, smiling down at him, with her own amusement, "If you have any second thoughts about this, they won't do you any good, once she gets hold of you. She'll eat you all up, and continue enjoying life."

"I won't have any regrets, Miss Balfour."

"I'm very proud of you, Arthur, and grateful."

"I never had a girlfriend, Miss Balfour. I think you're the most beautiful woman I've ever known in any time period."

They said their goodbyes and he returned to his own dimension and made preparations.

He took his time machine back into the past by over a year, to the time that Colleen was on sabbatical. By materializing inside her house, he was able to avoid the problem of breaking in. He shrank the machine right out of recognisable size first, watching it dwindle beyond the size of even a dot. Then he shrank himself and slipped under the door into her garden.

Soon he saw the past Miss Balfour arrive. She walked through the garden, with her back to him, and unlocked a door, and went into the house.

He recalled the conversation he’d had with the present day giant Miss Balfour while they’d been talking themselves to sleep, when they had selected this date for his arrival in the past:

He looked up, and watched Miss Balfour walk out of the garden. He turned around, in the flowerbed, and looked past the seat towards the house. He thought about the situation he had placed himself in. He grew even more thrilled at the prospect of being caught and eaten whole by the beautiful past Miss Balfour.

After around 20 more minutes of personal reflection, he saw the past Miss Balfour open the door in the distance, step out, and walk across the garden, with something in her hand.

She reached the seat, sat down, and he saw that she was carrying a plate with something on it.

He peeked up out of the flowerbed, about a meter away from Miss Balfour. She looked every bit as beautiful as he'd remembered her at as his teacher.

She picked up a passion fruit slice that she’d bought from the village bakery, raised it to her mouth, and opened her mouth wide. He watched as she bit into it. She continued biting off mouthfuls, lowering the slice, while she chewed them and licking her lips, and biting off more. He enjoyed the look of her towering face, and the way her tongue sparkled and moved about her lips. How thrilling it would be, when that tongue touched him, when she would be eating him.

Arthur continued to stare at her, and eventually she had eaten the entire slice. Was she about to get up and go back inside? Should he make his presence a little more obvious, so that she could spot him?

He looked up, as Miss Balfour began licking each of her fingers several times in succession. It was the most arousing sight he'd ever witnessed.

Arthur was about to move a little, to give his presence away. Then he saw her stare intently in his direction.

Miss Balfour had seen him!

"Hello, little one, and welcome to my garden," she said.

"Hello. I’m Arthur. You were my teacher until your sabbatical started. I … snuck into your house and ended up playing with some device that seems to have shrunken me."

"I remember you, Arthur. Have you been there long?"
"Only since this morning," he said truthfully.

"It's nice to see you again," she said, smiling adorably.

He guessed she must have decided for certain that he was definitely worth eating. He enjoyed the way she showed such friendliness, when he knew that she was actually making her plans to capture him and eat him.

The present day giant Miss Balfour's description of the past Miss Balfour was now foremost in his mind. He wondered how long she would take before announcing the fate she had devised for him.

"It's lovely to see you too," he said.

"Have you had anything to eat today?" she asked.

"Not yet."
"I was going to have some strawberries and whipped cream inside. Would you like to join me?"
"Thank you," he said, "I won't even need one full strawberry at this size."

She reached down, across the flowers in front of him, and picked him up.

"I like eating," she said.

This was the first hint, he surmised.

She carried him into the kitchen, placed him on the bench, took out a bowl, and a punnet of strawberries. She removed the stalks, and put the strawberries in the bowl. Then she sprayed whipped cream from a can, over the strawberries, and put down the can. She picked Arthur up gently, and placed him into the bowl. He was now covered in cream up to his neck.

She licked her fingers clean again.

So she was going to eat him as part of her morning tea.

Miss Balfour took the bowl and a spoon to the table on the patio and sat down on a chair.

"You just help yourself to the nearest strawberry. When you're finished, I'll lick any cream from you, and you'll be clean and tidy."

So she wasn't planning to eat him at this time. It would come later. Licking the cream off him would be her way of surreptitiously having a chance to taste him. Since the giant Miss Balfour had already reassured him of his delicious taste to her, he knew that past Miss Balfour would like him.

"Thank you," he said, and began eating from a strawberry, while he watched Miss Balfour spoon a whole one into her mouth.

They ate and talked, and then she asked if he'd had enough.

"Yes, thank you," he said, and she spooned his strawberry up and ate it. Now she would lick him clean! He was eagerly anticipating it.

Miss Balfour picked him up and licked him several times. When all of the cream was gone, she continued to lick. He knew she was enjoying the taste of him

She licked her lips, and smiled.

"Do you still feel sticky at all?" she asked.

"No Miss Balfour. Your tongue did a nice licking cleaning job."

"Well I'm going to watch some television. You can sit in my hands, and watch it with me."

They watched television for an hour, and then Miss Balfour took him to a room with a large set of shelves. She placed him beside a dolls house, which rested on one of the higher shelves, roughly level with her face.

"Thank you, Miss Balfour. You've been so kind to me today," he said, secretly aware of her real motives, "I guess I'm too small to be able to repay your hospitality."

"I think you'll have your chance," she said, with a hint of mischief in her voice. He knew exactly what she meant.

"Well you've been pleasant company for me to talk to in your garden. You fed me, cleaned me up with your tongue, and showed me a nice television program. You're like a beautiful friend to me."

"I'm glad I found you in my garden today. I've got to go and attend to a quick telephone call, to organise my eventual return to teaching at your school. Then I'm going to come back here and keep you company, and in the afternoon, I'll be having you for lunch."

He was ecstatic as she said those words.

"Do you mean I'm going to be your lunch?" he asked, to stay in character.

"That's right. You can't escape. I'm going to eat you all up!"

He looked at her beautiful towering face forming the words. This was his own great fantasy made real too.

"That's true. I think you've got me well and truly trapped, Miss Balfour."

She laughed.

"Well I'll see you soon then."

He watched her leave the room, and then made himself comfortable in the dolls house.

He sat on the dolls house couch, thinking of beautiful Miss Balfour, and the destiny, which awaited him, knowing that he would be in her stomach in less than a day. He waited for Miss Balfour to return. 

Soon they were talking together, as she sat on the couch, with Arthur on her shoulder.

"I'm going to cook you soon," she said, and took him to the kitchen. She placed him on the bench, and then heard the phone ring. He noticed the window was open, and decided to act the part, by making a convincing attempt to escape.

He ran across to the end of the bench, where it met the back of the fridge, and climbed down the fridge grate to the floor. Then he ran to the table, and hid behind a leg to wait for Miss Balfour to come back and look for him.

He saw her come into the room and begin to search. He looked up at her towering form, and edged around the table leg, staying out of sight, until she guessed his hiding place, and grabbed him.

"I told you, that you couldn't escape," she said, "In an hour or two, I'll gulp you down my throat, and it will be all over. I know you were once my size, but I've got you now, and you don't have a chance. I'm going to warm you up in the oven now, and then enjoy this meal. Your only reprieve is that I will swallow you whole."

Miss Balfour was certainly in character.

He warmed up in the oven, and then she took him to the dining table, where she had a glass of water waiting, and served him on a plate.

Miss Balfour sat down and licked her lips.

"I'm going to start licking you now, and then I'll put you into my mouth for a while, and then slide you into my throat."

"Goodbye Miss Balfour."

"Goodbye little Arthur," she mused, and proceeded to eat him.

As he entered her mouth, felt her tongue like a moist mattress, and her throat loomed ahead, he knew this was no longer an abstract fantasy. soon he felt an incredible gulp.

In time, Frances Woodfield and Sandra Corlani became friends. Sandra confided in Frances about her discovery of time travel techniques, and Frances returned the confidence by telling Sandra about her shrunken Dollipops, and eventually told her everything about Colleen. In the meantime, Frances had kept in touch with Colleen, and had been equipped with a new shrinking device to use in the quest for shrinking yet another boy to become her Dollipop III. Frances and Sandra agreed to lend their scientific devices to eachother when needed, and Sandra began reflecting on Colleen’s desire to eat leprechauns and shrunken boys. The more she thought about it, the more the idea appealed to her.

Sandra borrowed Frances’s shrinking device and followed a boy named Gilbert home from school one day, until he walked through the public gardens in the village.

She caught him up, let him know she was there, took the shrinking device from her handbag and pointed it at him. He shrank to tiny size. She picked him up and took him home to her garden.

"I was walking here on my birthday last year. I didn’t have the shrinking ray, only my time travel invention. I think you’d make a nice surprise meal for her, now that she can eat you all up and swallow you whole in one mouthful.”

She took a small box and some wrapping paper from her handbag.

There was no point in saying anything. She had obviously thought this out for a long time and planned it, and would not be swayed from her mischief by any pleadings on his part. He prepared to meet his fate, and waited.

"I'll be expecting you when you arrive, since I made the mental note of the idea back on my birthday."

She took a small card and wrote on it, "Happy Birthday from Sandra Corlani, your older self. I think you’ll find this tasty," and placed it into the box, "Can you give that to my younger self, when she opens the present?"

"I guess so," he said.

"Sorry, I guess it's not the best deal for you," she said.

She put the lid on the box, and wrapped it.

Then she called out, "Goodbye, until last year."

The next thing he heard was the wrapping paper being torn off. Then the lid was removed, and he looked up at the same lady in the past, at a time when she was not the science teacher at his school.

He picked up the card.

"This is for you," he said.

"Thank you," she said, and took the card.

"Well I'm sure you understand why you're here," she said.

"I've accepted that I can't stop you from eating me. So I'm not going to be unpleasant towards you about it."

"I appreciate that," she said.

"But could you do something nice for me first? It won't take you long."

"What would that be?"

"I've never had a kiss before. It would be nice to be kissed by a beautiful lady like you."

She kissed him for several minutes.

"Is that enough?"

"Yes, thank you very much."

"Then I'll have my birthday lunch," she said.

She licked him and put him onto her tongue and swallowed him whole.

Then she began to realise that the idea could be extrapolated on, in order to achieve a much more significant outcome.

Two weeks after his grandfather died, another student from the school named Morton, went to the cemetery to visit the grave, and saw that Miss Corlani was there too, also visiting a grave.

She approached him and said, "You look a little young to have lost anyone."

"My grandfather," he said.

"Oh. My husband died on that ship that sank years ago. You were probably too young to have heard about it. I was lucky they even recovered the body."

"It's nice that you can keep such a lovely smile, after facing such a loss," he said.

"I'll tell you a secret," she said, "I've invented a time capsule. It's about three inches high. I'm going to write a message to my younger self, and send it to her in the time capsule. It should arrive in the past. It will warn her to call my husband and tell him not to be on that boat. That way he'll live, and I'll have changed history."

"I'd love to be able to time travel," he said.

"I'd never fit in the capsule."

"There's a way you could. I have borrowed someone else’s invention. I could shrink you for your journey through time. At the moment, until history is changed, I'm a widow in this time, and you're a very handsome boy. When you said I had a lovely smile,… well, is that because you find me beautiful?"

"Yes. I think you're very beautiful."

"My friends don't know I'm planning to change the past. Would you come to my house and cuddle me for the afternoon? I'd like very much to kiss you as well."

"Nothing could make me happier," he said.

She hugged him, and her cheek rested against his own. It was fantastic.

She took him to her house, and invited him onto her couch. He sat down beside her and she put her arms around him and kissed him passionately on the mouth for a long time. He ran his finger over her lower lip. After a whole afternoon of passionate cuddling and kissing, she said, "Well are you ready to make the trip back?"

"Yes. You might as well shrink me, so that I can get used to being tiny while you're writing your letter."

He waited for her to use Miss Woodfield’s device and shrank to tiny size. She placed him on the table, and finished her letter. She folded her letter and placed it in an envelope. She lifted the sleeve to lick it, and he was about to ask her why she felt the need to seal it. Then he thought that the last thing he should do was discourage her from displaying her lovely tongue licking the envelope. He watched her lick and seal it, and then she took the time capsule out of her drawer, placed the envelope inside it, and picked him up and kissed him.

"Good luck," she said.

She sent him on his journey, and he materialized on her desk in the past. Her younger self was seated at the desk, and had her hair down, and wore a long black dress with a dark jumper over the top half of it.

She looked up, and saw him open the door of the tiny time capsule and step out with the envelope.

"I must have used this in the future, if you're here now. Did I invent a shrink ray too?"

"No, but your friend in the future has one. We met in the future, and your future self wrote you a letter, which will explain everything."

She took the envelope, opened it and held the note up to read it.

"I'd better ring my husband and ask him to stay a week longer in New York," she said.

"Could you put me on the carpet, so I can stretch my legs on the floor for a while?" he asked.

"I think I'll leave you up there," she said, and placed the letter under the small rug on the carpet. She walked out of the room.

He was curious to know why she had been so unfriendly. Maybe there was a clue in the letter. If he could get off the table, he could read it. He folded a sheet of paper into a hang glider and flew down to the carpet, pulled out the letter and read.

            Dear Past Self,

                        You must warn your husband not to board the boat he's due on. Tell him any feasible story you can think of, that will warn him of deadly danger, if he catches the boat. Ask him to wait another week to be safe. I've sent back with this letter a boy who wanted to time travel. Since he looks delicious to me, and we're the same person, I know you'll want to eat him. Best not to tell him until you're ready.

            Love, your Future Self from the future.

He couldn’t believe it. She had been playing him for a fool the whole time. The moment she'd learned of his shrinking serum, she'd planned it all.

"I've got to get out of here, before she comes back from the phone call. If she finds me, she'll eat me all up and then go on enjoying her marriage."

What he didn’t know was that sometimes the past could not be rewritten. Her husband did not believe her warnings and caught the boat anyway and died.
She had planned to eat him once the boat had sunk without her husband on it, but when the day came, she had to tell her tiny captive that she had failed to avert the danger that her future self had warned of. She was still, in all timelines, a widow.

He couldn't see any way out of the room, except walking out the door she'd used, which might lead him straight into her clutches. He searched the room, and found a small grating leading to an air vent. He slipped between the bars, and stayed there.

"I'll have to wait until nightfall, or until she goes out. Then I might be able to escape and mix my own antidote and relive these three weeks all over. I'll have to avoid my younger self."

She came into the room, and saw the note on the carpet, and his absence from the desk.

Without a word about her obvious awareness of what he'd done, she closed the door and began to search the room for him. She came to the grate, and lay down on her stomach and looked in at him.

Her large hand just fit through the grating. She grabbed him and then found that her hand would not fit with him in it.

"I'll make you an offer," she said, "If I have to fetch a screwdriver from the desk behind me, and then undo all four screws on the grating, pull it off and grab you, I'll eat you for lunch in half an hour's time. If you come out of there now, and save me the trouble, I'll treat you as a boy orphaned by time, adopted you for the afternoon, and let you cuddle up to my cheek in my bed until I'm ready to eat you for dinner."

"I guess I'll accept it," he said.

17 year old orphan Garfield had just inherited his late grandmother's house. He was one of the secret time travel class run by Sandra Corlani, and was also an ace English student who had written some books and submitted them to a publisher A woman from a publishing company telephoned to say that she had reviewed his manuscript and wanted to come over and go through some suggested alterations with him.

She arrived around 9am on the Saturday morning.

"Hello. It’s nice to meet you in person at last. I've been a publisher's editor for years, and worked with several successful authors. I was at home a year ago, when something odd happened, something I thought was scientifically impossible. So I'm very interested in your science fiction novel. It struck a chord. With a few modifications, we should be able to publish it."

They worked on it all morning. The woman was very beautiful, and had a happy effervescent smile all the time.

They finished the book at 12:10, and he asked if she'd like to stay for lunch. After the meal, he took her on a tour around the house.

When he showed her the upstairs balcony, she said, "It's a lovely spot up here. Do you bring your girlfriends up here?"

"I haven't had a girlfriend yet," he said.

She brought her head closer, and kissed him happily.

He put his arms around her and she did the same.

After several seconds, she withdrew her lips and asked, "What did you think of that?"

"The best moment of my life."

She invited herself into his lounge room, where they kissed and cuddled.

"I knew I loved you, as soon as you arrived," he said.

"But you don't know me. Do you remember that scientifically improbable thing I told you about, that happened last year? I was at my house one day. I go there to read manuscripts in peace. One day I arrived and sat down in the garden to read. It's not far from here actually, just a block or two away. After half an hour or so, I heard a rustling noise in the garden, and saw something move. I could have sworn it was a tiny boy. Then I stood up, walked over and searched the garden, until I saw him again. I asked if there were any other little boys like him.

He said no, that he had been shrunken by someone, and was a normal sized boy before then. I told him that, in that case, I would eat him for dinner the following night. After an eventful two days, I did just that. Do you still love me, knowing that?"
"I can't help it," he said, and kissed her.

She let him set up his scientific experiments in her spare room. He had a special tiny engine he had designed to run a time machine, but had not been able to build one.

He became her boyfriend, and would visit her often. One day he was followed by the mischeivous Ellie Blish from his school. (She had gained possession of one of Colleen’s earlier shrinking devices and had been using it to amuse herself by shrinking boys from her school. See earlier chapters of this book.)

Ellie waited until Garfield had run the publishing editor’s doorbell, and then fired the shrink ray at him. He heard her giggle, turned and dwindled to tiny size, and then heard his older girlfriend approaching the door from the inside.

Ellie ran off, laughing as she went. The editor opened the door.

"You're as small as the boy I ate," she said.

"Does that mean you're going to eat me?" he asked, "It wasn't meant to do this."

"You're my boyfriend. I’d never had the chance to swallow anyone before, when I ate that little boy last year. He must have made the same discovery you did."

She continued as his girlfriend, while he tried to perfect an antidote. He enjoyed lying on her chin, stroking her full lower lip at nights, and having her huge kisses.

One day she told him that she had also met someone her own age.

"Are you … going to eat me?"

"You would make an excellent celebration lunch today," she said, "but thank you for the good times we've had."

She took him to the dining room, put him on the dining table, and went to the kitchen. He grabbed a napkin, parachuted to the floor, and ran for the laboratory room she had been allowing him.

He soon heard her coming back. She noticed his absence in the dining room, and ran straight for the lab, while he hid under a cupboard.

"I know you're in here. You'd come back to try to restore your size. What makes you think you could have made an antidote now, after weeks of unsuccessful attempts? Besides, I'm not going to let you near your chemicals."

On the other side of the room was the experimental time travel engine he had made, using the knowledge he’d gleaned from Miss Corlani’s secret time classes. At his present size, it might well teleport him out of the present, if he could reach it, and hold onto it, when he activated it. He snuck around, while she searched for him. He ran for the device, and pressed the switch. She turned around and ran towards him. She reached down to grab him, and he vanished out of sight just in time.

He materialized in the past, in the room which would become the laboratory.

"I'd better get out of this house," he thought, "I'll have to get back to my house, find out what time period I'm in, and then try to perfect the antidote in my own house. My younger self can help me, if I make sure my grandmother doesn't see us. It would be hard to explain a tiny boy, if she's still alive in this time."

He made it out to the garden, and started across it. Then he heard footsteps and looked up. He saw the editor walking along a pathway. She stepped onto the grass and walked over to a seat, sat down and began reading a manuscript. He remembered it was what she did.
"I'd better get away from here as subtly and quickly as possible," he thought, "or she'll eat me, just like she did to the other tiny boy. She’s sure to be indifferent to me in this time."

He looked up at her, admiring her beautiful face for a while, and then stepped back, about to make a run for it, hoping the flowers would conceal him.

Then his foot fell on a dry leaf, which rustled.

He saw her look up.

Then he remembered her story of the boy she'd eaten.

"It just happened exactly as it happened then. It was me all along!" he thought, "I'm the boy she ate, after I time travelled. If I don't escape this time paradox, she'll eat me for her dinner tomorrow night!"

He ducked his head, saw her stand up and walk towards the garden. She stood towering in front of the garden, and looked in. He backed away, and then turned and ran. She searched the garden and eventually found and caught him. She picked him up.

"Are there any other boys like you?"

"No. I shrank myself. I was a normal sized boy before that," he said, without thinking, and then realised it was the exchange of dialogue she'd narrated in the future.

"Well you'll make a delicious dinner for me tomorrow night. I'll be here another two days to read a manuscript through, and mark some alterations on it."

He knew there was no point in pleading with her. She had even been prepared to eat him in the future as her ex boyfriend. He had to escape.

That night she let him lie on her neck, and then against her cheek while she slept. In the morning, she placed him in her lap, and later on her shoulder, while she read the manuscript. Late in the day, she took him to the kitchen and prepared him to be served in the dining room, and happily ate him.

14 year old Drake, another student of Sandra Corlani’s time classes, was staying in his aunt’s house. He completed work on the time machine hidden in the garden.

He gave the machine a test, and it took him to twenty years into the past, where he stepped out, to see that a beautiful middle aged woman was walking into the bamboo area which partly concealed his time machine. She had noticed something, as it arrived, presumably.

He told her he was a time traveller from twenty years into her future, and introduced himself. She said her name was Iris, and invited him in for lunch.

After they'd finished eating, she started a conversation.

"I've moved back into this house, which I once shared with my previous husband. He died in the Great Irish war, when I was 33."

"Are you a time traveller too?"
"No. I think you're the first."

"But how can you be so young now, if you were 33 in during that war?"

"How old do you think I am?"

"In your early forties, I'd guess."

She smiled.

"You're very sweet to say so, but I'm 55. Now would you like to dance with me?"

He accepted, and they waltzed slowly to the music she turned on. Then he suddenly shrank to tiny size. She towered in front of him.

What both of them could not possibly imagine is that the leprechauns had once used the Ring of Reversal to reverse a period of time during which Colleen had shrunken several boys and young men and eaten most of them herself. The Ring had reversed this period of time, but also infected it. Anyone who used time travel to traverse this particular period in time could well end up arbitrarily shrinking to tiny size when they arrived in the past, present or future. It was simply an exposure (to the period of time that had been altered by the Ring of Reversal) that could trigger the shrinking effect. It was as if the reduction effect of Colleen’s device from the original timeline still had to go somewhere, and could only affect those who time travelled across that particular period in time. This is what had now happened to Drake.

"This must be a side effect of the time travelling," he said.

It was as close as he ever came to the truth of it.

"You're here before you were actually born. So nobody will miss you. I'm going to take you into the dining room and eat you."

"No, please, you can't!"

"It's useless to protest. I'm set on my purpose," she said, and took him to the dining table, sat down, and picked him up and licked his face with her huge sparkling tongue.

"Thank you for the dance, and your compliments about my age," she said, "And goodbye now."

She placed him into her mouth and closed it.

He waited for the moment when she would gulp him down, and it would be all over.

Then he suddenly pinched her tongue, and she opened her mouth and took him out.

AT THIS POINT THE WORD COUNT HAS BEEN REPEATEDLY CHECKED AT MORE THAN 500 WORDS AND YET GIANTESSWORLD KEEPS RETURNING THE “FAILED TO MEET THE MINIMUM WORD COUNT OF 500” MESSAGE. SO I WILL USE THIS PARAGRAPH TO BOOST THE WORD COUNT AND SEE IF THAT BYPASSES THE MALFUNCTIONING ONLINE SOFTWARE.

"Did you want to ask me something?" she said.

"Yes."

"Well be quick about it. I was about to swallow you whole."

"When you do, I'll never be able to be with a beautiful woman like you. Is there any chance you could spend one night with me on your pillow beside your cheek, and tell me all about your life? It's the closest I'll get to sharing it with you."

"You can snuggle up to my cheek on my pillow this afternoon, while I'm awake, but tonight, I shall have to put you in a locked cage on my bedside table. I'll leave the reading lamp on, so we can talk, but when I fall asleep, you'll still be trapped. I'll eat you for breakfast in the morning instead. Is that alright?"

"Thank you. I'm so grateful."

He enjoyed his afternoon with her. Then they had dinner, and she put him into a cage, and padlocked it, and put the key well out of his reach. They talked until she fell asleep. Then he had an idea. He put his tiny hand in the padlock, and worked the mechanism quietly, and managed to unlock it. He slipped out of the cage, jumped onto the edge of the bed, slid down the side of the blanket to the floor, and ran to the study. There was enough moonlight for him to see his way. So he climbed the desk lamp cord to the table, and found the growth serum, and took it.

Then he grew to normal size, and the light came on. He turned to see her standing in the doorway, with her hand on the light switch.

"How did you manage that?" she asked.

He explained about his escape, but was unaware that the fluctuating effects of the dispersed shrinking energy from the Ring of Reversal had since restored his size.

"I'm sure it would have been an honour to end up in your shapely stomach, but I'm young, and I have many things to do in life, including more time travelling."

"I know. Well you can't blame a lady for trying."

"I guess this is goodbye."
"Dance with me once more, before you go?"

"In the middle of the night? Why not?”

They danced for a while, and then she said, "I guess you'll want to be going. I'll walk you out to your time machine."

He farewelled her, and travelled back another twenty years further into the past, and met her 35 year old self. He did not tell her of his encounter with her 55 year old self only twenty years into his past, but did admit to being a time traveller. Then, before their eyes, his machine suddenly started smoking, and exploded.

"I guess I'm not old enough to understand the quantum physics as well as I thought," he said, "My invention must have burned out its power source or something."

"Stranding you here," she said, "as an orphan. I've been left a widow by the war, for two years now. Would you like me to adopt you?"

AT THIS POINT THE WORD COUNT HAS BEEN REPEATEDLY CHECKED AT MORE THAN 500 WORDS AND YET GIANTESSWORLD KEEPS RETURNING THE “FAILED TO MEET THE MINIMUM WORD COUNT OF 500” MESSAGE. SO I WILL USE THIS PARAGRAPH TO BOOST THE WORD COUNT AND SEE IF THAT BYPASSES THE MALFUNCTIONING ONLINE SOFTWARE..

This was so much better than being eaten by her future self. He accepted, and she secretly adopted him. Since he seemed well educated enough to have invented a time machine, she did not expose him to schooling, but let him live at her house. After a few months, she had been dancing with him in her living room for a while, and suddenly kissed him. It was the first kiss he'd ever had, and it was lovely. He put his arms around her and embraced the moment happily.

"I didn't know if you'd feel the same way," she said at last.

"I never imagined you'd feel the same way. I thought I was just a child to you."

"Just a handsome fifteen year old child, whom I secretly have all to myself," she said, "besides, the real age difference between us is a lot more than 20 years, since I'll be 60 a few months before you're born."

For the next year they dated happily, and then she told him she'd bumped into someone else, someone her own age, from her own time, a man she had dated in high school, before she met her husband. He had remained unmarried, and had now asked if he could be her boyfriend.

"I've accepted. I’m sorry to hurt your feelings, but this affair has been rather supernaturally engineered. My feelings for you have not diminished, but I have older fonder memories of my new boyfriend. We grew up together in high school for four years of dating. Then I left school, met my husband, and was swept off my feet. This time it's meant to be forever between my childhood sweetheart and me. But you can stay here too. He'll never come to this house. Although our romance can't continue, I did adopt you, and you are welcome to stay here. You're not even 17 yet, and I'd never turn you out."

"Thank you," he said, "I guess I can still find someone in this time."

He should have guessed that time would still take its natural course. He had merely spent with her one of the years, which she would otherwise have spent as a grieving widow alone and without a boyfriend.

He saw less of her, as time went on. She eventually turned 40.

One day they went to the upstairs bay windows, and sat on the cushions together to talk.

Then he suddenly shrank to tiny size again. He realised that she would have the same desire to eat him that her 55 year old self had once demonstrated.

She picked him up, and rested him on her open hand in her lap.

"Are you thinking of hiding me here at tiny size from now on?" he asked.

"I have an old dolls house from my childhood. I'll set it up in my bedroom in this house, and you can live in it for a time."

"Thank you! Being here at tiny size will be fine, with you to look after me. I'll enjoy the next few years as much as the ones we've already had together.

Her face took on a distant stern look.

"I'm afraid you won't be living there that long. When I was reunited with my high school boyfriend, it was nice to keep you here. I had no children from my late marriage, and you were lovely to have around here as my secret adopted child. You can live in the dolls house for the next few weeks. When I have an opportunity to come here alone and stay a few nights, I'll move onto the final stage in my plan to conceal you from detection by anyone in this time period."

"What's that?" he asked.

"It'll be a surprise, when the time comes," she said, again looking stern, but this time with a trace of pleasure.

He was certain that he knew what she had in mind.

"She's made the same decision her future self made when she was or will be 55! She's planning to eat me!" he thought, "I've got to pretend I don't know. It's the only way she'll trust me enough alone here, so that I'll have a chance to escape. I won't be able to escape through time again, but I've got to find the antidote and restore my size, and then get away from this house."

For the next few weeks, whenever she was there, they talked about various things. It was haunting to be looking up at her, knowing that her pleasant friendly demeanour concealed her calculated plan to have him for her dinner. He had used the periods she was away to search the house for the antidote, but did not find it.

One day she came over and said, "I'll be coming in two days' time to stay a few nights. On the second night, I'm planning a surprise for our last dinner together. That evening, you'll find out where you'll be going from here."

Now there were only two days left until she was ready to eat him!

She would intend to gobble him down for her own pleasure, and then enjoy being with her boyfriend.

"There's no sense in hoping I’ll get my size back. I have to get out of here in the next two days," he thought.

As soon as the sun was up the next morning, he had some breakfast from the dolls house food supplies she'd given him the day before, and then searched for a way out of the house. He could find no doors with space to squeeze through, and no way of reaching and turning the handles.

"There's only one way out of this house," he thought, "She'll have to let me out, without knowing it. I'll have to cut my escape fine, by waiting behind the curtain the day she's coming. She'll open the door. I'll duck out behind her, and get around the corner out of sight, before she closes it. Then I'll be able to flee into the garden."

He waited for her arrival, and then looked up, as he heard her walking up the steps outside. She crossed the porch, and turned the key.

AT THIS POINT THE WORD COUNT HAS BEEN REPEATEDLY CHECKED AT MORE THAN 500 WORDS AND YET GIANTESSWORLD KEEPS RETURNING THE “FAILED TO MEET THE MINIMUM WORD COUNT OF 500” MESSAGE. SO I WILL USE THIS PARAGRAPH TO BOOST THE WORD COUNT AND SEE IF THAT BYPASSES THE MALFUNCTIONING ONLINE SOFTWARE.. 

He kept her long swaying skirt between himself and her eyes, as he ducked around her shoe, and raced around the corner. She closed the door, and headed for the dolls house.

He grabbed a vine at the edge of the porch, and climbed down to the garden. Then he ran through it.

"I just hope it takes her a while to guess what I've done," he thought. This garden is only a ten second walk for her, but it's like a forest to me, that could take hours to cross."

It took him a long time to get to the far side of the garden. Then he looked back, and saw no sign of her. It was now or never. He started running across the lawn, headed towards the next patch of garden, which would lead to the fence. If he made it, he could duck through the fence, be safely onto the neighbour's property, and ask the housewife next door to help him.

He was a foot away from the garden, when he saw her turn a bend on the distant part of the lawn and come into view. She saw him, and began running towards him.

He darted into the garden, and ran as fast as she could. She reached the garden in seconds, and walked slowly in after him, searching the plants that concealed him.

Estimating two feet between him and the fence, he sprinted for it, but she just caught him in time, seizing him in her hand and lifting him high in the air.

She walked back into the house, carrying him by her side, and then placed him on her shoulder, as she sat up in her bed.

"The thing I'm curious about is why you ran away," she said at last.

"I… I guess you hurt my feelings," he said, not wanting to reveal what he knew, hoping he would still have a chance to get away again, if she did not know he was trying to save himself from being eaten.

"Well you’ve no idea how much it might have benefitted you and disappointed me, if you’d succeeded. The surprise at dinner tomorrow is the fact that you are going to be the main course. I'm going to gobble you all up, little boy. I don't need you anymore as a boyfriend, nor as an adopted child. I think you'll make a delicious meal. Your escape didn’t work. I'm going to eat you for my dinner."

"I guess you are."

"Well I think I can find a place to keep you tonight, where you won't escape at all."

"Where?"

"Inside my mouth. You can sleep the night on my tongue. It's as soft as a mattress, although it will be more like a waterbed with the moisture on the outside."

Her tongue had looked excitingly beautiful to his tiny self, both when she was 55 and now, but this time it would seal his fate. He could do nothing but lie against it for the night, spend the following day with her, and then be eaten the next night.

When she awoke the next morning, she took him from her mouth and gave him a giant kiss.

"You're still my adopted child for today," she said, "I thought we'd have a picnic on the lawn."

While they talked, he explained that he’d met her when she was 55, and that she’d made no mention of her new boyfriend then. She guessed that they must have broken up. The thought stayed with her.

That evening she ate him happily, and he spent the night in her stomach, until he was no more.

Years went by, and she thought of the implications of changing historical events. She realised that she could change his past in her future, when she was 55.

She lived her intervening years, looking forward to the arrival of the 14 year old Drake. When he shrank, she realised that for him, it had happened earlier too, and took him to the dining room to eat. She didn’t know how he’d escaped in her previous timeline, but felt that she could have both the memory of having eaten that version of him when she was 40, and the new experience of making sure he didn’t escape being eaten by her now in this timeline. Then he pinched her tongue and requested a night with her. Then she realised that this was when he had previously set up an escape. She did not tell him of  her encounter with his time travelling self in when she’d been aged 35-40. This time, she waited until it was time to go to bed, and then said, "I can't take a chance on your escaping from any cage I could put you in. So you're going to spend the night in my mouth. We'll have plenty of time to talk some more in the morning, and then I'll eat you for lunch. Goodnight, little friend. Just climb over my lower lip and onto my tongue, like a good little boy."

He did so.

She lay awake happily for a while, which he knew from the occasional movements of her tongue.

"From my point of view, I get to eat him twice, and the second time I'm older, but he's younger and more tender than before. From his point of view, he now won't have the love affair with my younger self, as his personal history gets changed. That means he'll never have been kissed in his life."

She opened her mouth, took him out, and dried his face on her nightdress. Then she kissed it.

"What was that for?" he asked.

"Did you like it?"

"Yes."

"So enjoy thinking that there'll be more kisses in the morning. Think of it as a down payment on a delicious lunch."

The next day she ate him at lunchtime.

In the moment that he was sliding down her throat, he remembered another time travel technique that he had learned. He could simply send his consciousness back into his younger self, by using a form of time travel hypnotism. The unique aspect, of trying it under these circumstances, was that he would be doing it after his physical body had already travelled into the past. This meant that he would be sending his mind into his younger self but years into the future relative to his current time period in Iris’s throat.

He made it into the body of his 13 year old self, the one who had not yet time travelled back to meet Iris in the first place. As he already had the knowledge of the earlier timeline’s romances and gobbling attempts in his memory, he saw no reason to go ahead and travel to Iris’s time when he turned 14 and learned all he could from Miss Corlani’s class.

He would always remember his incredible adventure, but would no longer bring it about. Time travel seemed to risky.

17 year old Ralph was experimenting with his time machine after many of Miss Corlani’s lessons, when there was a knock on the door. He opened it to a beautiful adult woman, with short blond hair and a dark blue coat and matching short skirt.

"Hello, are you about to time travel?" she asked.

"How did you know about that?"
"Because to me, you've already done it. 18 months ago, you walked over to my back door, knocked on it and asked me the date. I thought it was an odd question, until you explained that you had come from this year. You showed me your time machine, and I believed you were a time traveller. We then began the greatest older woman / younger man romance of all time, which went for two months. In that time, you suddenly shrank and thought it was a side effect of time travelling. I continued our romance, until I decided to eat you, and insisted on doing it. Then, after two years and one month, I began to think it would be better if our love affair hadn't happened. That's when I thought of warning you not to do it. If you don't time travel, you'll save yourself from being eaten."

"And I'd miss out on the love affair with you," he said, "Maybe it's worth it. I've never had a girlfriend, and you are very beautiful."

"Do you mean you'd go back and face the certainty of becoming my dinner, for the sake of a two month romance?"
"Yes, I think I will."

"I felt certain I would talk you out of it. You must think a lot of me."

"Yes, I think I do."

"I'm very flattered," she said, "And I wish you the best of happiness with my younger self."

She kissed his cheek and watched him go into his time machine and vanish.

He arrived in the past and went to knock on her back door. She wore a black shirt and a long white skirt.

Everything went as he'd heard, until the day he shrank, and she continued to kiss him to sleep at nights, until one day he had an idea.

"She hasn't decided to eat me yet, and she doesn't know I'm aware of it. I can escape before the day she does or did it. Then I can get back to my own house and work on an antidote to my shrinking problem, if there is one. Maybe Miss Corlani could help. My younger self was still at school in the daytime of this past year. So I'll have the place to myself."

He snuck out of her house and walked all the way to his own place, and slipped under the door. It took him most of the afternoon to climb the carpeted stairs. When he was two thirds of the way up, the door at the foot of the stairs opened, and she came in from the porch. "Of course!" he thought, "She's brought my house key over. It was in my old clothes from before I shrank."

She called through the house:

"Ralph, did you come over here? It's the only place I could think of to look for you. We need to have a talk."

She was wearing a lovely red and black design skirt, and a red shirt.

"Oh no!" he thought, "It was today. I've thought of attempting to change the past too late. If she finds me, I'm done for."

She looked around in the downstairs rooms, calling for him, and then returned to the foot of the stairs, and started walking up them. There was nowhere to hide. She drew closer and saw him, and towered in front of him.

"Didn't you hear me call?" she asked.

"I… err… I did. Did you hear me?"

"No. I guess your tiny voice is too soft. I need to talk to you."

She picked him up and took him to his bedroom.

Now it would all happen the way she had warned him. He would discover the dialogue which accompanied the experience.

"I'm going to do something I've been thinking about since you shrank. I had avoided it so far, because of our romance, but that will come to an end. I know you won't like it, but I am going to eat you for dinner."

"I … can't stop you," he said.

"Well we've got a couple of hours until dinner time. Let's lie here and have a final talk together."

Soon she took him home to her dining table and prepared for the meal.

Hubert was 15 when he went to a girls private school fete advertised in the local paper. It was in the neighbouring village, and he didn’t know that it was actually Miss Balfour’s old school. There was a folder open for people to look at, with group photographs of the teachers for every year of the school's history dating back since the invention of the camera.

He looked at each of them, in reverse chronological order, until he saw a photograph taken decades earlier. There was a pretty looking 25 year old teacher among the ladies. He looked at all the photos of earlier years in turn, until the one (which contained her first appearance), which was when she was 22. So she had been a teacher there. He looked at the names, and matched hers to her position in the photograph. In each case, the name was Miss M. O'Dell. He thought she was so lovely, that he wanted to go back in time and see her, but his time machine was not completed yet. He went home to his laboratory, and continued to work on it, using all of the notes he had taken in Miss Corlani’s secret classes, and finished it within days.

He took the time machine back to the school grounds, and arrived 50 years into his own past, when Miss O’Dell was 25.

Then the dispersed shrinking energy from the effects of the Ring of Reversal reduced both him and his time machine, before he even stepped out of it. He entered the bushes and soon worked out what had happened. He decided not to let this upset his plans to meet Miss O’Dell.

He snuck over to the playground, while afternoon classes were on, and made his way to the classroom, which had been designated hers in the photograph for that year. He climbed a cling vine and looked into the window. He saw the girls in their seats, and the beautiful teacher Miss O'Dell, walking around the room, helping the students with their work. He watched her, fascinated with his own achievements. He had gone 50 years into the past, and was watching his own country's history. The window was partly open, but he could not hear the quiet questions of the individual students.

When the last lesson came to an end, she said, "Alright, remember your home assignment about the effects of war on the family is due tomorrow. If any of you have fathers in the infantry, who are overseas in the war effort, then draw on your feelings about that."

The girls went home.

Miss O'Dell sat at her desk and wrote in a folder for several minutes. He watched her and felt frustrated by the fact that he could not involve himself in the established flow of history. It would have been such fun to meet her and tell her of his invention in the future and travels back to her time. However, he must not do that.

Some pollen in the air got into his nostrils, and he suddenly sneezed. 

Miss O'Dell glanced up, and looked in his direction. He edged back, and began to climb down the vine. Soon he saw her looking out of the window. He looked up at her neck and face, as she looked out. Seeing nothing, she looked down, and saw him.

She gaped in surprise, and leaned over, reached down and grabbed him, before he could climb down out of her reach.

He wondered what he should say to her. She would have many questions, and he could not alter her knowledge, by introducing an awareness of time travel devices and reduction effects in her time.

"What sort of little creature are you?" she asked.

"I'm sorry, Miss O'Dell. I can't possibly tell you."

"Well I can't make you, I suppose," she said, "But I can make use of you. If I sprinkle some herbs onto you, I think you'll make a scrumptious evening meal for me. I'll take you home, and pick some herbs from the garden."

"Miss O'Dell, you mustn't do that."

"Why not? You appear outside my classroom, like a spy. You won't give me any indication of who you are. The only thing I know for sure is that you're a nice looking mouthful of meat."

"Alright, I'll have to tell you the truth. I'm not a spy for the other side. I'm a historian from the future. I came back to your time to study. I invented a time machine. But somehow the time travel process reduced me in size."

"Can I see this device?"

"Yes, I guess so," he said, thinking it was better than being eaten.

She carried him to the bushes, and collected his device on the way to her car. She put it in the glove box, and placed him just under the top of her dress, so that he could look out at the historical views of the streets. She reached her home, a luxurious upper mansion, and said, "Why didn't you tell me this before?"

"I didn't want to risk tampering with the past," he said.

"Weren't you taking a big risk by climbing the vine to my classroom window, while a full class of students was there?"

"Yes, I suppose so."

"Then why did you do it? I still don't think you're telling me the whole truth."

He explained the full story.

"I'm very flattered," she said, "I never imagined I'd mean that much to someone in 50 years’ time. I wonder if I’m still around at 75 in your time."

"I never imagined you would be prepared to eat me, before you found out about me," he said.

"I understand that you and your machine should not be found in this time period," she said, and put the machine on the floor, stamped on it until it was crushed to pieces, and then threw them all onto a wood fire in her living room, which she then lit, "It's my concession to the sanctity of the time stream, as you've described it. However, you've admitted that your presence here is because I made quite an impression on you."

"Yes," he said, embarrassed to have confessed his true feelings for her.

"Well you've made an impression on me too. I'm thankful for your explanation, but if you can't be found in this time period, it seems that history won't be affected by your trip back in time. So I don't see any reason why I shouldn't make that herbal dinner out of you as we discussed earlier."

"But I told you the truth. You agreed…"

"No. I simply said that I would definitely eat you, if you didn't tell me the truth. I never gave you any guarantee to spare you, if you did."

"So you're definitely going to eat me."

"I'd say so," she said, "However, it doesn't need to be tonight. I'd like to do something for you in return, since your presence here is not malevolent. School breaks up tomorrow. I'll put you into a cage, while I attend the last day of school. We'll spend the weekend here together, and then next week, I can drive you around to nice places, where nobody will see us, and give you an extensive tour of my time. Would you like to see all that, before I eat you one night next week?"
"Yes, thank you. At least that would be something special."

So he enjoyed the views of the past, and then came the day that he could not escape. Towards the end of an afternoon, she put him on a kitchen bench, and went out to the back garden to pick the herbs. He looked out at her lovely long dress while she did it, and then watched her come in. She stood in the kitchen, her upper body towering over him, and placed him gently onto a dish. She washed the herbs in the kitchen sink, and then sprinkled them over him.

"I think five minute in the oven will warm you up nicely without making you too hot," she said, and placed the dish in the oven.

Soon she came back and took him to the dining table and licked the herbs from him, and then drank some water to wash them from her tongue.

"Well thank you for coming back to my time, Hubert. It's an honour to have met you, for the reasons you told me. It's about to work out differently from the way you planned, but I hope you've gained something from your little time tour. Did you want to say anything before I finish the meal?"

"Would you have been interested in me, do you think?"

"You're handsome enough, that you might well have changed history, but you won't have the chance," she said, and licked her lips and his face and upper body, "Well, with no further delay, I shall now gobble you all up."

She put him into her mouth.

She let him lie on her tongue for a while, and then gulped him into her throat and down to her stomach. He lay in her stomach, thinking of all the might-have-beens which could have occurred, had he not been caught outside her classroom that day.

Gordi was a 13 year old student of Miss Corlani’s time travel class. He went to the shops one Saturday, looking at comic books, and then went to the Food Mall Centre for lunch. One of his teachers Miss Woodfield was staring at him from another table, where she was also eating. She wore a red cardigan and a black dress. Then she brought her lunch over to his table. 

She asked him to her house for lunch the next day, as she had something she wanted to show him. He went around on the day, and she served their lunch. They ate, and then she showed him a device, which reduced him to tiny size.

"Don't worry, it can be reversed," she said, "I wanted to play a special game with you. I hadn't finished designing this technology until last year. I was hoping to shrink you, let you hide, until I found and caught you, and then eat you, by swallowing you whole, but not all the way down. Then I’d cough you up again, restore your size and we could play the game again another day. You could be my little Dollipop.”

"It's incredible," he said, "An amazing way to use your mouth."

"Would you mind doing that?"

"Not at all, if it would make you happy. Are you asking me if we can play such a game today?"

"Would you like to?"

"I'd be happy to. It sounds exciting, especially since I don't have to be eaten permanently."

He agreed to this exciting chance to be with the beautiful teacher in any capacity. She explained that the house had once belonged to Miss Balfour, who had moved away now. He remembered Miss Balfour and thought that both teachers were beautiful.

Each weekend he enjoyed coming over and playing the game.

One rainy day, they were playing it as usual. Miss Woodfield found him hiding in her bedroom, picked him up and put him into her mouth. She gulped him down her throat, and then coughed him up again.

The next day, he decided to experiment with his time machine, just for a short trip. He waited until the end of the Sunday, around bedtime, and then set the machine to travel to Miss Woodfield’s house at the beginning of the day. He would let her think that it was his morning self coming around to play the game as usual.

Just as the time machine reached her garden, lightning struck struck it, and something happened. The machine surged, and shrank with him shrinking inside it.

The storm had suddenly vanished. It was not raining, not even overcast.

He did not know it yet, but he was now much further in the past than he had intended to go. He slipped under Miss Woodfield’s door and into the house.

Gordi wondered what had happened, and then noticed that a woman came in, wearing a dark blue dress. She wasn’t Miss Woodfield, but Miss Balfour.

When the machine had received the lightning surge, it had moved further back in time, crossing the period which had been affected by the Ring of Reversal. Both Gordi and the machine were reduced to tiny size, not by the lightning, as Gordi believed, but by the dispersed shrinking energy from the Ring of Reversal’s side effects. At this point in time, Colleen had not even invented her shrinking device yet.

Since the table leg was between him and the door, he found himself peeking around it at her. She could not see him. She walked over to the wall, and took a pen from her pocket and crossed off a day on a hanging calendar. He looked at it. It was back in the days when Colleen had been a teacher at the school, but before he’d even been her student. This Colleen hadn’t met him yet. His real time self was still in prep school.

"The time machine must have accidentally sent me much further back in time! Miss Woodfield in my time probably doesn’t even know that this has happened to me. She’ll be wondering why I’m not there to play the gobbling game. I'll have to sneak into Colleen’s pantry for food to live on, until I work out what to do," he thought.

Colleen looked breathtakingly beautiful, as she walked over and sat at the desk. He stayed hidden until she left the room.

He ran out of the room and crept behind as many concealing objects as he could, until he saw her sitting on an armchair.

At least he could enjoy looking up at her beautiful face, dreaming of whatever miracle might enable him to return to a time when she knew him and be friends with her.

He did so for days, and would sneak into the pantry or kitchen at nights, light matches to see his way around, and help himself to food which she would not miss. It would take him fifteen minutes to climb up onto the pantry bench, but he had the whole night to do it, and could sleep in a concealed soft piece of carpet under a cupboard in the lounge room during the daytimes.

One night, he made his way up as usual, at around ten o'clock, just after he had heard her going to bed. He felt about for the box of matches, and bumped something. It must have been a cup, which then fell off the bench, and crashed loudly on the floor.

"She must have heard that," he thought, "There's no time to climb down, and nowhere to hide on this bench! … She's coming down the stairs now. What am I going to do?"

Colleen walked into the room and turned the light on. She saw the broken cup on the floor, and then saw him.

"I didn't expect such a tiny trespasser," she said, in a strict tone, "What are you doing here, little leprechaun?"

"I’m not a leprechaun. I was shrunken and teleported here from … somewhere else."

"And you thought you'd steal my food in the middle of the night! Well your punishment can be similar to your crime. I've never eaten a shrunken boy before. Tomorrow night I shall have you for dinner."

"No, please! I only took tiny amounts of food to survive. You didn't even know they were missing."

"That's not the point. You're still a tiny thief. It's a minor point anyway, because you look very mouth watering. So whether I eat you as a punishment or purely for my own pleasure, I'm definitely going to do it."

She picked him up and took him to her bedroom, got into bed, and lay down, resting him on the pillow beside her face.

This younger Colleen had no reason to show him any concern.

"My name's Miss Balfour," she said, and turned the reading lamp down to a dim setting on the wall above the back of the bed.

"Miss Balfour, how can you eat me like this?"

"I'll do it, because I'd like to."

"Don't you think this is a bit unfair to me?"

"I only need to concern myself with how I feel about it," she said, and licked his face,

            "which is this: You are a delicious little boy. I've caught you, and I'm going to gobble you all up. Now let's get some sleep."

When she'd fallen asleep, he snuggled against her soft cheek.

In the morning, he waited for her to awaken and said, "It was comfortable, and nice."

"That's fine. You'll be very nice yourself tonight." She spent the day in the house, and then went ahead with her awesome plan at dinner time.

When Bertie was 9, he had been given some money for his 9th birthday, and decided to go and look at the shops after school. He found a science fiction magazine with a cover story about shrinking, and went to buy a copy. After he had handed the money to the shop assistant, he turned to see that a beautiful lady was behind him in the queue, and she was holding a copy of the same magazine to purchase.

“It looks interesting, doesn’t it?” she asked.

“Yes,” said Bertie.

She bought the magazine and then followed him out to the street.

“Since we both like the same magazine, would you like to come over for afternoon tea, and we could read it at the same time and then talk about it? I’m Doris.”

“Yes please Mrs….”

“It’s Miss,” said Doris, “I never married. I always wanted to meet a tiny boyfriend, ever since I was 17 in my second last year of high school. I used to think how wonderful it would be to have someone who was only as tall as my finger. But I never did. I’m 36 now.”

She drove him to her home, and they had pancakes together and then sat down on the couch to read the shrinking story. They talked about it for a while, and then she drove him home, to save time.

It was years before he was old enough to get to her home again under his own steam, and by then he had learned enough from Miss Corlani’s science class to build a machine that could control the dimensions of time and space. He was 13 and keen to see Doris again. He set the time controls for the year that he calculated that she would be 17. He set the location controls for her house and then arrived on her desk at around 1 ½ inches tall on an afternoon, after school for her. The Ring of Reversal’s side effects had gotten him too. He thought of her longing and realised that he was now in a much better position to win her over, even though this Doris had never seen him before.

He had quite literally appeared on top of her desk, while she was sitting there doing her homework.

Doris looked over at him in surprise, and put down her pen.

“Where did you come from?”

“I teleported in this machine,” he said, unwilling to confuse her with talk of being from the future.

“I’ve always wanted to meet a little boy like you. I’m Doris,” she said, thinking that he had teleported from another planet.

“Then I’m glad to be the one you’ve met. I’m Bertie,” said Bertie.

“You look younger than me. How old are you?” she asked.

“I’m 13,” said Bertie.

“I’m 17,” said Doris, and then added in a delightfully mischievous voice, “I hope you like older women.”

“I do now that I’ve met you,” he said.

“Little Bertie, I think I’d like to kiss you,” said Doris.

Her relatively huge lips had looked inviting enough even before she had issued such an irresistible offer.

“I’d love it,” said Bertie.

He watched her feminine hand approach him, saw her fingers opening and felt them closing gently around him. It was awesome, to say the least. He looked past her chest up to her neck and then her lips, and saw them get closer, and then felt her full lower lip enveloping his face. It was something which he now realised had been in his own subconscious ever since he had met the 36 year old Doris, when he’d been 9.

“Will you stay here and live on my bed and keep me company for always?” she asked.

“How could I go back home after a kiss like that?” said Bertie.

That night they were lying in her bed, with a reading lamp on. She had smuggled him up some dinner after having her own with her mother, and then talked with him until they had gone to bed.

“Bertie, if you had a mattress your own size, and it was very comfortable, would it matter if it wasn’t completely dry?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” said Bertie, “What did you have in mind?”

“My tongue,” said Doris, “I think it would be lovely to have you sleeping against it.”

She was asking him to sleep in her mouth! He had been admiring it every time she spoke, and now could not believe his ears.

“I think your tongue would be perfect,” said Bertie, “If you like, you can open your mouth and I’ll climb inside now.”

“Thank you for being so obliging,” said Doris, and felt him sliding over her lower lip, which felt absolutely magnificent to him too.

For years they lived together secretly, until one day in when she was 28. Doris was out shopping one day, with Bertie hidden inside her clothing, when he peeked between the fibres and saw her go into the very shop where her future self would meet his 9 year old self in 8 years time. She bought a much earlier issue of the same magazine, although without a shrinking story in this case, and took it to the park to read.

“I’m glad I found that shop,” she said, “I’ve always liked this science fiction magazine.”

“Yes, it’s the only newsagent in the village,” said Bertie.

“How did you know that?” asked Doris.

“I’m actually from the village myself,” said Bertie.

“But that’s not possible. I searched everywhere from age 14 onwards for tiny boys. They just don’t exist.”

She had never met any leprechauns, who would not be discovered for certain until Colleen’s time, and then the discovery would be reversed by the Ring of Reversal.

“I was a full sized boy, until I shrank with a machine,” said Bertie.

“You couldn’t have. There’s no such technology invented yet,” said Doris.

“I guess I’ll have to tell you everything,” he said.

“I should think that you will,” said Doris.

Her full lips were set in a serious pout, and her eyes demanded an explanation. Suddenly the relationship between them, which he had enjoyed like a fantasy made real for so long, had taken a surprising turn.

“I travelled into the year that you were 17 from the year that you were 40. I met your 36 year old self in that shop in the year I was 9. She told me about your longing for a small boy and I really wanted to be the one. So I invented a time machine and came back to when you were 17. Somehow the time travelling had a side effect of shrinking me. So I knew I’d make a good impression on you.”

“But don’t you know what you’ve done?” she asked, “For now you’re a chronological contradiction, existing as two Berties both in this year, one being a baby, and the other being the time travelling you I see before me. I can’t let you stay like that. You’ll have to go back to your time.”

“But I don’t want to go. I want to stay with you.”

“You can. Go to me in your own time. I’ll wait for you.”

She took him back to his machine and told him to get into it and depart.

He went in and thought and took one desperate step.

He pressed a sequence of control buttons and then walked out of the machine onto her floor where she’d placed him just in front of her bed on the carpet.

“You must make the return trip,” she said, “I won’t let you go anywhere in this time. Now get in and go.”

He stepped aside, further away from the machine, and saw her stepping sideways herself to block his path.

Suddenly the machine exploded and did very little damage to the carpet, but left a cloud of smoke for a few seconds, until it dissipated.

“I set the self destruct timer,” said Bertie, “Now you can’t make me go.”

“Well after years of having you sleep in my mouth, I still have one more way to make sure there aren’t two Berties in this time,” she said, “This time I’ll gulp you down to my tummy.”

As she knelt down, he ran under the bed, backwards, as fast as he could, and saw her crawling to the edge of the bed, and then reaching in with her hand. She grabbed him and sat up on her carpet. Then she took him to the table where they had first met, and sat there.

“The first time I lifted you up here, it was to kiss you,” she said, “This will be a very different encounter, and our last, might I add.”

Doris opened her mouth wide, showing him her marvellous pink sparkling tongue again and placed him helplessly upon it. He could see into her throat, and knew what awaited him.

He thought back over all that had happened, and couldn’t believe that it had come to this. He was inside her mouth, and about to be swallowed whole. Perhaps he could offer to rebuild the machine and return to his own time. What if it didn’t work? Then she’d insist on swallowing him anyway. She must have been a very extensive devotee of both science fiction and subsequently discovered science fact concepts, to take this hard line with him.

Then he felt her finger touching him, forcing him to the back of her mouth. He didn’t have far to go, as he was about 80% of the length of her tongue at his current height.

Slowly she pushed him with her finger, using far more pressure than his tiny body could hope to resist, particularly when her tongue had no traction to stop his movement. He slid into her throat, and felt himself being gulped down, down, down into her tummy.

14 year old Ferdinand was walking through a forest behind his old school. He saw a tiny leprechaun woman in trouble, and used his size to save her from the stream she was drowning in.

She told him of a nearby passage leading underground to her kingdom, and he carried her to its entrance. She could fit into it, but he could not. He was like a giant.

"Thank you so much, handsome boy!" she said, and waved goodbye.

He thought the tiny person was so pretty. He told his friend Ellie Blish about it, and she offered to shrink him. He took her to the tunnel entrance, and waited for her to shrink him to tiny size with her recently acquired device. He thanked her and watched her walk off.

He was about to enter the tunnel, when a woman's hand grabbed him from behind.

He turned to see that she was more beautiful than the tiny person, and much older than him.

She sat down and leaned against a rock, and said, "I'm from many years into your future. I have knowledge that would change your mind about going into that tunnel. In my time, I was eating my lunch in an outdoor mall. I noticed a handsome younger man staring at me. It was your future self. I came over to sit with him and asked if your wife would be happy about you staring at another woman? Your future self said he'd never married, which surprised me, until he explained that he went into this tunnel today and told the tiny person woman how much he loved her. She told him she was sorry, but he was too young for her. He then had to get back to his schoolfriend who’d shrunken him, in order to get restored to normal size.”

She had to be telling the truth. She knew all about his plans, and the existence and location of the secret tunnel, and the very day he planned to go down it.
"It was very kind of you to come back and save me from humiliating myself with the tiny woman," he said, "but did my future self tell you where to find my friend Ellie?"

"I didn't think to ask," she said, “I think I can change the past a little more than that. I wanted to arrive in this time after you'd shrunk, but before you'd gone into the tunnel. My time machine's only a minute's walk away. I've got a picnic basket in it, which I brought back in time."

This woman had, in Ferdinand’s present day time, been one of Sandra Corlani’s time travel students.

She took him to the time machine, collected the picnic basket, and placed him gently on the top of the folded rug, which was resting atop other picnic items. He was level with the top of the basket, and could still look at her, and the forest, as she started walking deeper into it.

"I was so pleased to hear that a tiny young boy existed back in this time. That's why I decided to use my time machine."

"You're a nice friendly lady, and having a picnic lunch with you would be fun, but I don't know how I'm going to cope, when you've returned to your own time."

"Once the picnic's finished, you won't need to worry about anything. I came back in time to enjoy a delicious rare treat for a picnic lunch. That's why you're in the basket. As soon as we find a nice place to spread the rug, I'm going to sit down and eat you."

"As bad as my tiny size is, we know I can change it eventually. So I do thank you for coming back to see me, but I must respectfully ask you not to eat me."

"Then I must respectfully inform you that I'm going to do it," she said.

He looked up at her face as she walked. It was calm, attractive, and friendly, but she meant every word of what she had just casually announced. Her long skirt swayed gracefully as she continued walking. She found a suitable spot and sat down and enjoyed her meal.

20 year old Chad was at his university ball. He did not have a girlfriend. So he wondered how the evening would pan out. After the meal, a lady got up from the table and walked over to him. She was 35 and very beautiful. She told him her name was Jillian.

She had medium length dark hair and wore a green t-shirt and long black skirt.

"Would you like to dance with me?" she asked, as other couples got up to dance.

"Yes, thank you," he said, "If your husband won't mind."

"I'm not married," she said, "I came here to meet you."

"Really?" he asked, "Why me, if we've never met before?"

She put her arms around him in and rested her body against his, and kissed him.

"To me, we have met before. Tonight you will time travel back a few years, and meet my younger self. You will do something, which will give her a great deal of pleasure. That's why I wanted to come to your formal, and meet you."

"So what do I do for you in the past?" he said, somewhat incredulous.

"It's best if I don't say for now. You'll find out, when it happens."

"Alright. I'll have to take your word for it. Time travel sounds so hard to believe, especially when I don't know the first thing about how to do it."

"It will happen, rest assured. Are you enjoying the dancing?"

"Yes, it's nice."

She held him a little tighter to express her appreciation of the compliment.

"Would you like to walk in the gardens with me?"

"Alright," he said.

She held hands with him, and led him out to the gardens. They walked to a secluded scenic lamplit spot, and sat beside each other on a seat.

She took his hand and ran his finger over her lower lip.

"Thank you," she said at last, and hugged him, "I should go now. You'll meet my younger self soon. I had slightly shorter hair."

"I can't imagine what I could have done to make you so happy."

"It'll make sense, when you arrive in the past. It may be hard to believe, but just accept what I know to have already happened for me. Goodbye, dear friend."

"How will I get to the past?"

"Don't worry about that. It'll happen when the time comes."

Chad was not one of the students of Sandra Forlani’s time travel class. In fact, he hadn’t even gone to the same school. However, there had been so much time travel activity from the techniques used by those who had, that a temporary time rift had opened, one that was unknown to Chad or Sandra or any of her students. It was about to take its course on Chad. Even Jillian didn’t know that this was how the time travel of Chad would come about. She only knew that it would.

She stood up, and walked away. He watched her walk along the path and out of sight.

He thought for half an hour about how he might get into the past. Then he gave up worrying and started walking along the path, and then he noticed that there was a lot of mist and fog. 

Soon he reached the point where he could not see the path in front of him. He found himself walking blindly. Still, he couldn't make out anything but white mist all around him. Then the mist eventually began to clear, but it was no longer dark. He could see sunlight reaching through the gaps, which began to form in the mist.

Then he noticed that the trees seemed taller. In fact all of the plants did.

The mist fully cleared away, and he saw the light of day, and something else. He was now not even as tall as the leaves on the vines, which grew. Sitting on a familiar seat was a lady with dark hair, a white shirt, and a grey coat and matching skirt. The Ring of Reversal’s dispersed shrinking energy from an earlier timeline had also caught up with Chad, while he was time travelling through the temporary rift.

"I must have gone back in time, for everything to have changed so much, and that's the way she described herself. The mist must have shrunken me as a side effect of its time travel properties," he thought.

He looked up at her, as she read.

He was wondering how to introduce himself to a woman who'd never met him (but whose future self he'd already met), when she eventually looked up and saw him.

She reached down, picked him up and pushed his chest against her lower lip. Then the front of her tongue came out and licked his face. She thought for a moment, and then placed him in her lap, between her shirt and the book, and continued reading. He wanted to talk to her, and make the friendship as real for her as it had already become for him in his own time, but he did not know what to say, since he was somewhat confused by the time paradox. So he just rested quietly in her lap.

She raised her hand to her lip, and moistened her thumb and finger, and then turned another page. The way she had licked her finger was strangely exciting.

"She said to just accept things as they happen," he thought, "So I needn't worry. I'll just sit here comfortably and see what happens next. Perhaps she'll introduce herself to me, when she's finished the book."

After a while, she looked up and turned her head to the left, which made her neck look even lovelier. Then she placed the book into a small carry case, and picked him up in her other hand. She stood up and began walking. She reached the footpath and walked down to a car, put down the case, opened the door, and placed the case on the passenger seat. She sat in the driver's seat, and placed him in her lap again. He looked up as she drove. Later, she stopped the car, and took him in her fingers, stood up and got out of the car. They were in the driveway of a lovely mansion. She walked up the front steps, unlocked the door, and carried him into the house.

She took a plate, and put some lettuce on it, and then placed him on the plate. He was wondering if he should ask first, before nibbling some lettuce. Then she placed a thick glass dinner dome over the plate and walked out of the room. She went to the letter box and came back with several days' accrued letters.

Through the open doorway, he saw her sit down in the next room and start reading through the mail.

He began to nibble the lettuce. When he'd had enough, he thought, "It's a pity she covered the food with the dome. Now I'm stuck in here too, until she comes back."

She opened all of the envelopes, discarded them, and then brought the letters to the table, and placed them beside the dome. She filled a glass with tap water, and came over and sat at the table.

She took the dinner dome off and began to read the letters, holding them with one hand, and reaching for pieces of lettuce with the other hand.

"I'd better not talk now," he thought, "She won't want to be interrupted, while she's reading."

She soon finished the lettuce, and continued to read.

"Lettuce is nice, but I would have liked some meat too," he thought, "Maybe she's a vegetarian."
Her free hand enclosed him and placed him into her mouth!

"She's not a vegetarian!" he thought, "She must have been planning to eat me, ever since she first found me! I'd better talk to her now, before she closes her mouth, or I'll never have the chance to find out what I'm supposed to do for her in this time."

She closed her mouth, just as he was about to call out.

"It's too late!" he thought, and then he remembered that her older self had told him that the past she remembered was inevitable. So he must have had a chance to speak to her. He pushed upwards, trying to force her mouth open. He thought of morse code, and started tapping a message onto her tongue, and hoped she would feel what it meant:

            "Must talk to you. Please open mouth."

She opened her mouth, and took him out.

"Oh thank you," he said.

"You can speak English. Who are you?" she said.

"I'm from the future. I was walking from my university ball in what for you is a few years from now. The school's just three blocks away. I got surrounded by a cloud of mist. The mist somehow took me into the past, to your time, and reduced me to this size. I'm actually a normal 20 year old boy in my time."

"I see. I didn't realise any of that."

"It's alright. The main thing is that we got to talk, before you almost ate me."

She took him to the car, fetched the bag with her book, took it upstairs to her  bedroom, got into the bed, and sat up in the bed, and placed him in her lap again.

"I think it will take me about an hour to finish this book. It will give you more of a chance to prepare yourself this time. I promise I won't eat you-" she said, allowing him a split second of relief, "- until I've read the rest of the book."

"But now that you know who I am, I was expecting you wouldn't eat me at all."

It was all he could say, without revealing that her future self had already told him that he had a special destiny to make her happy. Somehow, he believed, it would all work itself out, and he would do his good deed. He wondered if he ever got his full size back. Her future self had not mentioned the change in size."

"Little boy, I realise this is not easy for you, but let me explain something. I went through a difficult time a month ago, and I've been feeling a sadness I've never known before. It was there until I saw you today."

"I'm sorry to hear what you're going through," he said, and then realised that he had been pulled back in time to be a special friend for her, at a time in her life, when she needed him.

"When I picked you up on the log, I knew as soon as I tasted you, that I had something to look forward to. The sadness began to lift, for the first time since it began. This chance to eat a nice little boy like you will give me a lot of pleasure."

He froze in shock at those last four words. Her future self  had said that he would do something to give her a lot of pleasure. He was about to try to talk her out of it, when he remembered her other comment, that to her it was the immutable history. No matter what he said or did, he would end up being eaten by her. There was no point in trying to escape, or trying to discourage her. All he could do was wait while she read the book, and be eaten. Since he could not change it, he resolved to make it as pleasant as possible for her to enjoy.

"I understand," he said, "I hope you enjoy eating me very much."

"I'm sure I will, and you're very polite to say so," she said, and picked him up and kissed him, "Now just rest while I finish the book."

"Could I lie where your shoulder meets the base of your neck?" he asked, thinking it would enable him to see how many pages she had left.

"I'd be happy for you to rest there," she said, and put him there. He enjoyed the comfort of it, and watched her hands. He watched the number of pages to be read dwindling, knowing that his remaining time was dwindling too.

He thought back to the pleasant seeming mystery, which had surrounded her dancing with him and walking in the gardens. He realised now that he had enjoyed those experiences on borrowed time. Now he must pay the inevitable cost. No wonder she had said it was better if she didn't tell him what he would do for her.

She read it, closed the book, put it on the bedside table, and took him gently in her fingers.

"I'm in love with you. Is it too much to ask for you to give me some kisses first?"

She lay down and kissed him for over an hour.

"Are you ready to be eaten now?"

"Yes. Don't be unhappy anymore. Enjoy this meal and look forward to pleasant times ahead."

"Thank you very much. You've been very good natured about this, since we had that little talk before. You didn't interrupt my reading, or try to argue with my decision. You're a well mannered encouraging young boy. If I was much younger, and you were full sized, I'd have considered whether you might be a person for me to go on dating."

"I would have certainly asked you," he said, "You look lovely."

She held him up to her eye and said, "Well you've been very kind to say so, and you look adorably handsome yourself." 

He realised that this was the close look she would need to recognise him in a few years' time at the formal.

"But I'll never have the chance to be with anyone," he said.

"I know, and I'm grateful for what this is costing you. Nothing you might have said would have discouraged me from eating you in a moment, but I will always remember the way you coped with this experience. I'm very fond of you, and I will remember you fondly forever."

This was why she would come to the formal at his university in what, to him, was the first place.

Ellie Blish continued to arbitrarily shrink boys at the school for her amusement. She reduced a boy named Edmond to tiny size with the machine, and then picked him up and deposited him in the bushes on the outskirts of the school grounds. He waited until morning tea time soon he saw a few girls coming and sitting around talking, and eating, including Harriet Stone whom he’d admired for some time, as he looked out from the edge of the flowerbed. He took out his lunch, which had been reduced by the device along with himself, when Ellie had fired at him. He ate all of it, and made sure to deliberately rub some cream from the bun on his cheeks. Then he called out to the girls, and let them see him.

Harriet crawled in close and stared at him.

“I’m Edmond,” he said.

“I’m Harriet.”

The other girls introduced themselves.

“I’ve been eating a sticky cream bun and it’s left cream on my cheeks,” he said, “Since you have such a big tongue, would you mind licking me clean, Harriet?”

“Of course. I’ll be glad to help,” said Harriet.

The girl gently picked him up in the palm of her hand and swished her enormous tongue over his entire face and cleaned all the cream off with a single giant lick.

“Thank you, Harriet. You’ve turned me into a nice clean boy.”

Harriet licked him again.

“And tonight I’m going to turn you into the main course of my dinner!” she said, smiling in the most beautiful taunting manner.

“Are you serious, Harriet?” asked another girl.

“I’m very serious,” said Harriet, “He’s delicious!”

Harriet put him in her pocket and returned to go on with the day’s classes. During lunch hour, he looked up at her eating and eagerly anticipated his turn.

After school, Harriet started walking out of the school grounds with her friends.

“You can’t eat him, Harriet,” said the girl who had asked if she’d been serious, “He’s just a little boy.”

“I can eat whoever I want to eat!” said Harriet defiantly, “Say goodbye to my friends, little boy. By the time I see them again, you’ll be far down in my tummy.”

“Goodbye,” said Edmond.

“I think we should tell Miss Woodfield or Miss Corlani now,” said another girl.

“Oh you do, do you?” said Harriet, “I’m going to walk home with Edmond in my mouth. If Miss Woodfield or any other teacher comes anywhere near me, I’ll gulp him down before they can do anything about it. Or you can all just mind your own business, and he’ll at least have one more afternoon before I swallow him.”

Edmond didn’t want Harriet’s well-meaning friends to spoil his plans.

“You better just let her do it,” he said.

“Wise words, young lad. Now in you go, just to be sure,” said Harriet.

In front of her friends, she opened her mouth wide and placed him onto her tongue and then closed it. Half an hour later she opened her mouth and he could see that she was sitting at a table in her house.

She took him out and placed him on her shoulder.

“It was nice being in there,” he said, “Your tongue is very big, Harriet.”

“It was only nice, because I didn’t swallow you yet,” teased Harriet, “You can expect some huge gulps the next time you go into my mouth!”

“You’ve got me, Harriet. I’ll just have to be swallowed.”

She laughed and smiled.

She did her homework and then took him to the dining room table and sat down, looking lovelier than ever.

“Goodbye little boy. I’m going to eat you all up for my dinner now,” she said.

She put out her tongue in a taunting manner and licked him.

“You’re the tastiest meal I’ve ever had,” she said, “Now I’m going to swallow you.”

Harriet put him into her mouth and lifted her tongue up and down a little, probably to tease him. Then she suddenly drew him into her throat. He was being swallowed! It was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to him. He went down and down and down and into her tummy.

He felt a tingling all around him and realised that her stomach was beginning to digest him.

“Now that I know how much fun this was, I’ll always remember it, but I wish I could go back to this morning,” he thought.

Suddenly he felt time unravelling, and realised that the technique he’d learned from Miss Corlani was working for him, even though he had used it subconsciously. He had sent his consciousness back in time several hours. It was the beginning of the day. He was back on the footpath approaching the school bus stop. This time he went to school and avoided Ellie Blish and wasn’t shrunken by her nor eaten by Harriet.

One day he decided to tell Harriet the whole story of the original timeline and how he’d altered it.

“To me, you actually did eat me,” he said, and explained how he had briefly altered time.

“And you used this … time power of yours to change things back, so that I hadn’t eaten you after all.”

“Yes, but it was so much fun when you did,” he said.

“But you’re the only one who gets to remember it,” said Harriet.

 “Would you like it if I could still swallow you now?” she asked.

“I think I would,” he said.

“I’d like it very much too,” said Harriet, “At least I can still lick your cheeks, even though you don’t make a mess with your desserts anymore.”

She secretly invited him around to her home after school, promising that she would lick his cheeks again.

After the licking, she served them both some drinks, and drank hers with a hearty gulp. He looked at her neck and then drank his own too. Suddenly he shrank to tiny size.Then Ellie Blish stepped into view, and explained that Harriet had befriended her and told her the whole story. Harriet picked him up and placed him on a baking tray and put it into the oven. Then she showed Ellie out, and returned to the kitchen. She sat in front of the open oven doorway and looked in at him.

“Now you can swallow me,” said Edmond.

“I certainly can!” said Harriet, “I’ll be back in a few minutes, when you’re warmed up and ready to be eaten.”

She soon served him at the table and swallowed him.

He used his time reversal power and went back to just before he had accepted her invitation to her home and told her:

“I won’t come over now.”
“I can eventually find another way to trick you into Ellie’s range,” she said.

“But I can still unravel time and come back,” he said.

“Then I guess I never get to have you in my tummy,” she said, “But you must have liked it a lot, if you waited to be eaten by me a second time, before reversing time.”

“I do. I just don’t want things to stay that way, with me being eaten forever.”

“I understand. I like what you’ve done for me, even though I can’t remember it. Would you like me to go steady with you?”

“Yes, Harriet.”

So, with only Edmond able to recall the times he had been eaten by Harriet, he became her steady boyfriend. Ellie remained a friend of both of them and would occasionally shrink Edmond, so that he could be eaten by Harriet and then reverse time to escape.

Perhaps the most extraordinairy adventure of all of the students of Sandra Corlani’s time travel class was the one that happened to a 17 year old boy who had a major crush on Sandra Corlani herself. His name was Ryan, and he had attended her time travel class from the first day, not because of an interest in time travel per se, but because of an interest in Miss Corlani.

When the school term drew to an end, she taught the final lesson after school as usual, and waited while all of the students packed up and went home. Ryan stayed behind waiting as well, until he was the only student left in the room.

“I’ve really enjoyed this class, because you were teaching it,” he said.

“And you’ve done very well.”

“Would you like to go out on a date with me?” he asked her.

She accepted, and they made their date for dinner, followed by a walk in the school grounds during the first week of the holidays. When they had circled the grounds once, he took her in his arms in a secluded spot and kissed her passionately.

“Well that was nice,” she said, “But do you know how old I am?”

“What’s wrong with you being in your thirties?”

“I’m 57.”

“Really?” he said, watching her blushing, “It makes no difference to me.”

“But you could make the difference, if you applied the class you’ve just completed. I was a teacher here from my early twenties until I was widowed at 46, and I didn’t get married until I was 41. All you’d need to do is go back a little over 30 years each time you made a date with my younger self. There’d still be a few years’ age difference, but you might as well make the trips.”

“Could I spend these holidays with you as you are now, and then travel back after school on the first day of term?”

“You really meant it, when you said it made no difference. I’d like that,” she said.

When the first day of school term came around, he took a backpack time machine he’d built out of his schoolbag after school, in a secluded part of the school grounds, and set it for 32 years earlier. Sandra Corlani would be 25 back then. Lurking in the bushes, looking for someone to shrink (with the device that she had once acquired from Colleen Balfour without her knowledge) was the mischievous Ellie Blish She had no idea what Ryan was doing with a peculiar looking backpack. All she knew was that she had chosen him as her next target, because he was in a place where nobody would see her using the shrinking device. His own desire for secrecy had made sure of that.

Ellie fired the shrink beam at Ryan, just as Ryan activated the time travel backpack.

The combined effect was extraordinairy.

From Ellie’s perspective, Ryan seemed to simply vanish instead of dwindling in size. From Ryan’s perspective, he began time travelling and fracturing into multiple tiny versions of himself, each one with all of his memories up until that moment, each one landing in a different time period. 

The process of shrinking and time travelling also duplicated the backpack, but completely shorted out its circuits. The reduced time travelling backpacks would never work again, for any of the Ryans lost in time.

Ryan#1 arrived in the year when Sandra Corlani was 25, just as he planned to. He had no knowledge of how far in the future from that year each of the other Ryans had ended up. Ellie Blish had shrunken him from behind. So he had no idea that she had caused his mishap with a shrinking device. As he had crossed the time period affected by the Ring of Reversal, he would have shrunken anyway, without her interference. However, the combined effect of both a time machine and a shrinking device had caused him to fracture into several Ryans, dispersed in time.

Ryan#1 was sure that the younger Sandra Corlani would be the only person who might be able to solve the conundrum and help him to be reunited with his other selves at his full size. He had arrived at night. He walked through the school grounds, until he came upon a very reassuring sight. Sandra Corlani was seated on a bench in the outer gardens, wearing a long dark green coat, buttoned like a dress, with a pink shirt underneath. The top of the shirt was showing above the V shaped joining of the coat.

“Sandra!” he called out.

She stood up, walked over and looked down at him.

“Who are you?”

“I’m a student of yours, 32 years into your future. You taught a time travel class. I fell in love with you, finished the course, went out on dates with you, and you asked me to come back to meet this version of you. However, something went wrong with the time travelling process. It split me into many tiny versions of myself. The others are scattered over the next 32 years of time. I think you’re the only person who could help me undo that effect.”

“To me, time travel is only a hypothetical concept. I must have started working on it at some point in the future, but I don’t even know where to start now, let alone how to solve whatever went wrong with it.”

“Then I guess I’m stuck here at this size, but it wouldn’t matter if I’m with you.”

“You’re sweet,” she said, and picked him up and took him home.

She took off the coat and kissed him several times, and then lay down and let him snuggle against her cheek and her neck.

The next morning, a Saturday in this time, she put on a tracksuit and parka and went for a walk to the school grounds and then set him down to watch her taking a jog around the sports oval. She looked incredibly athletic, running with her major size difference, until she ran over to where he was, picked him up and pressed her lips to his face again. Then he saw and felt her tongue sliding across her lower lip and his face. It was the most amazing experience of his life.

Suddenly she withdrew her face a little, stuck her tongue out at him, stuffed him into her mouth and gulped him down her throat. He could hardly believe it.

Ryan#2 arrived at a point in time when Sandra Corlani was 30. He had no knowledge of what would be happening to Ryan#3 onwards in the future. However, he did seem to have a memory of what had happened to Ryan#1 in the past. The situation called for considerable thought. Presumably 30 year old Sandra Corlani would show him initial romantic affection and then gobble him all up too. Since he had told 25 year old Sandra what had happened to his other selves, she would remember it at age 30 and onwards. She might even have spent the last five years searching the school grounds periodically, looking out for his later selves. If she were prepared to eat him in every time period, then even a later version of him who met her after she’d perfected time travel would not be able to seek her help in restoring the remaining versions of himself. Even if she were to help him by then, there might be so few of him left in the timestream, that he could only hope to be a midget at best after they were reunited, and if that were even possible.

All of these considerations left him only two choices. He and Ryan#3 onwards could flee the school grounds and live out their lives at tiny size, scattered in time. Or they could let the Sandra Corlani at various points in her personal time line find him, romance him and eventually eat him. At least, if he did things that way, he would be with her as much as he could hope to be. Apart from that, being swallowed whole by her had been strangely thrilling, and he could look forward to several views of her mouth from age 30 to some point before she reached age 57.

It seemed to be mid afternoon. The school was quiet, and he wondered if she would be around. He didn’t have long to wonder. He saw her sitting on the lawn in front of the school pool, wearing a white pair of shorts and a white T shirt. He walked over to her, fully aware of the situation he would be walking into.

“You must be the next Ryan,” she said, confirming that she had understood and remembered what Ryan#1 had told her five years earlier.

To him, it had only been a matter of minutes earlier, as Ryan#2 had acquired the memory of what had happened to Ryan#1, and all of the Ryans were the same 17 years old that the original had been before the time travel experience.

“I guess you’ve only met one other,” he said, having made a split second decision that he would not let her know that each subsequent Ryan would know what she’d done to the first one.

It would enable him to roleplay, and even to attempt to escape her, without her knowing that he wanted to, if he or the later Ryans ever had second thoughts about exchanging romance for being eaten by her.Suddenly she withdrew her face a little, stuck her tongue out at him, stuffed him into her mouth and gulped him down her throat. He could hardly believe it.

Ryan#2 arrived at a point in time when Sandra Corlani was 30. He had no knowledge of what would be happening to Ryan#3 onwards in the future. However, he did seem to have a memory of what had happened to Ryan#1 in the past. The situation called for considerable thought. Presumably 30 year old Sandra Corlani would show him initial romantic affection and then gobble him all up too. Since he had told 25 year old Sandra what had happened to his other selves, she would remember it at age 30 and onwards. She might even have spent the last five years searching the school grounds periodically, looking out for his later selves. If she were prepared to eat him in every time period, then even a later version of him who met her after she’d perfected time travel would not be able to seek her help in restoring the remaining versions of himself. Even if she were to help him by then, there might be so few of him left in the timestream, that he could only hope to be a midget at best after they were reunited, and if that were even possible.

All of these considerations left him only two choices. He and Ryan#3 onwards could flee the school grounds and live out their lives at tiny size, scattered in time. Or they could let the Sandra Corlani at various points in her personal time line find him, romance him and eventually eat him. At least, if he did things that way, he would be with her as much as he could hope to be. Apart from that, being swallowed whole by her had been strangely thrilling, and he could look forward to several views of her mouth from age 30 to some point before she reached age 57.

It seemed to be mid afternoon. The school was quiet, and he wondered if she would be around. He didn’t have long to wonder. He saw her sitting on the lawn in front of the school pool, wearing a white pair of shorts and a white T shirt. He walked over to her, fully aware of the situation he would be walking into.

“You must be the next Ryan,” she said, confirming that she had understood and remembered what Ryan#1 had told her five years earlier.

To him, it had only been a matter of minutes earlier, as Ryan#2 had acquired the memory of what had happened to Ryan#1, and all of the Ryans were the same 17 years old that the original had been before the time travel experience.

“I guess you’ve only met one other,” he said, having made a split second decision that he would not let her know that each subsequent Ryan would know what she’d done to the first one.

It would enable him to roleplay, and even to attempt to escape her, without her knowing that he wanted to, if he or the later Ryans ever had second thoughts about exchanging romance for being eaten by her.

He looked up at her towering neck and imagined what it would be like to be gulped down inside it again. She looked more beautiful at 30 than she had at 25. Then he looked at her lips.

“I met the first Ryan, when I was 25, and he explained the situation. We dated for less than 24 hours, and then I swallowed him,” she said, “It was very enjoyable.”

“Maybe he liked it enough to think that it was worth it.”

“You’ll find out for yourself. I’m going to do the same to you.”

“Just the swallowing, or the dating as well?”

“Both.”

She picked him up and pressed her full shapely red lips to his tiny face and shoulders.

Then she reached down and took a white jumper from the lawn beside her, put it on and then lay down, resting her face on her forearms right in front of him and smiled at him. He stepped closer and kissed her huge cheek.

She kissed him again and then took him to her car. She sat him on the circular center of the steering wheel and began to drive home. He looked up at her lips, her neck, and her eyes, and felt even more excited than he been when 25 year old Sandra had been swallowing Ryan#1. This time the experience would be preceded by so much anticipation. When she reached her own driveway, she picked him up and placed him into her mouth. Her tongue looked breathtakingly beautiful as he lay upon it and awaited the gulp that carried him down her throat.

Ryan#3 arrived two years later, when Sandra Corlani was 32. In keeping with his pretence of ignorance of what had happened to Ryan#1 and Ryan#2, he found her in her classroom after school, and climbed up onto her desk to get her attention. She smiled at him as he told her what had happened to him, while he was well aware that she already knew.

Without any verbal preamble, Sandra picked him up and placed him into her mouth and closed it. All he could do was wait for the gulp.

Ryan#4 arrived at the school, in the year when Sandra was 35. He hid in her handbag until she put it down at home, and then concealed himself in her house while she slept and went to school the next day. He managed to access some of her food while she was at school and then waited until he saw her coming from the car to the front door. He decided to roleplay and let her catch him. She was wearing jeans and a woollen jumper. As soon as she had stepped into the house, he let her see him and then darted under a cupboard. It was marvelous to watch her get down on all fours, crawl towards the cupboard and try to reach for him with her hand, peeking in at him, until she eventually caught him and sat up.

She carried him to her desk and sat at it, towering over him.

“I already know that you’re one of the Ryans. And you might as well know that I’m going to gobble you up,” she said.

“Are you going to kiss me first?”

“I don’t see why not,” she said, and lifted him gently and pressed her lips against him several times.

Then she took him to her bedroom without having dinner that day, and lay down and let him lie beside her cheek. When she became drowsy, she asked him to climb into her mouth.

“I’m not going to swallow you now, just let you sleep on my tongue,” she said.

“It should make a nice soft bed,” he replied, and eased his way over her lower lip.

Early the next morning, she yawned in her sleep, and he decided to make a break for it, when he fell out of her mouth onto the pillow. He climbed down from the bed, made it out into her large back lawn, and started running. Soon she awoke and came running after him, now wearing her night skirt and woollen jumper.

She caught up to him, stood towering in front of him, put her hands on her hips and smiled down triumphantly. Then she squatted down, picked him up and took him inside again.

She gave him several more lovely kisses, took him to the kitchen bench and began to prepare him in a pavlova. Then she placed him in the oven, left the room and returned wearing a lovely white dress, sat down and looked across at the oven, until it was time to take him out and over to the table. She sat at the table, her lovely face and neck towering in front of him and smiled down. She spooned pavlova from around him and into her mouth, while he looked on in wonder. Eventually the spoon passed under him as well and lifted him high and placed him into her mouth. Down her 35 year old throat he went, exhilirated beyond his wildest dreams.

Ryan#5 arrived when she was 38, in the evening at the school. He saw her walking towards him in a long dress, with her hair mostly up. She sat down and began talking with him. She soon raised the subject of eating him. He told her that it didn’t matter any more than her being 57 in the future had ever mattered. He loved her anyway and wanted her to know it. She lay down and smiled adorably. She sat up again, picked him up and licked him with just the front end of her tongue. Then she put it out all the way and licked him several times. He felt her beautiful taste organ sliding over his shoulders, his neck and his entire face, and enjoyed every second of  it.

Then right there on the classroom carpet, she removed her dress to reveal a two piece bikini and lay down on her back. She let him lie on her neck for a while, then sat up and held him beside her while she stuck out her tongue in a side on view. Then she withdrew her tongue and opened her mouth and slid him in and out a few times.

Then her tongue came out and swished from side to side against his face, looking even better than it had done when she’d been 25. Then she popped him into her mouth and swallowed him.

Ryan#6 arrived when she was 40, to see her sitting with her arms folded, wearing a brown patterned skirt and a white blouse. She wasted no time on this occasion, simply announced, “I’m going to gobble you up,” placed him into her mouth for several minutes, and then gulped heavily.

Ryan#7 arrived when she was 46 and only just a widow, about to go into semi-retirment. She had her hair up, and wore an evening gown that reached just below her knees. She kissed him and swallowed him with the same speed of despatch that her 40 year old self had shown.

Ryan#8 met her at her age 49, but not at the school. As she was in semi-retirment, he had to go to her home. Having remembered the way to her house from Ryan#2’s ride on her steering wheel, he approached a school girl when nobody else was looking, and asked her to take him to Sandra’s front garden and leave him there. Then he snuck under Sandra’s door and soon saw her walking in his direction. Wearing a light brown skirt and a medium brown jumper, she was all smiles and kisses as she took him home and set him down on the carpet. He waited while she went and changed into a neck to knees dress. Then he saw her step forward and squat down to reach for him. Her legs looked awesome, as he compared their size with his own meagre dimensions and awaited yet another round of becoming her next meal. She stuck her tongue out at him several times. He saw how wide and thick and sparkly it was and noticed that it seemed to become more and more attractive with age. No wonder he’d liked her so much when she was 57.

She kissed him many times, and then prepared him in the kitchen, smiling in amusement, put him in the oven, closed it, waved at him through the glass window and turned and walked away. She soon returned, sat in front of the oven until he’d warmed up, then carried him to the table, sat down and picked him up and opened her mouth wide in front of him. He had one of the best chances ever, to stare in at her yawning tonue and fully appreciate the view, before she placed him into her mouth and let him lie there until the gulp came.

Ryan#9 never knew exactly at what point he’d arrived. He knew it was when she was in her fifties, but he was not aware that it was during the school holidays just before she resumed teaching, or that he had arrived on the day of her interview with the school board for the purpose of re-engaging her as a teacher. What he did know was that he was the last of the Ryans, since he’d been the first one to drop out of the time stream while the fragmenting original Ryan was careening into the past from the time in which Ellie Blish’s shrinking ray had corrupted his time travelling process. 

This was to be his last romance and last throat ride with Sandra. He wondered if he should run from the school and find a more lasting romance, albeit at tiny size for him, with another girl instead.

He soon worked out that it was holidays, as the school was empty in the middle of the day. Then he saw Sandra Corlani walking towards him with a long black dress and dark sunglasses.

“I can see that I’ll have to teach a time travel class in order to make sure that we meet each other today,” she said.

Realising that his nine selves were down to one, he made a sudden break for it. She stepped towards him with a minimum of effort, as he darted into the flower bed. She stepped into a suitable position and reached down and snatched him up, took him home and sat on an armchair and placed him on the right arm.

She smiled at him, deeply amused with the knowledge that she was about to eat the final Ryan.

“It’s been a few years,” she said, “But I guess you wouldn’t know that.”

“Actually we all knew it,” he said, “It doesn’t hurt to tell you now.”

“But… if you knew what I’d done to the other Ryans, if you all knew, then why did you keep coming back and letting me whittle you down to the one of you that’s left?”

“For the same reason that I came back in time in the first place. I love you.”

She put out her tongue in a wide long stretching movement and licked him.

“You’re as sweet in mind as you are in taste,” she said.

She opened her mouth and slid him back and forth against her tongue several  times, and then beamed at him.

“This will be the last time, for both of us,” she said.

“Not quite for you. The original undivided Ryan will still see you for the term ahead, while you teach the time travel class, and then while you date him in the holidays.”

“I’ll be sure to suggest that he travel back to my youth, when I talk to him on our first date then,” she said.

So continued another predestination paradox, as Sandra opened her mouth, put her tongue just slightly out, so that the tip of it rested on her lower lip, and slid him into her mouth.

He waited with more anticipation than the other eight Ryans had felt, as he knew that this would be the penultimate gulp. She had enjoyed eating versions of him for over 3 decades of her life, while he had been fractured at age 17 to facilitate those meals. Now it was all coming to an end. He had been with the lady of his dreams at points in time when most people could do little more than dream about it, some of them before he’d even been born. He had enjoyed both the kisses of her lovely lips and the gobbling of her lovely tongue and throat, and this was the final round. She let him lie there for nearly an hour, perhaps deciding for herself whether this was really the choice that she wanted to make, before finally drawing him into the top of her throat.

“Maybe she’s going to have second thoughts and cough me up,” he speculated.

Then came the final gulp, which carried him deep down her throat, and he knew that the adventure had reached its final instalment. 

There were two events coming up, as the term drew to an end: the simultaneous lady teachers and men teachers parties, of which Frances was hosting the one for the ladies.

Frances Woodfield now had her replacement shrinking device, with the help of her closest friend Colleen, whom she visited sometimes in giantland. She had been asking a number of boys at the school if they would like to be her third Dollipop. (See Book 1 chapter 41-46 again, if you’ve read so much since, that like me, you’ve almost forgotten why she called Dollipop 1 and 2 such names.)

Nobody had been willing to be shrunken permanently. So she had mentioned the device’s reverse setting, and found that three with crushes on her would be prepared to be shrunken temporarily and then restored in the future. proposed to one, that she could reduce his size indefinitely, and restore it in the future. Then she chose the one of the three who had been recently orphaned. He was now a boarding school student, funded by his parents’ legacy, and was coinicidentally named Francis. He had chosen to stay on at that particular school, because he had been fascinated with continuing Miss Corlani’s time travel class, largely in part because he had been fascinated in Miss Corlani. His crush on Miss Corlani was stronger than his crush on Miss Woodfield, but he also wanted his size eventually restored, so that he could use one of her time techniques. It seemed meant to be. So Frances adopted Francis first, in order to enable him to live with her and be reduced and restored on regular occasions without arousing any suspicion caused by absence from school.

One Saturday afternoon, when he was at full size, he completed work on a hitherto unused method of time travel taught by Miss Corlani: The Time Projector. This device had a wrist attachment, which was a miniature remote control, that could project a person into another time, and then send a retrieval signal through time and space itself to instruct the projector to bring the time traveller back. The projector machine itself actually never left the present. Francis was understandably keen to give it a try.

He went to the chemist, bought a blond hair dye to disguise his brown hair, went home and applied it, put on the wrist remote, then had Miss Woodfield shrink him, and then sent himself back to a time when Miss Colleen Balfour was still a teacher at the school only weeks before she left. He didn’t cross the period affected by the Ring of Reversal, but arrived not long after it had ended. He was now occupying his own timeline in two aspects, shrunken before he started time travelling, rather than by the dispersal of the reduction energy in the period which had been altered by the Ring of Reversal. He had arrived just after school, and waited in the garden bed on one of the school’s paths, until he saw his younger self (who had not yet been orphaned) heading home. Then he waited for Colleen. 

He must not tell her that in the future she would leave the school and give a shrinking device to Frances Woodfield, as that knowledge may corrupt Colleen’s personal timeline. Miss Woodfield had told him about it, when she’d explained things after shrinking him, but Colleen didn’t know. With his hair dyed and his body shrunken to tiny size and wearing his weekend casual clothes, he would hopefully be unrecognisable to her, and could satisfy something in her that Miss Woodfield had mentioned, when explaining Colleen’s reason for inventing a shrinking device in the first place. When he saw Miss Balfour walking along the path, he was about to step out and let her see him. Then he saw the past self of Miss Woodfield walking behind her, talking to her as they walked. He couldn’t take the chance on letting her see him, as that would really put the timeline at risk. So he used the wrist remote’s recall setting to pull him only one day back in the direction of the present. He arrived one day later than he had the first time. This time, he saw Colleen approaching alone, and waited until she drew closer, and then sneezed.

She heard it, turned and knelt down.

“Well, it looks like I’ve found another delicious little leprechaun,” she said, “Would you like a kiss, before I take you home and gobble you down?”

“Yes please!” he said enthusiastically.

As far as his three crushes went, he had one on Miss Woodfield, a stronger one on Miss Balfour, and the strongest one of all on Miss Corlani. He had enjoyed Miss Woodfield’s licks on the first night that she’d shrunken him, and would enjoy Miss Balfour’s gobbling all the more.

Colleen picked him up and pressed her full lips closely to his face. Then she put him into her handbag and walked a while. When she reached the woods, she took him out of the handbag and let him ride in the neck of her turtleneck sweater, with his head peeking out the top, so that he could see the journey she made through the wood and up through the meadow to her house.

When she had him warmed up in the oven and served at the table, she sat down and looked down at him. She reached for him with a casual gesture of her hand. He saw her elegant fingers separating and drawing close with her perfectly formed palm, and then the whole hand closing around him, leaving only his head free to look up as she drew him up towards her face. Then he saw her incredible tongue come out of her mouth. It was wide, rounded at the front, and had no gaps on the top, a truly awe inspiring tongue to behold after being reduced to tiny size. He felt the tongue sliding over his neck and face a few times, and then saw it returning into her mouth.

“Is there anything else you’d like to say, before I swallow you?” she asked.

“I guess just to thank you for the lovely kiss.”

“It was my pleasure,” she said, “Although this will be a far greater one. Farewell then.”

She opened her mouth wide in front of him. He looked in at the tongue inside her mouth, which looked different from the outstretched tongue view he’d just seen immediately prior to the commencement of the licking, but equally appealling to him nonetheless. With her finger and thumb, she placed him into her mouth, and then withdrew her hand, and slowly closed her mouth.

“After eating so many shrunken boys and leprechauns, I have refined the art of eating someone, to give the meal a chance to see the light very slowly go out in my mouth, rather than instantly being plunged into a wet darkness,” she thought to herself, wishing that her mouth was not ironically unable to voice that thought to him.

She let him lie on her tongue and contemplate what lay ahead for a few minutes, and then raised her tongue ever so slightly, so that he was only on a slight incline. Colleen wondered whether he would try to resist his destiny or simply start sliding. She felt his movements, as he drifted into her throat, and slid part of the way down. Then she gave a hearty gulping movement, and drew him down further. Then she felt the presence of him in her neck and throat no longer, and expected that he’d reached her stomach.

After the gulp had carried him a little way, Francis activated the wrist remote’s recall setting and was drawn back to his room at Miss Woodfield’s house on the Saturday afternoon in his own time. Only a few seconds had passed since he’d left for the past. He asked her if he could attend the lady teachers party at his tiny size.

“You can, but you’ll have to stay out of sight for most of it,” said Frances, “Miss Corlani and I are friends. So she’ll be arriving an hour earlier than all the other lady teachers. As soon as I hear the first doorbell of someone else arriving, I’ll have to hid you out of sight on the top shelf of the high lounge room cabinet. You’ll be able to look out through its glass doors and watch the party, but the other teachers won’t be able to see you, as you’ll be above their eye level. If they do spot you at all, you’ll just look like a doll in the cabinet from that distance, as I’ll have some other dolls there too.”

When the night of the party came, Miss Woodfield placed him on the table along with the food, so that he could help himself to as much as he liked in the first hour, before going into seclusion. Then they heard the doorbell.

“That will be Miss Corlani now,” she said, and went to answer it.

He soon heard them walking to the lounge room, and then saw Miss Woodfield go to the kitchen, calling, “Start on anything you like,” to Sandra.

Miss Corlani was his favourite of the three crushes, and she now walked straight over to the table and saw him.

“Hello Miss Corlani,” he said.

“Anything I like?” she repeated, with a questioning intonation, “Are you one of the guests or part of the food?”

The question was the most exciting one he’d ever heard. Nothing she’d said or done in her time travel classes could compete with this moment.

“I guess I’m still Miss Woodfield’s adopted son,” he said.

He watched with baited breath, as Miss Corlani’s fingers closed around a small meringue and lifted to her mouth. He saw her tongue come out of her mouth to receive it. The sight had even eclipsed his memory of being temporarily eaten by Colleen’s tongue in the past.

Sandra gulped it down, beamed at him with her eyes, and turned to talk to the returning Miss Woodfield.

“You’re the only person who now knows I’ve been shrinking him,” said Miss Woodfield, “I’ll have to hide him when the others arrive.”

The three of them talked for almost an hour, but neither Sandra nor Francis mentioned anything about their initial exchange. During the subsequent four hours, Francis watched from concealment, as all of the ladies enjoyed the party. Sandra was careful not to look in his direction, lest she do anything to give his presence away to the other guests. Francis, on the other hand, didn’t take his eyes off her the entire time. He hoped that she wouldn’t leave before the last of the others, and was pleased to see that she didn’t.

When Frances and Sandra were alone again, Frances said, “You can fetch Francis down from the cupboard and let him enjoy the leftovers on the table, while I’m washing up the empty plates in the kitchen.”

He heard that clearly enough through the glass door, and then saw Miss Corlani approach, open the glass door, and reach up for him. She took him back to the table and set him down on it, and turned to walk away.

“Miss Corlani,” he said, “Could we talk a bit more about what you asked me before?”

“If you like,” she said, and took him over to an armchair and sat down.

“I wanted to ask you … if I had been designated as part of the food, would you have eaten me?”

“I’d have had you down my throat within a few minutes,” she said.

“Would I have gone down intact?”

“Absolutely. I’d enjoy it more that way.”

“I enjoyed it when Miss Balfour did it in the past, and then used the time projector’s wrist remote to bring myself back, but I’d enjoy it even more with you. I could just send myself back a few minutes and into your place.”

“If you did that, you’d be back in the present and into the future by a few minutes, by waiting out the time it would take me to eat you,” she said.

“Would the device still return me from a few minutes into the future?”

“Theoretically, yes it would, but I wouldn’t want you to try it that way.”

“I could go back further, just to be sure, if we wait a while, so that I’ll still arrive after tonight. That way you’d be expecting me.”

“But if you use the time projector and the wrist remote recall, you wouldn’t become part of my tummy.”

“Do you really want that so much?” he asked.

“I didn’t have to say anything about that. I invented the time projector and the wrist remote that goes with it. I could easily design a remote of my own to override your recall setting,” said Miss Corlani.

“Why didn’t you just trick me that way?” he asked.

“I don’t know, perhaps because of the way you willingly brought up the subject at the end of this night. You must be in love with me, and I think I feel the same way. But I would very much like to eventually swallow you permanently.”

“Maybe we could do it both ways, obviously with the permanent way coming last.”

“You wouldn’t even need the wrist remote then. I could operate the time projector manually to return you after I’d swallowed you a little in the past. Then the next time around, I’d simply leave you in there. You might not have continued to love me if I’d not asked you to go down the final time willingly.”

“I think I would.”

She kissed him.

“The only thing is that you obviously mean a lot to my best friend at the school,” said Sandra.

“It looks like I’ll have to take up the next potential Dollipop’s offer to be temporarily shrunken,” said Miss Woodfield, “There are two other candidates, but I won’t be able to keep them shrunken for long at any given time, as they’re not available for adoption. I’ll pick one and check that he’s still willing.”

She was standing in the doorway.

“You don’t think I’m awful then?” asked Sandra.

“I got used to this with Colleen Balfour. I only have the shrinking device, as a side effect of her confiding in me of her desire to shrink and eat someone.”

Her second choice of the three temporary Dollipop volunteers, named Killarney, would become Dollipop 4.

In the meantime, Sandra took Francis to her house, and set him up in a tiny makeshift bed in one room.

“I’ll need to be alone in my bedroom tonight, so that after we’ve romanced eachother for a few days, I can send you back to tonight with the time projector,” she said.

She leaned down, kissed him goodnight, and then walked out of the room.

He lay awake, thinking that in her bedroom, his future self of several days later was arriving and being swallowed whole by Sandra and then being drawn back to the future time by the manual recall setting on the machine. That future self would be aware that this present self of his was lying here. It didn’t do to dwell on this for too long, as he finally became tired enough to drop off to sleep, regardless of his excitement and anticipation.

The next morning she came to see him.

“Has it happened for you yet?” he asked.

“It has.”

“How was I?”

“Positively mouth watering,” she said.

He enjoyed lying beside her cheek and on her neck in her bed for the next few nights, enjoyed many huge kisses from her, and then the future night arrived.

She took him to the time projector and prepared to send him into the past, back to the night that he had first been brought home from the lady teachers party.

“What happens if you get distracted by some event and can’t bring me back, or because of a power failure?” he asked.

“Then I’ll just do it, as soon as I can. It wouldn’t make any difference from your perspective. I could leave you there in my past throat at that particular second in time for a week, and still pluck you from that particular second the moment I set the machine to do it.”

“I guess I’ll get to make it back regardless then.”

“Well I’ll let you in on something. You did. I felt you vanishing from my throat back then, when my tonight self must have activated the manual recall setting. At worst, I’ll definitely do it in the future, because you did make it back.”

She projected him back to her bedroom at the end of the party night, and licked him and slid him into her mouth and swallowed him. The next thing he knew, he was back on the bench at the machine, with Miss Corlani looking at him.

“This will be the first time I’ve had the chance to talk to someone after eating him,” she said, wondering why she’d never thought to ask Ryan#9 to describe his acquired memories of the experiences that Ryan#1-8 had gone through while being eaten by her, “Tell me what it was like.”

“Amazing, astounding, the most incredible thing that’s ever happened to me, and the second most incredible thing that ever will.”

She smiled at his reference to what lay ahead.

They dated secretly for another few weeks, and then she made plans to eat him up without the intervention of the time projector.

She showed him her wardrobe, let him select a few dresses for her to try on, and then left him in the lounge room, while she put on each dress and walked out to see him.

He chose the same black dress that she had worn the day she had eaten Ryan#9.

She took him to the kitchen, wearing the grey laced dress that had been the final entry in their private fashion show, and prepared him, and placed him into the oven to warm up. She left the room and he waited, looking through the glass window of the oven door.

Soon he saw her walking slowly into the room, resplendent with elegant beauty and radiant beyond measure. She sat down in front of the oven for a few minutes, smiling pleasantly at him, and then opened the oven and took him to the table. As far as eating him went, she went through all the same motions that he’d seen in the preview experience in her bedroom, but this time he knew that it would not be a temporary journey. He was excited beyond all means of self-expression as she lifted him up, licked him and placed him into her mouth and eventually swallowed him down.